History has been curiously tight-lipped about the man who first developed the idea of harnessing energy from nuclear chain reactions—the true “father of the atom bomb.” Leo Szilard had long been overshadowed by such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and J. Robert Oppenheimer; and little had been known or said about Szilard until William Lanouette’s Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb (Skyhorse Publishing, September 2013), which was named a Notable Book of the Year in 1993 by The New York Times Book Review. Skyhorse Publishing is proud to announce its release of a revised, updated edition of Genius in the Shadows, with a new introduction from the author and many new photographs.
Leo Szilard changed world science and history through nuclear discoveries that led to weapons and power plants and improved medicine. Born in Hungary in 1898 and educated in Berlin, Szilard fled Hitler’s Germany in 1933, the year he conceived chain reactions. Just before World War II, Szilard enlisted Einstein, his mentor and friend, to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging America to build the A-bomb before Germany could. But after the war, Szilard crusaded for nuclear arms control until his death in 1964.
Shy, witty, and eccentric, Szilard often confounded his colleagues, but also tossed off ideas that led them to win Nobel Prizes in biology, his second field of study. The 1995 Nobel Peace Prize went to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, founded in the 1950s by Szilard and fellow scientists to control the spread of nuclear weapons. In a whimsical political satire that Szilard wrote, he, Oppenheimer, and President Truman are tried as “war criminals” for creating and using the A-bomb.
Szilard’s vision thrives today in two respected institutions. To bring “the sweet voice of reason” to politics, he founded in Washington, DC, the Council for a Livable World, the first political action committee for arms control. To understand biology and its social consequences, he helped create the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California.
This revised and updated edition of a widely acclaimed biography gives a captivating portrait of Szilard’s protean mind, political foresight, humor, and conscience. A scientific provocateur and prophet, he still speaks to our own time.
About the Author
William Lanouette has written about atomic energy and arms control for more than four decades, as a staff member at the National Observer, National Journal, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and in the Atlantic, the Economist, Scientific American, and the Washington Post. He holds a BA in English from Fordham University, and an MSc and PhD in political science from the London School of Economics (University of London). He lives in San Diego, California.
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