Richard Rhodes | Author

Richard Rhodes
Journalist, historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction

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PUBLISHED: Nov.29.2011

Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

What do Hedy Lamarr, avant-garde composer George Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? The answer is spread-spectrum radio: a revolutionary invention based on the rapid switching of communications signals among a spread of different frequencies. Without this technology, we would not have the digital comforts that we take for granted today. Only a writer of...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.09.2007

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb the story of the entire postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within scant hours of nuclear war—and then nearly agreed to abolish nuclear weapons. In a narrative that reads like a thriller, Rhodes reveals how the Reagan...

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PUBLISHED: Sep.17.2007

The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses and Historians

Born out of a small research program that began in 1939, the Manhattan Project brought together the cream of the scientific community and the military to create and perfect a weapon more powerful than any the world had known. Racing against time as the war raged in Europe and Asia, and against our enemies, whom we feared were pursuing similar ends, the Project would eventually...

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PUBLISHED: Apr.11.2006

The Audubon Reader

This unprecedented anthology of John James Audubon’s lively and colorful writings about the American wilderness reintroduces the great artist and ornithologist as an exceptional American writer, a predecessor to Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville. Audubon’s award-winning biographer, Richard Rhodes, has gathered excerpts from his journals, letters, and published works, and has...

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http://www.amazon.com/John-James-Audubon-Making-American/dp/037571393X/sr=8-3/qid=1164435601/ref=pd_bbs_3/104-7240188-1463959?ie

PUBLISHED: Apr.11.2006

John James Audubon: The Making of an American

Born in 1785 in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), the bastard son of a French naval officer and a chambermaid, Audubon was taken to France by his father and then sent to America in 1803 to escape conscription into Napoleon’s army. He began drawing birds as a child, and in America this passion grew into an obsession. His business ventures failed, and he was often short of money, but for...

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PUBLISHED: May.07.2002

Masters Of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

In Masters of Death, Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These “special task forces,” organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and...

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PUBLISHED: Sep.14.1999

Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

Lonnie Athens was raised in a violent world. His father was a hot-tempered man who shot at strangers and beat his wife and literally bashed his sons’ heads together. So when Athens began studying for his doctorate in criminology at the University of California, Berkeley, it was only natural that he was fascinated with the question of what makes people violent. He decided to conduct...

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PUBLISHED: Mar.04.1999

Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines Systems and the Human World

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb provides a unique perspective on the twentieth century through a lively collection of writings about the unexpected and paradoxical ways in which technology has changed our lives—and will affect our future. Technology has been the blessing and the bane of the twentieth century. Human lifespan has nearly doubled in...

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PUBLISHED: Mar.20.1997

Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health

In this brilliant and gripping medical detective story. Richard Rhodes follows virus hunters on three continents as they track the emergence of a deadly new brain disease—commonly called "Mad Cow"—that first kills cannibals in New Guinea, then cattle and young people in Britain and France—and that has already been traced to food animals in the United States. In a new...

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PUBLISHED: Aug.01.1995

Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War. Based on secret files in the United States and the former Soviet Union, this monumental work of history...

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PUBLISHED: Jun.01.1995

How to Write: Advice and Reflections

Uniquely fusing practical advice on writing with his own insights into the craft, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes constructs beautiful prose about the issues would-be writers are most afraid to articulate: How do I dare write? Where do I begin? What do I do with this story I have to tell that fills and breaks my heart? Rich with personal vignettes about Rhodes’s...

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PUBLISHED: Nov.01.1991

The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West

Inland Ground is Richard Rhodes's first book. It was published quietly in 1970 to critical acclaim (The New York Times Book Review named it one of the best books of the year) but few sales. In the two decades that followed, Rhodes published ten more books, including A Hole in the World, Farm, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb, for which he won the National Book Award, the National...

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PUBLISHED: Sep.01.1990

A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood

When he first published A Hole in the World in 1990, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes helped launch and legitimate a decade-long publishing phenomenon—the memoir of abused childhood. Rhodes, whose mother committed suicide when he was a year old, recalls how he and his older brother were physically and emotionally devastated by an abusive stepmother and their father’s complicity...

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PUBLISHED: Oct.15.1989

Farm: A Year in the LIfe of an American Farmer

Farm lyrically recounts a year in the lives of Tom and Sally Bauer, solid Midwesterners who work the bottomlands of the Missouri River to grow “a harvest few city people could have identified ... the foundation of their diet, the principal food plant of the Western world”: corn. The two rise before dawn in all kinds of weather, tending to the hundreds of tasks farmers must master...

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PUBLISHED: Feb.01.1989

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

This massive work deals with the history of the people and the science that preceded and then made possible the development of the atomic bomb. Heavily biographical, the book provides portraits of the many players from Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein to Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes includes detailed explanations of the various scientific discoveries beginning in the late nineteenth...

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PUBLISHED: Jun.01.1973

The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party

In 1846 several hundred wagons set out from Independence, Missouri, to follow the California Trail nearly two thousand miles across unpopulated prairies, up sluggish and seemingly endless rivers, and through the Rocky Mountains over the Continental Divide. There, where the water flowed west to the far Pacific, the more prudent emigrants swung north through present-day Idaho, though...

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Richard's Latest Blogs

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Dec.26.2011 - 9:21 pm

Hedy's Folly Now Available

Hello, fellow Red Room authors and readers. I’m still a novice blogger, but I’d like to announce the publication of my new book, Hedy’s Folly, about the life and inventions...

Dec.03.2007 - 10:52 am

Violence: Shifting the Blame

[O]ne way we in the United States avoid accepting responsibility for the violence in our society is to pretend “the media” inflict it on our children. —Me, quoted by the American...

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Dec.15.2011

Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Published by The New York Times

On a sweltering Paris evening in June 1926, a 25-year-old pianist and composer from Trenton stepped out onto the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which was crowded with...

About Richard

RICHARD RHODES's most recent book is Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-four books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer...

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Causes Richard Rhodes Supports

Survivors International

Richard RhodesJournalist, historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction

Featured Works

Richard's Latest Blogs

Published Reviews

About Richard

Causes Richard Rhodes Supports

Richard Rhodes
Journalist, historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction