Richard Rhodes

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Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Richard Rhodes

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John James Audubon: The Making of an American

Richard Rhodes

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John James Audubon: The Making of an American

Richard Rhodes; John James

From the Pulitzer Prize—winning historian Richard Rhodes, the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years, and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world.

Rhodes shows us young Audubon arriving in New York from France in 1803, his illegitimacy a painful secret, speaking no English but already drawing and observing birds. We see him falling in love, marrying the wellborn English girl next door, crossing the Appalachians to frontier Kentucky to start a new life, fashioning himself into an American just as his adopted country was finding its identity.

Here is Audubon exploring the wilderness of birds–pelicans wading the shallows of interior rivers, songbirds flocking, passenger pigeons darkening the skies–and teaching himself to revivify them in glorious life-size images. Now he finds his calling: to take his hundreds of watercolor drawings to England to be engraved in a great multivolume work called The Birds of America. Within weeks of his arrival there in 1826, he achieves remarkable celebrity as “the American Woodsman.” He publishes his major work as well as five volumes of bird biographies enhanced by his authentic descriptions of pioneer American life.

Audubon’s story is an artist’s story but also a moving love story. In his day, communications by letter across the ocean were so slow and uncertain that John James and his wife, Lucy, almost lost each other in the three years when the Atlantic separated them–until he crossed the Atlantic and half the American continent to claim her. Their letters during this time are intimate, moving, and painful, and they attest to an enduring love.

We examine Audubon’s legacy of inspired observation–the sonorities of a wilderness now lost, the brash life of a new nation just inventing itself–precisely, truthfully, lyrically captured. And we see Audubon in the fullness of his years, made rich by his magnificent work, winning public honor: embraced by writers and scientists, fêted by presidents and royalty.

Here is a revelation of Audubon as the major American artist he is. And here he emerges for the first time in his full humanity–handsome, charming, volatile, ambitious, loving, canny, immensely energetic. Richard Rhodes has given us an indispensable portrait of a true American icon.

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Masters of Death: The Ss-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

Richard Rhodes

“Through his fine and accessible account, Rhodes deepens our sense of the Holocaust’s utter evil.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Graphic and sometimes lurid. Yet this is how the story must be told for readers to grasp the depth of the horror. . . . The impact of this story is profound.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A vivid account. . . . Should contribute to better understanding of Nazi Germany and its crimes.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A pointed reminder that all of us—even the most ordinary—are capable of horrendous acts of violence.” —The Denver Post

“This is an important and enormously powerful book.” —Elie Wiesel

“Powerful. . . . Not only an important work but a morally necessary one.”–Houston Chronicle

“Rhodes breaks searing ground. . . . Without reminders like this, we might never learn.”–Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Graphically and chillingly details the work of the special killing battalions of Himmler’s SS. . . Extremely well-written. . . [A] fine work of gruesome history.”–Jerusalem Post

“Powerfully concise. . . [Rhodes] continues his authoritative research with a story that is wrenching in human terms.”–The Kansas City Star

“Riveting history. . . Unrelenting.”–The Weekly Standard

“This latest contribution to the debate about the origins of Nazi behavior–the processes of socialization to butchery–is dreadfully timely.”–Newsweek

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Other editions: Hardcover - 2002

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What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

Richard Rhodes; Theodore K. Rabb; Geoffrey Parker; Cecelia Holland; Doris Kearns Goodwin; Josiah Ober; Caleb Carr; James McPherson

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A First Book of Canadian Art

Richard Rhodes

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What If?

Richard Rhodes; Theodore K. Rabb; Geoffrey Parker; Cecelia Holland; Doris Kearns Goodwin; Josiah Ober; Caleb Carr; James McPherson

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Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

Richard Rhodes

WHY THEY KILL challenges with devastating evidence the theory that violent behavior is impulsive, unconsciously motivated and predetermined. It offers compelling insights into the terrible, ongoing dilemma of criminal violence that plagues families neighborhoods, cities and schools.

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Other editions: Softcover - 2000

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Basic Coaching Skills: Building Leadership in Youth Sports Based on the National Standard for Athletic Coaches

Richard Rhodes; Steven Hayward

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

Richard Rhodes

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Visions of Technology

Richard Rhodes

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Nuclear Renewal

Richard Rhodes

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

Richard Rhodes

In a non-fiction narrative that reads like a medical thriller, Richard Rhodes follows virus hunters on three continents as they track the emergence of a deadly new brain disease that first kills cannibals in New Guinea, then cattle and young people in Britain and France. Photos.

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Other editions: 1999, Hardcover - 1997, 1997

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Trying to Get Some Dignity: Stories of Triumph over Childhood Abuse

Richard Rhodes; Ginger Rhodes

Trying to Get Some Dignity: Stories of Triumph Over Childhood Abuse evolved from Richard Rhodess memoir, A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood, in which he told of the abuse he endured at the hands of his stepmother. Here is an oral history of child abuse--physical, mental, and sexual--and how its survivors dealt with it. While talking with victims of abuse, the authors found that "each strategy [for survival] was original, imaginative, off the books, a tribute to the canny resilience of the human spirit. Collectively, like breathtaking third-act reversals, they promised to lift the narrative from one of pain to one of triumph." Trying to Get Some Dignity will reaffirm readers' faith in their ability to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their own lives.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1996

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Vija Celmins: Works 1964-96

Richard Rhodes; Vija Celmins; James Lingwood; Neville Wakefield; Stuart Morgan; London Institute of Contemporary Arts

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Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer

Richard Rhodes

Richly textured and deeply moving, FARM chronicles a year in the life of Tom and Sally Bauer of Crevecoeur County, Missouri, who struggle to build up their farm, harvesting corn, birthing calves, planting wheat, coping with the vagaries of nature and government regulations. Required of them are ancient skills--attunement to weather, animals, crops, and land--as well as a mastery of modern technology. 32 drawings.

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Other editions: Softcover - 1990, Hardcover - 1989

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How to Write: Advice and Reflections

Richard Rhodes

ving personal account of of the things that inspire one of the most original writers of our day. "How generous Rhodes is with his mind and his heart. Buy this book, buy it. It's a handbook on how to live".--The Washington Post.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1995

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Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb

Richard Rhodes

The Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb now tells the defintive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the H-Bomb and the birth of the Cold War, based on secret files found in the United States and the former Soviet Union. "A dark tale told with gripping intensity".--Washington Post Book World. of photos.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1995, 1995, 1995

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Picturing the Bomb: Photographs from the Secret World of the Manhattan Project

Richard Rhodes; Rachel Fermi; Esther Samra

This book presents the first photographic record of the Manhattan Project - the United States Government-sponsored effort to build an atomic device - and its publication coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the development of the atomic bomb. The compelling photographs from the Manhattan Project, by turns specific, abstract, dramatic, and surreal, offer a multifaceted look at history. Photographs of landscapes and of construction, of scientific experiments and their results, are framed against official portraits and casual snapshots. In gathering these materials the authors, Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, have had unprecedented access to the personal archives of many physicists and their families, as Rachel is the granddaughter of Enrico Fermi, one of the key participants in the Manhattan Project. An introduction by Richard Rhodes, author of the pulitzer prize-winning book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, provides a historical framework for the Manhattan Project. Then, in a series of striking images, the body of the book compares and contrasts the different individuals, activities, and settings that characterized the Manhattan Project.

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Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey

Richard Rhodes

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1992

Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense About Energy

Richard Rhodes

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The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West

Richard Rhodes

The Middle West was land before it was people, a broad inland ground. To the south, alluvial; to the north, glacial; to the east, forested; to the west, dry and barren of trees. A vastness, a wilderness. Once ocean floor, now the basin of a great river.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1991

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A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood

Richard Rhodes

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1990

Writing in an Era of Conflict

Richard Rhodes; Thomas L. Friedman

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes

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Other editions: Softcover