Rhodes, Richard 1937–

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Rhodes, Richard 1937–

PERSONAL:

Born July 4, 1937, in Kansas City, KS; son of Arthur (a mechanic for Missouri Pacific Railroad) and Georgia Rhodes; married Linda Iredell Hampton, August 29, 1960 (divorced, April 27, 1974); married Mary Magdalene Evans, November 26, 1976 (divorced); married Ginger Kay Untrif, October 3, 1993; children: (first marriage) Timothy James, Katherine Hampton. Education: Yale University, B.A. (cum laude), 1959.

ADDRESSES:

Home—CA. Agent—Morton Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, 445 Park Ave., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER:

Writer and journalist. Newsweek, New York, NY, writer trainee, 1959; Radio Free Europe, New York, NY, staff assistant, 1960; Westminster College, Fulton, MO, instructor in English, 1960-61; Hallmark Cards, Inc., Kansas City, MO, book editing manager, 1962-70; Harper's, New York, NY, contributing editor, 1970-74; Playboy, Chicago, IL, contributing editor, 1974-80; Rolling Stone, New York, NY, contributing editor, 1988-93. Writer-in-residence, Kansas City Regional Council for Higher Education, 1972; visiting fellow, Defense and Arms Control Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988-89; visiting scholar, History of Science Department, Harvard University, 1989-90; advisor, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1990—; affiliate, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, 2004—. Military service: U.S. Air Force Reserve, 1960-65; surgical technician.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Playboy editorial award, 1972; Guggenheim fellowship, 1974-75; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1978-79; Ford Foundation fellowship, 1981-83, 1985; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship, 1985, 1988, 1991-94, 2001-06; winner of National Book Award, 1987, National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, 1988, and Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, 1988, all for The Making of the Atomic Bomb; L.H.D., Westminster College, Fulton, MO, 1988; MacArthur Foundation fellowship, Program on Peace and International Cooperation, 1990-91; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 1995 and was one of three finalists for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in History; Los Angeles Times Book Award nomination for biography, 2004, for John James Audubon: The Making of an American.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1970.

The Ozarks, Time-Life (New York, NY), 1974.

Looking for America: A Writer's Odyssey, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1979.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1986.

Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1989.

A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1990, 10th-anniversary edition with new preface and epilogue, University of Kansas Press (Lawrence, KS), 2000.

Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1992.

Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense about Energy, Whittle/Viking (New York, NY), 1993.

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1995.

How to Write: Advice and Reflections, Morrow (New York, NY), 1995.

(With wife, Ginger Rhodes) Trying to Get Some Dignity: Stories of Triumph over Childhood Abuse, Morrow (New York, NY), 1996.

Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor) Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1999.

Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.

John James Audubon: The Making of an American, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Arsenals of Folly: Nuclear Weapons in the Cold War, Knopf (New York, NY), 2007.

NOVELS

The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party, Charterhouse (New York, NY), 1973.

Holy Secrets, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1978.

The Last Safari, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1980.

Sons of the Earth, Coward (New York, NY), 1981.

OTHER

(Editor and author of introduction) Robert Serber, The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1992.

(Author of introduction) Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, Picturing the Bomb: Photographs from the Secret World of the Manhattan Project, Abrams (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor) John James Audubon, The Audubon Reader, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

Author of television documentaries The Loss of Innocence, National Educational Television, 1965, and The Osage River: Another Kind of Wilderness, KCPT-TV, 1973. Contributor to books, including The Literary Journalists, edited by Norman Sims, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1984, and Writing in an Era of Conflict, Library of Congress (Washington, DC), 1990. Contributor to periodicals, including American Heritage, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune Book World, Esquire, Harper's, Journal of the American Medical Association, New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Playboy, Reader's Digest, and Redbook.

ADAPTATIONS:

Deadly Feasts was adapted for audio cassette by Simon & Schuster Audio, 1997; Visions of Technology was adapted for audio cassette.

SIDELIGHTS:

Journalist Richard Rhodes has produced a large body of work encompassing both fiction and nonfiction, and a wide variety of subject matter, but he has won particular acclaim for his writings on nuclear weapons. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, published in 1987, brought Rhodes the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize—"the literary world's Triple Crown," as a Bestsellers 1990 contributor put it. While noted for writing about explosives, Rhodes has written books on numerous other topics, including farming, sexual passion, and his own troubled childhood.

One of Rhodes's early assignments almost never came to light. Editor Dick Kluger, impressed by the young writer, asked Rhodes to produce a literary study on the American Midwest. "Rhodes froze in fear," reported a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor. "Unable to exorcise the demons of his nightmarish childhood, he felt he had no right to speak." Still, Rhodes attempted two chapters, both "flat, uninspired, and pedestrian," according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor. Then a friend invited Rhodes to a coyote hunt in Kansas. Seeing the carnage inflicted on the canines, and the unfeeling reaction of the people watching, awakened an impulse in Rhodes. He returned home, got "thoroughly drunk," re-read Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, and began to produce what would become his signature style of literary journalism. His essay on the coyote hunt, "Death All Day in Kansas," was published in Esquire and became the cornerstone for Rhodes's first full-length book, The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West.

This work, wrote a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor, "is a running commentary [on] the people of the American Middle West, their customs and follies, their anxieties and delights, their morals and philosophies." Rhodes, the contributor continued, "celebrates their decency, goodness, ingenuity, and inherent loyalty. Along the way, however, he discovers an egregious darkness in the heart. Mindless slaughter, callous indifference, conspicuous waste—this is, he reminds readers, the American character."

Rhodes followed his debut book with several novels and articles for periodicals. An established writer, Rhodes then turned his attention to the atomic bomb. He first became interested in the subject while writing a profile of atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer that would later be collected in Looking for America: A Writer's Odyssey. In 1976 Rhodes received a grant to research a novel set in Los Alamos, the site of the work that produced the first atomic bomb. He soon concluded, however, that this story did not need to be fictionalized to be fascinating, so he spent several years in research and writing to produce a nonfiction work. The Making of the Atomic Bomb chronicles the evolution of atomic physics, from early experiments with the atom around the turn of the twentieth century, through the creation of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, to the post-World War II work on the hydrogen bomb. The book provides many details about the scientists involved in these ventures—including Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Rutherford, and Niels Bohr—and background on the era in which they lived.

New York Times Book Review contributor William J. Broad recommended the book as a work that "offers not only the best overview of the century's pivotal event, but a probing analysis of what it means for the future." He praised Rhodes, calling him an "intelligent layman,"> for approaching the subject without preconceived ideas or moralizing. "Short on heroes and villains, his book is populated instead with complex figures in a compelling plot," Broad wrote. Chicago Tribune Book World reviewer Priscilla Johnson McMillan also found much reason for enthusiasm: "If the story Rhodes has to tell is in many ways a tragic one, his telling of it is a tour de force. Writing with lucidity and with stunning economy, he places abstractions within our grasp and renders sound judgments about the science of the bomb and the men and women who made it." New York Times critic John Gross, however, thought many of Rhodes's portrayals of scientists were superficial and some of his phrasing was awkward. In spite of those reservations, Gross did find that several passages provide evidence of Rhodes's dramatic skill. "His account of Trinity, the first atomic test in New Mexico in July 1945, is particularly compelling; reading it, you find the tension building as though the outcome were still in doubt (as in a larger sense, no doubt, it still is)," Gross wrote. Gross also saw in Rhodes's work "a tendency to look for scientific solutions to what are essentially political problems. But at least he forces you to debate the issues, and his narrative has a consistent moral edge." The Making of the Atomic Bomb brought Rhodes a sweep of the major book awards of 1987-88.

Rhodes followed his atomic chronicle with an agricultural one. Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer is a detailed study of a Missouri farm family. Rhodes reportedly filled forty-two notebooks with observations that he then boiled down into Farm's 336 pages. Rhodes gave the family the pseudonym Bauer and also changed the names of some of the sites in the book to preserve his subjects' privacy. This did not prevent him, however, from offering a truthful portrait of a demanding and financially precarious endeavor, according to several reviewers. "Farm gets as close to the sweat and slim profit margins of an uncertain occupation as any suburban slicker could imagine," wrote R.Z. Sheppard in Time. Rhodes won praise not only for the wealth of material he presented, but also for how he presented it. "Rhodes generally affects the no-nonsense, unadorned tone of the farmers, but his occasional lyricisms are not inappropriate," a Publishers Weekly contributor observed. New York Times Book Review critic Maxine Kumin commented that "Rhodes brings empathy and intelligence to his subject," while Sheppard described the book as a "near perfect piece of reportage."

Rhodes once noted that writing Farm was like going home; he had spent his adolescence at a boys' home—the Andrew Drumm Institute—located on a farm near Independence, Missouri. His time on the farm, however, was preceded by a harrowing childhood in an abusive home, and Rhodes dealt with this period of his life in A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood. Rhodes was barely a year old when his mother committed suicide; several years later, his father married a woman who perpetrated shocking acts of cruelty upon Rhodes and his older brother, Stanley. She fed them little, forbade them to bathe, and imposed bizarre and complicated rules on them. When they broke one of these rules, she would kick, slap, or beat them, sometimes using a broom handle, a spike heel, or a belt as a weapon of punishment. Their father, meanwhile, was a passive witness. The boys were able to escape their horrendous situation and go to the Drumm Institute only after Stanley reported the abuse to police.

In Time, R.Z. Sheppard described the book as "painful to read and hard to put down," and found Rhodes's story ultimately inspiring, with his winning a scholarship to Yale University and subsequently becoming a very successful writer. Similarly, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt noted in New York Times that reading the book, "one marvels at the tenacity of the human spirit." He also praised the "spring-fed clarity" of Rhodes's prose. New York Times Book Review commentator Russell Banks, however, expressed reservations about how Rhodes tells his tale. He "portrays his stepmother and his father almost too simplistically, as if they were characters without motivation, without an inner life," Banks mused. "The stepmother does seem quite mad," the critic added, "but … she cannot have been without an inner life or—given what we know of parents who abuse their children—without some history of having suffered herself." The book also leaves unresolved the puzzle of why the boys' father did nothing to stop the abuse, Banks added.

Rhodes explores a different aspect of his life in Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey. He recounts his sexual experiences in detail, including his homoerotic explorations with other boys at the Drumm Institute, his loss of virginity to a prostitute, his two marriages, and his liaison with his then-current partner, a woman he referred to as "G" (in 1993 he married Ginger Untrif). Lehmann-Haupt, reviewing the book for the New York Times, found that Rhodes's story occasionally fails to ring true, but that if his effort "never brings him close to solving the mystery of love, it is a courageous enough assault on eros to leave no hollow proprieties intact." Martin Amis, however, writing in the New York Times Book Review, thought the book "a cataract of embarrassment" and believed he saw why few writers, as Rhodes notes in the book's preface, have dealt with sex outside of fiction: "A widespread fear of writing a book like Making Love would perhaps be reason enough." New Republic contributor Katha Pollitt deemed the work frequently clichéd, sexist, and self-absorbed, giving little credence to Rhodes's assertion that he views the women in his life as fully rounded individuals; ostensibly to avoid identifying them, he tells little about any nonsexual aspect of his partners, but the absence of this information "managed to make sex simultaneously vague and mechanical," Pollitt commented.

Rhodes returned to nuclear topics in Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense about Energy. In this 1993 work he lays out an argument for increased use of nuclear energy, contending that it is inexpensive, efficient, and, contrary to the statements of many environmentalists, quite safe. James Ridgeway, reviewing the book for Audubon, was not swayed; he observed that Rhodes "airily dismisses" the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and also felt that Rhodes discounts the genuine and widespread concern and opposition that nuclear power aroused. All in all, the book is a "flippity tract," Ridgeway concluded. A Scientific American commentator, though, found Rhodes "informed and articulate, his eye on the telling detail," and thought he "made a concise and attractive case for a new beginning with fission power." At any rate, "we will surely gain from seriously renewed discussion," the reviewer stated.

Rhodes published two books in 1995. In How to Write: Advice and Reflections, he shares insights into his creative process. Washington Post critic Carolyn See pronounced the book "a remarkable work of self-revelation" and commended Rhodes as being "generous … with his mind and his heart." Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Frederick Busch called How to Write "as useful a study of the craft, of the professional conduct of a writing career, as I've seen."

Rhodes's other 1995 publication was the eagerly awaited follow-up to The Making of the Atomic Bomb. In Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb the author chronicles the efforts to develop ever more destructive weapons from 1939 onward. His account includes extensive coverage of espionage and politics, as well as science. For instance, he was able to use Soviet documents released after the end of the cold war, as well as U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation files, to tell the stories of spies such as Klaus Fuchs, who leaked U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviets. He also provides a detailed analysis of the political environment that produced the arms race.

Dark Sun was one of three finalists for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in History. Writing in Commentary, Walter A. McDougall found Dark Sun for the most part praiseworthy, but disagreed with Rhodes's analyses of some topics. "Rhodes asserts that as early as 1949, ‘a degree of mutual deterrence had already been installed between the United States and Soviet Union,’" McDougall continued: "If that is so … then clearly the arms race amounted to insane ‘overkill.’" However, Rhodes, McDougall claimed, provides little evidence to support this assertion. McDougall also took issue with Rhodes's casting of U.S. military officers as villains who caused the arms race. "Richard Rhodes has thought deeply and well about the conundrums of politicized science in a democracy, and has the skill to convey his wisdom to a general audience," McDougall acknowledged. "But his blanket condemnation of U.S. military strategies in the perilous age of the cold war suggests, at a minimum, insufficient research into the diplomatic and military documents of those conflicts, and into the literature of nuclear deterrence." Some other reviewers did not voice such reservations, though. Time contributor Richard Stengel termed Dark Sun "epic and fascinating," while Science contributor Hans A. Bethe praised "the thorough research that is the basis of this book." Bethe added: "The book is full of suspense. Its only fault is that it kept me from doing other work."

Danger of another sort is the focus of Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague. This book examines the phenomenon of protinaceous infectious diseases, from its early identification in 1913 Germany to its best-known latter-day incarnation, as spongiform encephalopathy (in bovine form, "mad cow disease"). As Rhodes's mad-cow study comes to light, offered Phoebe-Lou Adams in Atlantic, "the book becomes truly alarming." This slow-acting virus infects the brains of its victims, and seem to defy all attempts at eradication. In the mid-1990s an outbreak of mad cow disease threatened herds in Europe. Because of ineffective action by the British government, says the author, spongiform encephalopathy is in a position "to reach not only beef eaters but consumers of any other meat, including those in the United States," as Adams described it. "In cinematic fashion," a Publishers Weekly contributor remarked, "Rhodes creates a complex, colorful and sometimes gory medical documentary."

Given his brutalized childhood, Rhodes has recognized a theme in his writings. As he was quoted in First Things: "Most of my books have examined human violence in one form or another, always for the purpose of discovering what causes such violence and how it might be prevented, mitigated, or at least survived." In that spirit, Rhodes produced Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist. The maverick in question is Lonnie Athens, himself a survivor of childhood abuse. Athens, a Seton Hall University criminologist, eschews statistics in favor of in-depth interviews with the most violent of criminals. He has identified violent criminals as victims of abusive childhoods, but it does not stop there. "People become violent, Athens concluded, through a long, slow process he calls violentization, an awkward term that means simply that people learn to be violent," as Paul Chance wrote in a Psychology Today article.

Violentization involves four kinds of experiences, Chance continued: brutalization, subjugation, violent coaching and criminal activity. "In other words, their world teaches them to be violent." Then what of abused children who, like Athens and Rhodes, did not turn out savage? Athens reasons that in those cases at least one of the elements of violentization is missing.

Rhodes tests Athens's theory against such well-known criminals as boxer Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist; Lee Harvey Oswald, the acknowledged assassin of President John F. Kennedy; and Cheryl Crane, who at age fourteen stabbed to death the lover of her mother, actress Lana Turner. "The author champions Athens as a pioneering genius battling a criminological establishment that ascribes violent crime to psychopathology or antecedent social conditions," remarked a Publishers Weekly contributor. "I confess that before reading Why They Kill, I had never heard of Athens," noted First Things reviewer John DiIulio, Jr. "There are many first-rate ethnographies of violent felons behind bars and on the streets, but Rhodes has done a service by bringing Athens' work to light." Chance added, however, that the book "crashes" when the author "stops quoting Athens and starts flying solo" with the case studies of the celebrities. Chance also castigated Rhodes for pointing a finger at conservative Christianity as a factor in the childhood of violent criminals. "For the record," remarked Chance, "recent empirical studies of child-rearing practices indicate that, if anything, Christian fundamentalists make exceptionally loving, capable parents." And while calling Why They Kill "not a flashy book," Booklist contributor David Pitt recommended this volume as "a serious, intelligent, and altogether mesmerizing portrait of evil and the people who fight it."

Rhodes has applied his journalistic eye toward fiction as well as fact. In The Last Safari, the author presents a murder mystery set in Africa. Rhodes's fourth novel, Sons of the Earth, focuses on Reeve "Red" Wainwright, a former astronaut who became a hero by piloting a crippled spacecraft home from the moon. His sudden celebrity destroys his marriage and drives him to alcoholism; eventually, however, he achieves a more stable success by forming a solar energy corporation and writing a best-selling book on the subject. When Wainwright's teenaged son is kidnapped, the exastronaut must raise 500,000 dollars in gold in a few hours. David Quammen wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "As a conventional cliffhanger and as a systematic contemplation of the uses and costs of fame in our idolatrous society, Sons of the Earth succeeds respectably. But what is most compelling about the book is its ghoulish and timely portrait of the villain, a fame-starved misfit named Karl Loring Grabka." Quammen continued: [In Grabka, Rhodes has] "created a villain who calls to mind that particular sort of covetous predation which apparently brought Mark David Chapman out of the darkness toward John Lennon … and John Warnock Hinckley toward, first, actress Jodie Foster and then Ronald Reagan." Quammen also remarked that "the texture of [Grabka's] tawdry and disconnected life [is] portrayed in a chillingly convincing and concrete way." The reviewer noted: "Sons of the Earth has great worth."

In Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, Rhodes examines the gathering momentum of Nazi movement toward the Final Solution with a focus on the sections of Eastern Europe occupied by the Germans. Using both official documents and first-person accounts, the author explores the psychology of ordinary men becoming barbaric executioners and examines the technology that led to efficient factories of mass murder for Soviet Jews and numerous others. Frederic Krome stated in the Library Journal that Rhodes "provides a detailed examination of the organization, motivations, and activities of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, which killed thousands of Jews in the wake of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union." A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote: "Though the explorations in mass psychology may not convince all readers, Rhodes exposes the industrial logic that underlies modem genocide."

Jay Freeman, writing in Booklist, called Masters of Death "grotesquely fascinating," adding: "In Rhodes' chilling account, victims beg, shriek, and writhe in agony while their executioners exult." In a review in Shofar, Hilary Earl commented: "The book's greatest strength is that for the first time in English, using some primary sources, but mostly summarizing existing work, Rhodes provides an accessible and graphic narrative of genocidal murder on the eastern front." Canadian Journal of History contributor Lawrence D. Stokes wrote: "Curiously enough, at least in Anglo-American historiography Richard Rhodes has written the first book-length narrative (previous accounts have largely only reproduced the reports by the EG [SS-Einsatzgruppen] to their Berlin headquarters) which focuses primarily upon this initial phase of the Shoah (= ‘utter destruction’)."

For the biography John James Audubon: The Making of an American, Rhodes had in-depth access to the Audubon's letters and journals, as well as a host of other primary sources. "Rhodes's portrait reveals a self-made man in a self-made nation, where perpetual reinvention was the norm," wrote Peter Cashwell in OnEarth. The biography covers the famous naturalist's entire life, beginning with his scandalous boyhood as the child of a French sea captain and a chamber maid. In addition to recounting many of Audubon's failed ventures in business and art, Rhodes explores Audubon's love of birds from his youth to his coming to America, where he becomes its foremost bird naturalist. Susan Hunt, writing in Birder's World, commented that she had viewed Audubon's capture and killing of birds as horrendous but noted that the author paints a "more sympathetic picture of Audubon" by being "convincing about Audubon's love for birds." Writing in the Economist, a reviewer noted that Rhodes "sets Audubon in the political context of the day." Smithsonian contributor Carey Winfrey called the biography "masterful."

Rhodes also served as editor of The Audubon Reader. Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, noted that the collection "presents an invaluable and stirring collection of Audubon's zestful letters, vital biographies … and zestful journal excerpts." Weekly Standard contributor Robert Finch wrote: "Throughout the essays in this work, there are wonderful observations, not only of birds, but also of the landscape, the characters, and the culture of young America in the early decades of the 19th century." The reviewer went on to comment that the letters "make this collection most valuable." adding that, "in making the authentic Audubon of his letters available in a readily accessible form, Rhodes has made a major contribution to our understanding of Audubon's mind and character."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bestsellers 1990, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 185: American Literary Journalists, 1945-1995, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997, pp. 241-252.

Rhodes, Richard, A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1990.

Rhodes, Richard, Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1992.

Rhodes, Richard, How to Write: Advice and Reflections, Morrow (New York, NY), 1995.

Sims, Norman, editor, The Literary Journalists, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1984.

PERIODICALS

Agricultural History, April, 1997, review of Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, p. 560; winter, 1999, review of Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer, p. 128.

American Scientist, March, 1999, review of Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World, p. 178; January-February, 2005, Paul Lawrence Farber, review of John James Audubon: The Making of an American, p. 74.

Atlantic, May, 1997, Phoebe-Lou Adams, review of Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague, p. 120.

Audubon, November-December, 1993, James Ridgeway, review of Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense about Energy, pp. 123-126; November-December, 2004, Fred Baumgarten, review of John James Audubon, p. 94.

Barron's, September 1, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 39.

Birder's World, October, 2005, Susan Hunt, review of John James Audubon, p. 70.

Booklist, February 15, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 970; December 15, 1998, review of Visions of Technology, p. 714; September 15, 1999, David Pitt, review of Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist, p. 203; April 15, 2002, Jay Freeman, review of Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, p. 1379; March 15, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of The Audubon Reader, p. 11.

Books, June, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 16.

Books & Culture, July, 1999, review of Visions of Technology, p. 42; September-October, 2006, Cindy Crosby, review of John James Audubon, p. 24.

Business Week, March 31, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 19.

Canadian Journal of History, August, 2003, Lawrence D. Stokes, review of Masters of Death, p. 342.

Chicago Tribune Book World, July 5, 1981, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, review of The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

Commentary, October, 1995, Walter A. McDougall, review of Dark Sun, pp. 52-55; August, 1997, Laura Maneulidis, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 61.

Economist, April 25, 1998, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 83; August 7, 2004, review of John James Audubon, p. 69.

Entertainment Weekly, October 15, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. 74.

First Things, March, 2000, John DiIulio, Jr., review of Why They Kill, p. 84.

Fortune, October 11, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. 84.

Futurist, August, 1999, review of Visions of Technology, p. 45.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), October 16, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. D25.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 283; January 15, 1999, review of Visions of Technology, p. 128; August 1, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. 1209; April 1, 2002, review of Masters of Death, p. 475; June 1, 2004, review of John James Audubon, p. 529.

Kliatt, July, 2006, Raymond Puffer, review of John James Audubon, p. 33.

Lancet, May 31, 1997, Paul Bendheim, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 1632.

Library Journal, March 15, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 86; January, 1999, Dayne Sherman, review of Visions of Technology, p. 145; September 15, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. 97; May 1, 2002, Frederic Krome, review of Masters of Death, p. 117.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 20, 1995, Frederick Busch, review of How to Write: Advice and Reflections, pp. 3, 10; October 26, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 5; October 17, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. 7.

Nature, April 10, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 565; May 20, 1999, review of Visions of Technology, p. 219.

New Republic, November 9, 1992, Katha Pollitt, review of Making Love, pp. 38-41.

New Scientist, February 6, 1999, review of Visions of Technology, p. 48.

New Statesman, August 23, 1999, review of Visions of Technology, p. 39.

New Yorker, April 14, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 82.

New York Times, February 3, 1987, John Gross, review of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. C14; October 11, 1990, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of A Hole in the World, p. C22; September 21, 1992, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Making Love, p. C16; September 27, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. E8.

New York Times Book Review, August 9, 1981, David Quammen, review of Sons of the Earth, p. 12; February 8, 1987, William J. Broad, review of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, pp. 1, 39; September 24, 1989, Maxine Kumin, review of Farm, pp. 1, 30; October 28, 1990, Russell Banks, review of A Hole in the World, p. 14; August 30, 1992, Martin Amis, review of Making Love, pp. 1, 21; March 16, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 9; June 1, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 38; February 8, 1998, review of Farm, p. 28; May 17, 1998, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 48; September 19, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. 13.

OnEarth, winter, 2005, Peter Cashwell, review of John James Audubon, p. 40.

Psychology Today, November, 1999, Paul Chance, review of Why They Kill, p. 79.

Publishers Weekly, August 25, 1989, review of Farm, p. 52; February 10, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 75; February 15, 1999, review of Visions of Technology, p. 99; August 16, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. 71; April 8, 2002, review of Masters of Death, p. 216.

Science, September 8, 1995, Hans A. Bethe, review of Dark Sun, pp. 1455-1457.

Science Books and Films, November, 1999, review of Visions of Technology, p. 259.

Science News, December 18, 2004, review of John James Audubon, p. 403.

Scientific American, February, 1994, review of Nuclear Renewal, pp. 120-121.

Shofar, summer, 2004, Hilary Earl, review of Masters of Death, p. 141.

Smithsonian, December, 2004, Carey Winfrey, "Birds and Beasts: A New Book on Audubon," p. 11.

Time, September 25, 1989, R.Z. Sheppard, review of Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer, pp. 81-82; October 29, 1990, R.Z. Sheppard, review of A Hole in the World, p. 102; August 21, 1995, Richard Stengel, review of Dark Sun, p. 66.

Times Literary Supplement, August 15, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 25.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), May 18, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 5.

Voice of Youth Advocates, October, 1998, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 254.

Wall Street Journal, March 14, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. A11.

Washington Post, June 23, 1995, Carolyn See, review of How to Write, p. F2.

Washington Post Book World, March 23, 1997, review of Deadly Feasts, p. 3; September 5, 1999, review of Visions of Technology, p. 11; September 19, 1999, review of Why They Kill, p. 6.

Weekly Standard, December 6, 2004, Robert Finch, review of John James Audubon, p. 31; July 3, 2006, Robert Finch, review of The Audubon Reader.