Books in Documenting U.S. History series

African Americans have made great strides in the battle for equal rights in the United Statesfrom the time of slavery all the way through the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s. This book examines important questions by giving a detailed account of the protagonists, campaigners, events, and attitudes that shaped an era. The book uses carefully chosen primary sources including period photography and fascinating extras like the lyrics to John Browns Body, which is a song written about the radical abolitionist John Brown following his death.

Less about Hiroshima than about the development and first deployment of the atomic bomb, this is nevertheless a compelling re-creation, using excerpts from documents, letters, memoirs, etc., of early experimentation on the atom by Bohr, Fermi, Otto Hahn and others, British application of the research to the possibility of a uranium bomb, the concentration of brains and effort in the American Manhattan project, and the controversy as to how and whether to drop the bomb. Yaas gives the material some shape, direction and (wittingly or not) a point of view. Though earlier excerpts speak for themselves to elicit understanding for the international community of scientists enlisted in the common cause of beating Hitler to the bomb, the ten pages of quotations (and photographs) from Hiroshima victims and survivors hardly constitutes equal time, and the coverage of the post-mortem controversy is so weighted toward justification as to alienate the sympathy already won. The value of the pre-Hiroshima sources, however, is considerable, along with such revelations as Oppenheimer's "When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success." It's just too bad that Betty Jean Lifton's Return to Hiroshima (1970) can't be required as collateral reading. - Kirkus Review