Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff marks the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, a comprehensive and riveting historical account. Culled from a first draft of "over 1.4 million words of quotations, reports, testimony, and firsthand accounts," Graff (UFO; The Only Plane in the Sky) leaves no stone unturned in this deeply informative and thoroughly captivating read. Though much of his focus is on the scientists and the political and military figures driving the top-secret project, Graff refuses to exclude other vital participants, such as the many women in the secret cities of Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Los Alamos, N.Mex., and the Japanese Hibakusha, the "bomb-affected people."
Graff's skillful interweaving of these voices feels like eavesdropping on a wide-ranging conversation, with each person's reflections addressing those of another. This dialogic style is especially effective in the foreword, which offers an account of the Trinity test, when the team at Los Alamos proved the weapon could work. Graff re-creates the intensity and drama of that fateful morning by layering each participant's experiences, including details of the chilly air, the dance music over the loudspeaker, and the uncanny silence in the final seconds before impact. The book's later sections lose some of this energy but gain in gravity as readers must wrestle with moral questions and pleas from survivors including Etsuko Nagano, who asks, "Please help us be the last victims of the atomic bombs," and Sunao Kanazaki, who insists, "No A-bomb must ever fall again. We don't need any more survivors." --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian