The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb, by Sam Kean (Little, Brown and Company, 464pp HB, 2019, $30) Review by Skye Anderson.
Can a Physicist Ever Be Funny?
One time I started writing a book review before I had finished reading the book but never just about 10% through the book so I titled this, Part One. I may not be able to finish it for a couple of weeks* but I wanted to sing the praises of The Bastard Brigade, a book I would not pick up myself if I didn't have to but I am so glad I did - for several reasons.
Would you believe 59 chapters? At first I thought I could skip around but then I read that I couldn't because this book is linear so it would not have made any sense if I had: the first few chapters don't even get to World War 2 but they are fascinating in that I know the names of the scientists but nothing else about them as people, only their formulas or discoveries.
Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, Oppenheimer, General Groves, Wild Bill Donovan, Wernher von Braun, . . . .
If you liked The Monuments Men***,
"Bastard" because the scientists and soldiers were not your ordinary soldiers taking orders from above (reminds me of one of my Army Reserve units). Their mission was to find the Nobel Prize winner scientists, mostly physicists, and kidnap them or help them escape to the States: also to ascertain the locations of the Nazis' stores of uranium plus their notes, in order to find out how far along they were in making a nuclear bomb, which the US was also working on, but with a later start.
And one of these 'soldiers' was Moe Berg, the professional baseball player who became an attorney and knew several languages proving that this book is full of surprises and humor. All of the scientists are well known to any chemistry or physics major and several are Nobel laureates.
The Story
You know that Joe Kennedy, Jr., was killed flying a plane in Europe in World War 2 and his little brother John (our future president) became a hero in the Pacific Theater commanding a PT-109 but were you aware of the animosity, envy and competitiveness between the brothers? You will be, after reading Brigade. And I had previously heard that that Great Dane, Niels Bohr, reluctant to leave Europe, was spirited over the Pyrenees but now I find that he went to Sweden and England, a version I tend to believe.
Written to grab and keep your interest, Brigade is told chronologically, so chapters jump around from one person's 'story' to another, then the next part of the book continues on with each soldier or scientist or incident, and so on. And you will discover how many SNAFUs there really are during combat! Sometimes it is a wonder that we won after all.
Clues Hidden in Plain Sight
The long chapters have sections marked with little icons which represent the theme of that chapter. See if you can guess why each icon was used.
Writing Style
Author Sam Kean, who also wrote The Violinist's Thumb (about DNA)
majored in physics and finally writes about it. The non-science reader, however, can skip those paragraphs about heavy water and thorium and uranium-235 and -238 and fission and dirty bombs and neutrons and V-2 rockets, e.g., and still fall in love with this well-written and exciting book.
Though long, The Bastard Brigade reads like fiction. You will not be able to put it down!
*Correction: There is no Part Two. I ended up reading Bastard quickly!
**read the review here
***watch The Monuments Men on Netflix
****"Moving on to his [German physicist, son of a Nazi diplomat] office, they found the door locked so several stout fellows lowered their shoulders and slammed into it. It didn't budge, so they started kicking. When that failed, they grabbed an axe. Only after smashing through the wood did they realize the door opened outward and hadn't been locked at all." (p. 360)
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