At the end of the 1930s, students in physics wanting to get a picture of the developments in the recently crystallized area of nuclear physics were provided with the bible of the new field: the so-called ‘Bethe bible’, a set of three long articles published in the Review of Modern Physics and written by Hans Bethe in collaboration with two other physicists. At the time, Bethe was a well-established professor at Cornell University whose early career as a theoretical physicist went hand in hand with the emergence of the new field of nuclear physics. His life also followed the pattern of many of his peers in the field: born in a German family of Jewish descent, Bethe was forced to emigrate from his country of origin only to find a new home in an American university.

This book is a biography of Hans Bethe's life and work from his early days until the outbreak of the Second World War: only a third of the life of Bethe, who passed away in 2005 at the age of ninety-eight. The author, the physicist and historian of physics Silvan S. Schweber, was well acquainted with Bethe from his days as a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical physics in Cornell. This partly shapes the style of this biography: accurate data are mixed with personal recollections and impressions by the author, resulting in a very vivid (and, certainly, positive) depiction of Bethe. At the same time, the book is also an excuse to give an account of the often-told story of theoretical physics and the birth of nuclear physics in the 1920s and 1930s. The reader new to this period will thus have a self-contained story, one in which most characters and places, theories and experimental results, are described in detail.

After a defence of biographies as an important genre in the history of science, the book gives us some details of Bethe's childhood in Strasbourg, Kiel and Frankfurt, where his father held university positions in the field of physiology. The father's ideas and career in early twentieth-century Germany became the first strong influence on the intellectual development of Hans Bethe and locate this biography in the social context of his time. The mother is also present, but in a different way: as a possessive and manipulative character with an overwhelming ascendancy over her son. Chapter 6 describes the culmination of this negative influence when, at the end of 1934, she successfully encouraged her son to break up his engagement with Hilde Levi.

Bethe's career started with his early degree in physics at the University of Frankfurt, from where he moved to Munich to work with Arnold Sommerfeld, the father figure to many German physicists of Bethe's generation. As a matter of fact, towards the end of the book we learn that Sommerfeld thought so highly of Bethe that he offered him the chance to be his successor in the chair of Munich after the Second World War. Bethe had, by then, become American in heart and mind and resentful of the German people, and he rejected the offer. After his dissertation on a model to explain the diffraction of X-rays and electrons (the latter only recently experimentally observed), Bethe moved to Stuttgart, back to Munich, to Cambridge, to Rome, to Manchester when in 1933 he was banned from working at any German university, and, from there, finally to Cornell in 1935. This journey was instrumental in his becoming an outstanding nuclear physicist: the positron and the neutron, the Cockcroft–Walton accelerator, the theoretical work of Gamow and Fermi – these and many other developments in the early 1930s convinced Bethe that physics of the atomic nucleus was possible and not just wishful thinking. The endpoint of this transformation came in 1938, when Bethe succeeded in formulating a theory to explain the energy emitted by stars, based on the synthesis of heavy nuclei from lighter ones in the stellar core. For this work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1967.

The book gives us a lively portrait not only of Bethe but also of physics in the ‘happy thirties’ (an expression coined by Bethe himself). The making of nuclear physics and the consolidation of theoretical physics internationally are part of the story of this book. The Jewish question also permeates the whole narrative. And the reader is given many long quotations from recollections and conversations with Bethe and his contemporaries, many of them from the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics and the later interviews project at the American Institute of Physics. After almost four hundred pages, however, the story ends abruptly with the beginning of the war. The reader is left wondering about Bethe's activities and participation in the Manhattan Project. From this point of view, the book is yet another example of what some historians call the ‘historiography of the bomb’: a narrative of physics in which the atomic bomb is presented as an inevitable consequence of a supposedly pure physics in the previous two decades (thus the ‘happy thirties’) and for which physicists themselves were not at all accountable.