Rider of the Pale Horse: A Memoir of Los Alamos and Beyond

by McAllister Hull, Amy Bianco (With), John Hull (Illustrator)

Overview

A scientist's recollection of his life as a junior member of the Manhattan Project, Rider of the Pale Horse recounts McAllister Hull's involvement in various nuclear-related enterprises during and after World War II. Fresh from a summer job working with explosives in the chemistry department of an ordnance plant, Hull was drafted in 1943, after his freshman year in college. Unlike other accounts written by scientists and historians of that era, Hull's narrative offers a realistic picture of the dangerous and messy job that GIs and civilian powder men were asked to do. Life in the workshops where bomb components were constructed was very different from life in the offices where they were designed.

Hull's description of his postwar work supporting the Bikini Atoll tests in the Pacific and the early concerns about the effects of a hydrogen bomb explosion illuminate the Dark Age of nuclear weaponry. John Hull's handsome illustrations show technicians and scientists at work and bring the story to life.

"Rider of the Pale Horse adds valuably to the total record of the most important technological development of the twentieth century."--Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atom Bomb

"Hull gives a bottom-up view as seen by a foot-soldier. His account of the grubby details of the project is illuminated by his later view of its historical repercussions and bears new witness to a turning-point of history."--Freeman Dyson, author of Disturbing the Universe

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826335555
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	08/08/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	170
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

McAllister Hull (1923-2011) was professor emeritus of physics at the University of New Mexico, where he served as provost in the early 1980s.

Amy Bianco is a science writer and editor and a documentary film producer at Quarter Turn Media, which she cofounded. She has worked as a sponsoring editor for trade science at the McGraw-Hill Companies; a buyer for national science, nature, and medicine for Barnes & Noble; and an associate agent at John Brockman Associates (now Brockman, Inc.). During the course of her career she has acquired, edited, and/or published more than thirty-five books, and she is a member of the National Association of Science Writers. A native of Rochester, Minnesota, Bianco received her BA from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she now lives.

John Hull is professor of painting and department chair of studio art at the College of Charleston (South Carolina).