Book List: Uranium, by Tom Zoellner

Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, by Tom Zoellner
Viking, the Penguin Group, 2009
293 pages, plus Acknowledgments, Notes on Sources, and Index. No photos
Library: 546.431 ZOE

Description
The stability of our world rests on a substance that is unstable at the core. This is the fundamental paradox of uranium, the strongest element the earth can yield and one whose story is a fascinating window into the valor, greed, genius, and folly of humanity.

Uranium is a riveting journey to the heart of this eerie mineral. It takes us from slave camps in Africa to desert mesas, war councils, smugglers' routes, doomsday cults, jungle mines, and secret enrichment plants on five continents, in a narrative that is equal parts history, investigative journalism, and nonfiction thriller.

Throughout its six-hundred-year arc across history, uranium has behaved like a character from a Greek tragedy, changing its face almost as quickly as it sheds neutrons. First a nuisance to miners in the Middle Ages, then an inspiration to novelists and a boon to medicine, later a devastating weapon at the end of World War II, and eventually a polluter, a killer, a money waster, an enabler of failed states, and an excuse for a war with Iraq, it is now both the potential deliverer of Armageddon and a possible last defense against global warming.

Tom Zoellner has written a gripping, up-to-date biography of this yellow dirt that will shape the future, for better or worse. This is an indispensable volume for lovers of history and science, as well as those who want to read a thoroughly engrossing profile of the most deadly material in the earth's crust.

Tom Zoellner is the author of The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire, named a 2006 Notable Book by the American Library Association.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Scalding Fruit
2. Beginnings
3. The Bargain
4. Apocalypse
5. Two Rushes
6. The Rainbow Serpent
7. Instability
8. Renaissance
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes on Sources
Index