Description

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In this absorbing account of life with the great atomic scientist Enrico Fermi, Laura Fermi tells the story of their emigration to the United States in the 1930s—part of the widespread movement of scientists from Europe to the New World that was so important to the development of the first atomic bomb. Combining intellectual biography and social history, Laura Fermi traces her husband's career from his childhood, when he taught himself physics, through his rise in the Italian university system concurrent with the rise of fascism, to his receipt of the Nobel Prize, which offered a perfect opportunity to flee the country without arousing official suspicion, and his odyssey to the United States.

About the Author

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Laura Fermi (1907-77) also wrote Atoms for the World, Mussolini, and Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930-1941.

Praise For…

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“If Laura Fermi is short on domestic candor, she makes up for it in excellent science-chronicling. Her accounts of Fermi’s critical experiments in Italy will delight the lay reader without horrifying the pure scientist.”
— Ralph E. Lapp

“Fermi’s biography by his wife is a polished, lively piece on the man who won the Nobel Prize for work in nuclear physics and who helped to make the atom bomb. Covering their life together through three decades and two continents, there are intimate pictures of the early teaching days in Rome in an increasingly fascistic Italy, of other scientists who were their friends, and of the years at Columbia, Chicago, and Los Alamos. Valuable.”
— Kirkus

“Damn original, these Fermis.”
— New York Times