SOURCE: "Fifty Years of the Nuclear Age," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 242, No. 31, July 31, 1995, pp. 23-4.

[In the excerpt below, Mantell surveys works published in 1995 that center on the development of the atomic bomb, the victims in Japan, and the American decision to carry out the attack.]

The 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is almost upon us. Many related books have been published in the half-decade since the bombings, including acclaimed and widely read volumes such as John Hersey's Hiroshima (Knopf), Robert J. Lifton's Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (UNC paperback) and Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb (S&S). But an event this momentous demands attention over and over again, often, as is the case this commemorative year, from new and different angles.

The crop of books that will be published on Aug. 6 or soon thereafter can...