Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe

I knew Hans Bethe quite well in his later years, when he used to spend his winters at Caltech to enjoy the California sunshine. He was a very impressive man. Each year at Caltech he gave a physics department colloquium, at an age well into his nineties. His colloquia were always lucid and convincing. He had lost none of his remarkable abilities. Silvan Schweber has now written a monumental biography of Hans Bethe. It is said that every equation in a book reduces its potential readership by half. If that's true there won't be many readers of this book. The book seems to have been written primarily for physicists who will recognize the equations and follow the arguments that go with them. Even without the equations, the book is so closely tied up with Bethe's physics that it would have been tough going for a casual reader.