Comment on Epigraphs

Rhodes makes use of epigraphs—short, pithy quotations—at the beginning of each of the three parts of the book and facing the table of contents. The very first of these quotes is by Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos, New Mexico, branch of the Manhattan Project; it reads: "Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics." Such a reference to mythological or biblical tales of human heroism and folly is entirely apt as an opening to Rhodes' arguably "epic" nine-hundred page history of the atomic bomb.