Rent a hotel room for every journalist who has become a historian, and you would need to book half of the French Riviera. Among those who would deserve a waterfront suite is Evan Thomas, a news-magazine veteran who has written a shelf of superb biographies on figures as diverse as John Paul Jones and Sandra Day O’Connor, as well as chronicles about naval wars and the early days of the C.I.A. Road to Surrender, his latest book, is a vivid and freshly researched account, much of it told in the present tense, of the days before and after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is superb, filled with just the sort of telling detail and stylish writing that distinguishes all of this writer’s work.
JIM KELLY: In your new book, you focus on the final weeks leading up to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet you also look back on the years leading up to those fateful days, when the atomic-bomb project was code-named “S-1” and was underway even before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, in 1941. How was such a project kept so secret within the official—and gossipy—circles in Washington and London, and could a secret like that be kept today?
