Reviewed by David Brizer
Trinity:
An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test
by Emily Seyl
University of Chicago Press
July 2026, 344 pages, Hardcover, ISBN-13: 978-0226848402
School kids in 1963 got their first taste of the nuclear age while ‘duck and covering’ beneath their desks, rehearsing an apocalypse loosely hinted at twice before, during Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe thumping caterwaul, “We will bury you!” tightened our guts an extra notch.) Fast forward to Oppenheimer, third highest grossing film of 2023, with lines of manic fans comparing notes on heavy water, uranium-235, and fission/fusion, snaking around the block. The creators of the bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer & company, were enjoying a renaissance of favor. The makers of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” were scientific heroes, the epicenter of a cultural storm.
Julius Robert Oppenheimer, from a secular Jewish family on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, was a polymath, dashingly eclectic in his scholarship and his tastes. He favored chocolate-drizzled peanut butter sandwiches, washed down with martinis, at unlikely times of day. He acquired Dutch in less than six weeks to arm himself for a public address. He named the country’s first atom bomb test ‘Trinity’ after the opening line of Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14” “Batter my heart, three-person’d God”.
What they are all wearing
All this by way of introduction to Emily Seyl’s majestic photo narrative history of the Trinity test, the Manhattan Project, and the coordinated work and planning of hundreds of scientists and staff. Seyl, a science writer and editor at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Security Research Center, has organized a coffee table book to end all coffee table books. Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test, replete with more than 300 carefully restored photographs, maps, blueprints, and formerly top-secret documents, goes where no book has gone before.
Not that they haven’t tried. Several decade’s worth of forerunners, including Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Robert S. Norris’ Racing for the Bomb, The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb by Robert Serber, Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb by Stephane Groueff, and so many others, make estimable attempts but lack the stunning imagery in Trinity, or were short-changed on publicly available documents at the time of writing. The closest competitor for overall visual impact would be One Hundred Suns by Michael Light, which features striking, previously classified photographs of above-ground U.S. nuclear tests in the Pacific and American West.
Seyl’s masterful pageant represents twenty years of careful attention and study of now released archival material. The restored photographs are breathtaking. Trinity hobbyists, as well as newcomers to the treasure trove of history and images, will revel in once top-secret documents and unfamiliar restored photographs, such as those of trinitite (green glass which fell from the bomb’s fireball in liquid molten drops.) The application of mid-1940s technology to the ferocious power of the atom makes for a sentimental (if not sometimes daunting) visual feast. Fission explosions are contained in steel bubble balls; atomic piles are shielded behind blocks of…bricks. Seyl’s narrative, including a very accessible explanation of the science behind the big boom, is compelling, articulate, thorough and edge-of- your-seat throughout. Trinity is a visual and archival banquet of maps, schematic diagrams, photos of staff persons engrossed in work, of hastily jotted memos, of recording and containment equipment, painstakingly and clearly captioned and annotated. The book is far and away the most comprehensive and arresting collection of Trinity memorabilia ever collected.
Charles Oppenheimer (J. Robert’s grandson) writes in the book’s afterword, “the mastery of nature comes with a price.” The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Oppenheimer, citing Donne’s sonnet in a letter to General Leslie Groves, was especially moved by the lines to God, “break, blow, burn, and make me new” (Bernstein, Jeremy. “Donne and the Bomb” The New York Review of Books, 18 Nov. 1999, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/11/18/donne-and-the-bomb). These portentous lines equally apply to Emily Seyl’s masterwork, which takes a pivotal – if not the pivotal – twentieth century moment, already researched, written about, exhaustively discussed – and makes it new gleaming and truly memorable.
About the reviewer: David Brizer is a Bronx, New York-based writer and book critic. His work appears in AGNI, Another Chicago, Exacting Clam, TYPO, Vol 1 Brooklyn, Rain Taxi, Calliope, others.