Laura Fermi explains her husband life: the family, the adventures of the italian physicists, the Nobel prize, the American life, the Manhattan project. But Fermi life is full of physics, and in the book you don't find any explanation of the discoveries which took most of his time. It is a pity that Laura didn't get more information from her husband work to realize how great it was and how it influenced the future of quantum mechanic. Fermi was one of the top ones. I recommend this book as a preliminar biography but not as a deep one.

I rated this so high, partly because it is one of the few books I remember reading, 35+ years ago. Around the same time I had read another book about the Manhattan Project, "The Traitors," by Alan Moorehead (apparently out of print.) Between the two I found out that most of the scientists' wives were not told why their husbands were so excited on the night of July 16, 1945 until after the war was over; meanwhile Stalin was notified through his spy network within 48 hours, during the Potsdam Conference.

I also thought she told a great story about the difficulties for a family to not only move into a strange country with strange languages and customs, only to find themselves rushed into an isolated paramilitary environment.

No great lessons in nuclear fission, lots for nuclear families.

BTW, I was surprised that Amazon does not cross-list this among the other Manhattan Project books.

I first read this book more than 40 years ago. I still reread it, now and then. It is the source of most of the anecdotes that helped to explain, and disseminate, the Fermi style of doing physics. I am particularly fond of the memories of the youth of Laura Fermi, when Enrico was a young "dottore", and, together with a group of friends, used to hike the Italian Alps at holidays. Everything was used to teach science, or the way of thinking needed in science (for instance, the thermodynamics of the frying pan!). Later you'll find this "physics at the finger tips" approach used to estimate the power emitted at the first nuclear explosion. A great book.