Rhodes, author of Making of the Atomic Bomb, begins the story of his boyhood with his mother's suicide, when he was 13 months old. After several itinerant years, his father finally landed Rhodes and his brother Stanley in the house of a ghastly woman who was to become Rhodes's stepmother. Living a tortured existence, Rhodes and his brother were systematically starved, sent out of the house for 12-hour stretches, and deprived of any kind of emotional warmth. Eventually they were rescued and sent to live on a farm, where they began to heal.