Anyone who liked Oppenheimer, the Academy Award-winning best picture for 2023, is sure to have an interest in the book Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World (Prometheus Books, 2024).

Author Dave Lindorff tells the story of Ted Hall who was a teenager when he worked on the Manhattan Project. This endeavor led to the only two nuclear bombs to have ever been dropped on other human beings.

Hall thought he was saving the world by giving Russia details about what the U.S. was building. This was during World War II when Russia was an ally of the United States’.

His reasoning for doing so is spelled out more in the book; with some believing he did the correct thing.

The book is an intriguing look into this time period, the post-war anti-Communist fear that swept through this country, what Hall and his family went through while he was alive, as well as the workings of the FBI.

While the subject matter interested me, the writing made the book a bit of a chore to finish. It’s not that I wanted the author to embellish the facts, but there are ways to tell a story to captivate the reader. All really good biographies do this. I’ve never read anything else by Lindorff, so I don’t know if dry is his style. I recommend this for the subject, not the writing.