TBH there were parts of that book where I felt I had had my fill long before the book let go - (e.g. the above-mentioned pre-WW2 California leftist politics) bu

TBH there were parts of that book where I felt I had had my fill long before the book let go - (e.g. the above-mentioned pre-WW2 California leftist politics) but YMMV, and it's a true history book, not a novel designed to thrill. And there were fascinating engineering problem-solving details that were entirely absent e.g. the lengths gone to to get the shaped charges for the implosion device correct, and to run the punched-card computing for that. See Feynman's anecdotes on it instead. But on the whole, it's a fascinating book if you're into that sort of thing.