MAKING WEAPONS, TALKING PEACE A Physicist’s Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva. Herbert F. York. Basic Books, New York, 1987. 392 pp. $22.95. The most curious thing about Making Weapons, Talking Peace is the title itself; here we have strong implications of duplicity on the part of an unnamed culprit (the United States?, the Soviet Union?) whom the author intends to expose for wearing a peaceful mask while covertly engaged in war-like machinations. Happily, the book is nothing of the sort

Rabi: Scientist and Citizen. John S. Ridgen. Basic Books, New York, 1987. 352 pp. $21.95. Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist. Luis W. Alvarez. Basic Books, New York, 1987. 292 pp. $19.95. Tuesday is too nice a day to write reviews about scientific biographies if for no other reason than Tuesday follows Monday and Monday follows Sunday. Now on Sunday one takes a stroll through the grounds of the local conservatory, sits on a bench near the statue of Rimsky-Korsakov in Leningrad or outside the ch

Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics. Anthony Zee. Macmillan, New York, 1987. 384 pp. $25. For once I agree with the dust-jacket testimonials: this is an excellent book. Were a review not required I would let it go at that. Anthony Zee is a distinguished particle physicist who presently holds joint appointments at the University of California and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara. In Fearful Symmetry he has written a sprightly, partisan history of 20th

The Life it Brings: One Physicist's Beginnings. Jeremy Bernstein. Ticknor & Fields, New York, 1987. 192 pp. $16.95. Most of us, of course, know Jeremy Bernstein through his extensive New Yorker essays on the world of physics, essays that have included fascinating profiles of such great physicists as Hans Bethe and I.I. Rabi. In The Life It Brings, also based on a recent New Yorker series, Bernstein takes up his pen in the cause of autobiography. He travels from his childhood in Rochester and fo