Youth and family origins; student days at Amherst College, 1924-1928, and at Ann Arbor 1928-1931. Contact with European physicists and rising Nazism, 1932-1933; the physics departments at Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, Princeton University in the 1930s, and Johns Hopkins University in the 1940s; atomic spectroscopy, ferromagnetism, uses of the vector model, shift from atomic to nuclear spectroscopy, the Thomas precession and spin-orbit coupling in nuclei, shell and droplet models for nuclei, intermediate coupling model for light nuclei, the earth's magnetic field, wind-dynamos and nuclear reactors; Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory during World War II, Argonne National Laboratory in the 1950s and 1960s; expression of social concern, especially in relation to the nuclear arms race, in the 1950s through the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the political victimization of Donald Flanders, the Federation of American Scientists, congressional testimony concerning Lewis Strauss' (nominee for Sec. of Commerce) experiences at Pugwash Conferences, obstacles to slowing or reversing the arms race. Also prominently mentioned are: A. P. Alexandrov, Clinton Anderson, Niels Henrik David Bohr, Isiah Bowman, Gregory Breit, Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir, Walter Francis Colby, Edward Uhler Condon, Sydney Michael Dancoff, Paul Ehrenfest, Elmer Eisner, Enrico Fermi, James Franck, Wendell Furry, Samuel Abraham Goudsmit, Stanley Hanna, Werner Heisenberg, Walter Heitler, Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld, Alger Hiss, Edith Hoyle, John Charles Hubbard, Alfred Land,̌ Otto Laporte, Joseph McCarthy, Gale McGee, Arnold Nordsieck, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Wolfgang Pauli, Rudolf Ernst Peierls, Ernest Poole, Leonard Schiff, Hugh Scott, Alpheus Wilson Smith, Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, Edward Teller, Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas, John Osgood Thomson, George Eugn̈e Uhlenbeck, Robert Jamison Van de Graaff, John Archibald Wheeler, Norbert Wiener, Samuel Robinson Williams, Robert Williams Wood, Lloyd Young; Bayrische Wahl, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Saturday Review, United States Army Signal Corps, United States Atomic Energy Commission, United States Congress, Universitt̃ Leipzig, Universitt̃ Zurich, University of Chicago, University of Michigan Summer Symposium in Theoretical Physics, and Zeitschrift f r Physik.