Most books that are good are also useful as a result, and vice versa. Sadly, The Pope of Physics – a biography of the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi that is written in a style as flat and dry as the Mojave – is an exception. Its goodness is difficult to find but its usefulness is immediately apparent. No other biography of Fermi is as authoritative as this one, although with regard only to his early years. The book is filled with anecdotes from that period that help understand his famously clinical nature.

Fermi made lasting contributions to quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, cosmology and chemistry. It is impossible to walk a few paces down these roads without stumbling upon a marker saying, “Fermi was here”. Growing up in Italy, he was a bright student of physics learning under an old guard dismissive of the new-fangled quantum theories. He was also a philosopher of science racing against his contemporaries in Germany, the Netherlands and England to extend the ideas of Max Planck to explain nature’s fundamental constituents. A key figure in his early years was Orso Corbino, a physicist and statesman who ensured Fermi received all the important university admissions and appointments, who kept things moving for Fermi despite the political upheavals then rocking Italy.