A hole in the world

Richard Rhodes was born in Kansas City, Kansas. After graduating with honors from Yale in 1959, he worked for Hallmark Cards and was a contributing editor for Harper’s and Playboy magazines. He is the author of more than fifty articles, and ten books, including Looking for America: A Writer’s Odyssey (1979); Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey (1993); Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey Through Polynesia (1995); How to Write: Advice and Reflections (1996); the acclaimed The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague (1997); and Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (2002). Rhodes’s ability to cut through to the essentials and follow an action from its onset to its completion is clearly seen in "Watching the Animals" (1970), an absorbing and realistic account of the processing of pigs into foodstuffs by the I-D Packing Company of Des Moines, Iowa. [Source]