This Side of Honesty

“Once upon a mushroom, I was whoopeed.”

Thus begins the saga of a Princeton undergraduate who “designed” an atomic bomb in 1976 to fulfill the requirement for a class project. John Phillips’ improbable endeavor was meant as a warning that if an ordinary college student might create such a weapon, so too could terrorists intent upon wreaking havoc upon a nation that is lax in regulating its nuclear materials. In the intervening years, Phillips has parlayed his find into a forthcoming television movie and this book, ghosted by his college roomie. As the above sample of their bizarre prose suggests, the authors favor the style of the absurd, which causes their flippant account to sound less like a book than a whoopee cushion.

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Alan L. Miller

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“Once upon a mushroom, I was whoopeed.”

Thus begins the saga of a Princeton undergraduate who “designed” an atomic bomb in 1976 to fulfill the requirement for a class project. John Phillips’ improbable endeavor was meant as a warning that if an ordinary college student might create such a weapon, so too could terrorists intent upon wreaking havoc upon a nation that is lax in regulating its nuclear materials. In the intervening years, Phillips has parlayed his find into a forthcoming television movie and this book, ghosted by his college roomie. As the above sample of their bizarre prose suggests, the authors favor the style of the absurd, which causes their flippant account to sound less like a book than a whoopee cushion.