Fusion veteran John Sheffield has written an entertaining account of the "fun" times he has had traveling around the world doing research, giving talks, and cavorting with other scientists equally dedicated to the pursuit of the "ultimate" energy source. He says, "I have written this book to acknowledge the contributions of the occasionally nutty, sometimes egocentric, and truly inventive scientists who have given the world the contraptions, theories, and building blocks that offer hope for the realization of fusion energy."

Though he has spent much of his distinguished career in the United States, Sheffield got his start in fusion in the United Kingdom. He thus starts his narrative with the 1954 beginning of operation of the UK's ZETA (Zero Energy Thermonuclear Assembly) experiment. ZETA is famous in fusion lore as one of the first experiments to claim to have achieved fusion in the laboratory, only to have that claim later to be found false. At the time, Sheffield was studying physics at Imperial College in London. He finished up his bachelor's degree in 1958 and joined the fusion group at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell.

After a short fusion primer in Chapter 1, including a few amusing anecdotes, he launches into a description of the goings-on at Harwell, led at the time by fusion pioneers Roy Bickerton, Bas Pease, and Peter Thonemann. He was immediately surrounded by high voltage, high current equipment of the day. He describes the "fun" his colleagues derived from "blowing things up" in the course of their work. The group moved to the present-day Culham Laboratory site in the late 1950s. Sheffield continued his research and advanced education, eventually earning his Ph.D. degree in 1966. He then took a position with the recently established fusion group at the University of Texas in the USA.

Sheffield describes an event etched in the minds of those of us old enough to remember - the 1967 annual meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics, held in Austin Texas. The Texans had big plans for entertaining us - not just the usual conference banquet. Instead, they planned a real Texas barbecue, including a small rodeo. Fusion theorist Dick Aamodt organized the event. Unknown to the scientists who boarded the buses, some of them were to be taken on a side trip to a dedication of the Texas Bluebonnet Trail, a pet project of President Johnson's wife Lady Bird Johnson. The ladies welcomed the fusion scientists with Kool-Aid and cookies. After a two-hour series of speeches, the scientists boarded the buses to continue their journey to the conference barbecue, or so they thought. It had been raining hard for days and the bus wound up off road and stuck in a ditch. We had to get out and push, but eventually got to the barbecue, where we stood in long lines, outdoors in the rain, to get our food. Sheffield rounds out his description of his early days in Texas with an entertaining account of how different the English language sounds in Texas, as compared to, for example, in England.

Sheffield returned to Culham in the early 70s and tells of the beginning of the JET (Joint European Torus) program. JET was one of two large tokamaks designed to "burn" deuterium-tritium fusion fuel (the other was the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton) aiming at reaching near "breakeven" fusion conditions for the first time. Ever true to the purpose of this book, John describes a meeting in Grenoble, France, when he was taken on a skiing trip and wound up hanging upside down from the chair lift.

In 1977, as negotiations for siting the JET device stalled, Sheffield came back to the USA to head up a new tokamak project at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. John arrived in August, but the ORNL fusion division director, John Clarke, departed in November to become deputy director of the U.S. government's fusion division in Washington. Sheffield then became head of the tokamak section in the fusion division at ORNL. The fusion division at ORNL was within a security area at ORNL and John relates some interesting "misunderstandings" with the guards there. He also describes a meeting with Edward Teller on the relative merits of the Clinch River (fission) Breeder Reactor and a fusion-fission hybrid reactor, at the conclusion of which they agreed to disagree. John became director of the ORNL fusion division in 1988, a position he held until 1994, when he became director of energy programs at ORNL.

The book is filled with numerous other anecdotes accompanying the evolution of the fusion story. In the later chapters of the book, John goes on, in a somewhat more serious vein, to describe the subsequent evolution of the world fusion effort.

The book has many interesting stories to complement both the history of the world fusion program and John's part in it. It lists for $69.95 in hard cover, but is currently available for $34.98 at http://store.elsevier.com/ and search on "Sheffield". It is also available as an ebook on both the Elsevier site and on Amazon.com