"Much as Marcel Proust spun out a lifetime of memories from the taste of a madeleine, The Uranium Club spins out the history of Nazi Germany's failed World War II atomic-bomb project by tracing the whereabouts of a small, blackened cube of Nazi uranium. It's a riveting tale of competing German ambitions and arrogant mistakes, a nonfiction thriller tracking teams of American scientists as they race to prevent Hitler from beating the United States to the atomic bomb...

Tim Koeth peered into the crumpled brown paper lunch bag; inside was a surprisingly heavy black metal cube. He recognized the mysterious object instantly—he had one just like it sitting on his desk at home. It was uranium metal, taken from the nuclear reactor that Nazi scientists had tried—and failed—to build at the end of World War II. This unexpected gift, wrapped in a piece of paper inscribed with a few cryptic but crucial lines, would launch Koeth, a nuclear physicist and professor, an...