The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner as Told to Andrew Szanton

``Recollections'' might seem too straightforward and too modest a word for the memoirs of a Nobel physicist who moved in the orbits of Dirac, Einstein and Teller. It is, however, the only one that can do justice to the genteel and sweet qualities in this charming, rambling book of reminiscences. Wigner's versions of key moments in the Manhattan Project and the characters of its major participants--Leslie Groves, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller--are perhaps generous to a historical fault, especially his loyalty to Hungarian countrymen Jon von Neumann and Leo Szilard, among the period's most misunderstood and controversial scientists (at opposite ends of the atomic question). Wigner's memory is not self-serving, only loving, and some of this surprisingly durable amiability necessarily must come from his old-country, bourgeois Jewish upbringing, evoked in burnished prose with the assistance of freelance writer Szanton, also a Hungarian-American. The record of 20th-century physics is brighter and clearer for these firsthand recollections by a man whose life came close to the depths of evil and the heights of human ambition and wonder, but who can still close by remarking, ``I have tried to be happy in this life. . . . I could not do better with a second chance.'' (Nov.)