With the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb this year, “Countdown 1945” is a riveting account of the days leading up to Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II.

Chris Wallace opens with the April 12, 1945 death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman taking the oath of office and ends with the dropping of the first bomb on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki in August 1945.

Wallace with Mitch Weiss take readers behind the scenes with Truman meeting Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin during the Potsdam Conference. The authors introduce physicist Robert Oppenheimer, Gen. Leslie Groves and the Manhattan Project. But Wallace also introduces a young woman working on a secret project at atomic facilities of Oak Ridge, Tenn., while her boyfriend is fighting overseas; and a young Japanese girl growing up in Hiroshima who faces unimaginable devastation at a terribly young age.

Wallace delves into Truman’s moral dilemma for using the atomic bomb. The U.S. was looking at the estimated deaths of a quarter-million American servicemen in a full-scale invasion of Japan which would drag the war deep into 1946 or longer. The bomb could shorten the war and save American lives at a terrible cost to Japanese cities and civilians. Truman publicly never regretted the decision.

Wallace is the latest entrant in what seems to be a Fox News cottage industry of writing history books. Arguably, he has the best narrative style of his colleagues and former colleagues at the news network.

“Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days that Changed the World” reads like a ticking time bomb: suspenseful, heroic and tragic, a monumental chapter in human history with ramifications and shock waves we still feel 75 years later.