PHYSICS: Decade by Decade by Alfred B. Bortz, Ph. D. (Facts On File, Twentieth-Century Science set, 2007, grades 6-12 and adult), ISBN#9780816055326.

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From the introduction:
In the mid-1890s, physicists--scientists who study matter and energy--looked ahead to the 20th century with justifiable pride. The more they had studied the universe in the 19th century, the more orderly they had found it to be. Its behavior was thoroughly predictable through natural laws that they expressed in the precise language of mathematics. Though there were still a few important questions to be answered, most physicists were confident that the 20th century would be devoted to refining theories and making the critical measurements needed to complete the tapestry of their science.

They could not have been more wrong. Instead of tying up a few loose ends, physicists pulled on a few snags and watched the entire theoretical fabric of physics unravel. It would take most of the new century to reweave it. The process would redefine almost everything people thought they understood about matter and energy, space and time, and waves and particles.

Choosing a featured scientist from among all the notable physicists whose work contributed to quantum theory is not an easy task, especially since many of them continued to contribute to physics in later years. However historical records and correspondence of that period leave little doubt that most physicists considered Wolfgang Ernst Pauli to be in a class by himself....

Pauli continued to live and work in Zurich until his death on December 15, 1958. Soon after that, physicists invented one last Pauli story. They described Pauli's first meeting with God, in which he asked for an explanation for the value of a particular physical constant....

If professional accomplishments alone were the criteria for choosing a featured scientist, the choice for the 1930s would be Enrico Fermi. But the work of science can affect and be affected dramatically by social, political, and historical factors. And among the top physicists of the 1930s, there is no one whose life better illustrates the influence of the times in which she worked more than Lise Meitner.

Meitner's story is not of the 1930s alone. In fact, by the time she and Otto Frisch developed the first theory of nuclear fission in 1938, she had passed her sixtieth birthday and had built a notable career in physics. And although the persecution she faced as a person of Jewish ancestry was part of a much larger horror that should never be minimized, it was not the only time in her life that she had to overcome discrimination to succeed. She was born female at a time, November 7, 1878, and in a place, Vienna, Austria, where the traditional expectations for women were enforced by societal norms and sometimes in the law.....

For the first eight years of the Nazi government's existence, Meitner had been protected by her Austrian citizenship. That changed when the Nazis took over the Austrian government in 1938. At that point, even though she had converted to Protestantism thirty years earlier, she was subject to the Nazi government's restrictions on Jews. She even lost her passport, which made arranging an escape particularly difficult....

She died on October 27, 1968, a few days before her ninetieth birthday, and was buried in a country churchyard near Cambridge, England, where she had retired eight years earlier to be near her nephew Otto Frisch. She did not live to see the naming of synthetic element number 109 Meitnerium in her honor....