Nesbit artfully accumulates the tiny facts of an important historical moment, creating an emotional tapestry of time and...
The scientists’ wives tell the story of daily life in Los Alamos during the creation of the atomic bomb, in Nesbit’s lyrical, captivating historical debut.
There is no one single narrator. Rather, readers follow a collective "we" as they are uprooted from their varied lives in 1943 to follow their husbands to a makeshift city 7,200 feet above sea level in windswept, barren New Mexico. (Nesbit’s unusual style is reminiscent of Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, about another set of women living behind barbed wire in World War II America—Japanese-American women before and during their internment.) The wives arrive in Los Alamos as individuals, with relationships and beliefs that Nesbit captures alongside their growing, shared realization that they are no longer in charge of their own futures—and, in the case of foreigners, even their own names (the Fermis become the Farmers). While the husbands and a few women scientists spend the bulk of their time in the “Tech Area,” the wives, many highly educated with abandoned careers, cope with their new domestic realities: badly built identical houses, water shortages, limited schooling, boredom, gossip. But they also ride horses and collect pottery. And the husbands must be somewhat attentive since pregnancy is rampant. Uncomfortable social realities become exposed, as well as racism and snobbery toward the local Native Americans and the nonscientist workers. The wives also become distrustful of the members of the Women's Army Corps stationed at Los Alamos. By 1944, this cauldron of manic energy bubbles over in bouts of drinking and partying. There are rumors of musical beds. The women are all half in love with “The Director” (Robert Oppenheimer). But, by 1945, the mood darkens. An ominous secrecy heightens until the bomb is finally dropped. Individual women—like tough Louise, weepy Margaret, charismatic Starla and difficult Katherine—are less characters to follow than touchstones to keep the reader grounded as time passes in this insular world.
Nesbit artfully accumulates the tiny facts of an important historical moment, creating an emotional tapestry of time and place.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-503-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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