Although I question the premise behind the major part of this story, I still liked the book a lot. The premise is that a 10/11 year old girl moves to be with her father on the "Hill" - Los Alamos, during World War II. The scientists there are working feverishly to develop a secret new weapon to fight the war with. Perhaps it is just because we are so familiar with war and bombs from our news media, but I find it unlikely that kids of 10/11 would be completely clueless about what was going on there. True, it could have been a chemical weapon or a biological one, but with physicists and chemists and electrical engineers around in droves, it wouldn't take too much interpolation to reason out that it was a bomb. And a little girl who is smart enough to be taking algebra with the high school kids and who makes her own radio should also be smart enough to figure out that there is something big weapon-wise underway.
Nevertheless the story is interesting and some of the features of it are both common and unusual. It is interesting to see how much people smoke in the story. The parents are frequently lighting up. This is historically accurate, but most books leave that out nowadays, given the bad press that smoking (rightfully) has.
One of the common features of the story is the bullying behavior. Suze is bullied by the top dog girls and in turn looks down on Screwy Dewey. This problem is never addressed directly by adults - too much else is going on for them - but the girls eventually work it out - at least in part. An editorial comment: with all of the education in schools about bullying, I don't actually see it decreasing. It seems to be a common feature of childhood everywhere. Sometimes I think that adults should express more confidence in kids' abilities to work things out and save intervention for severe cases - physical and emotional.
I did find the name-dropping amusing. To call Oppenheimer "Oppie" and Richard Feynman "Dick" was fun. I doubt that Oppie would have had time to comfort the woman who was taking care of Dewey, but who knows.
The final true to life interesting feature was the trip to the test site, where the kids are allowed to pick up radioactive pieces of rock and watch them react to a Geiger counter - and allowed to keep the ones that weren't too active. It reminds me of the shoe stores of that era, where you stood on a machine and they x-rayed your foot to tell what size shoes you would need. We wouldn't dream of exposing ourselves to so much radiation nowadays, especially completely without shielding, but it was fairly common, even a decade after the war.
It is also interesting to me that, although the scientists knew what they were working on, they didn't really talk about the implications until after the weapon had been developed. I don't know if this is true to life, but I suspect, to some extent, it is. You are so wrapped up in your work and the problems and technical aspects that the greater picture is not only unforseen, but largely outside of concern.
All in all, it is an interesting and satisfying book, shedding light on an era and an event from a different perspective.
Huh? Dewey's smart, but how on earth could you think she might figure out that they were making something that had never existed before??
ReplyDeleteMy grandfather worked on the Manhattan Porject, as an electrical engineer, and *he* didn't know exactly what they were working on until after the test. He says there were 5000 people on "the Hill" by the end of the war, and maybe 50 of them -- mostly Nobel Laureates, had the big picture.
I gave him a copy of The Green Glass Sea for Christmas, and he told me it was as accurate a depiction of life at Los Alamos as he's ever read.
Great book.
I understand that this is probably historically accurate - that the people working there didn't know exactly what they were, in fact, working to make. But I am still puzzled by that. What are the choices? There weren't any airfields, so it wasn't a new airplane that they were working on? They knew it was a weapon. They knew it had to do with radiation. Guns, bullets, tanks, and small armaments would be too small to be that significant. I am really curious, not just trying to be obnoxious - what else could it have been?
ReplyDeleteBut, I agree, it is a good book. This is the way I would have liked to have learned history.