The Wives of Los Alamos

by TaraShea Nesbit
The Wives of Los Alamos
Author: TaraShea Nesbit
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2014-04-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1408845989
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Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London and Chicago – and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship in the desolate military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with a P.O. Box for an address, in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for the benefit of 'the project' that didn't exist as far as the greater world was concerned. They were constrained by the words they couldn't say out loud, the letters they couldn't send home, the freedom they didn't have. Though they were strangers, they joined together – babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up. But then 'the project' was unleashed and even bigger challenges faced the women of Los Alamos, as they struggled with the burden of their contribution towards the creation of the most destructive force in mankind's history – the atomic bomb. Contentious, gripping and intimate, The Wives of Los Alamos is a personal tale of one of the most momentous events in our history.

Beheld

by TaraShea Nesbit
Beheld
Author: TaraShea Nesbit
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1635573238
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A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Book of 2020 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 - Vogue, Medium, LitHub Honoree for the 2021 Society of Midland Authors Prize Finalist for the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in fiction A Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read Book” From the bestselling author of The Wives of Los Alamos comes the riveting story of a stranger's arrival in the fledgling colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts-and a crime that shakes the divided community to its core. Ten years after the Mayflower pilgrims arrived on rocky, unfamiliar soil, Plymouth is not the land its residents had imagined. Seemingly established on a dream of religious freedom, in reality the town is led by fervent puritans who prohibit the residents from living, trading, and worshipping as they choose. By the time an unfamiliar ship, bearing new colonists, appears on the horizon one summer morning, Anglican outsiders have had enough. With gripping, immersive details and exquisite prose, TaraShea Nesbit reframes the story of the pilgrims in the previously unheard voices of two women of very different status and means. She evokes a vivid, ominous Plymouth, populated by famous and unknown characters alike, each with conflicting desires and questionable behavior. Suspenseful and beautifully wrought, Beheld is about a murder and a trial, and the motivations-personal and political-that cause people to act in unsavory ways. It is also an intimate portrait of love, motherhood, and friendship that asks: Whose stories get told over time, who gets believed-and subsequently, who gets punished?

109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant
109 East Palace
Author: Jennet Conant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2007-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1416585427
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From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the extraordinary story of the thousands of people who were sequestered in a military facility in the desert for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer where the world's best scientists raced to invent the atomic bomb and win World War II. In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.

Los Alamos

by Joseph Kanon
Los Alamos
Author: Joseph Kanon
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 539
Release: 2010-09-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307765393
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The suspense novel for all others to beat . . . [a] must read.”—The Denver Post WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL It is the spring of 1945, and in a dusty, remote community, the world’s most brilliant minds have come together in secret. Their mission: to split an atom and end a war. But among those who have come to Robert Oppenheimer ’s “enchanted campus” of foreign-born scientists, baffled guards, and restless wives is a simple man in search of a killer. Michael Connolly has been sent to the middle of nowhere to investigate the murder of a security officer on the Manhattan Project. But amid the glimmering cocktail parties and the staggering genius, Connolly will find more than he bargained for. Sleeping in a dead man’s bed and making love to another man’s wife, Connolly has entered the moral no-man’s-land of Los Alamos. For in this place of brilliance and discovery, hope and horror, Connolly is plunged into a shadowy war with a killer—as the world is about to be changed forever. Praise for Los Alamos “A magnificent work of fiction . . . a love story inside a murder mystery inside perhaps the most significant story of the twentieth century: the making of the atomic bomb.”—The Boston Globe “Compelling . . . [Joseph Kanon] pulls the reader into a historical drama of excitement and high moral seriousness.” —The New York Times “Thrilling . . . Kanon writes with the sure hand of a veteran and does a marvelous job.”—The Washington Post Book World

Stallion Gate

by Martin Cruz Smith
Stallion Gate
Author: Martin Cruz Smith
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2011-12-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307809749
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This is a novel about the most important ten seconds in history. Stallion Gate, a magnificent successor to Gorky Park, is a powerful sensual idyll, a blend of love and betrayal, of humor and cultures in collision, of jazz and war. In a New Mexico blizzard, four men cross a barbed-wire fence at Stallion Gate to select the test site for the first automatic weapon. They are Oppenheimer, the physicist; Groves, the general; Fuchs, the spy. The fourth man is Sergeant Joe Peña, a hero, informer, fighter, musician, Indian. Oppenheimer and Groves have hidden Los Alamos on a mesa surrounded by vast Indian reservations. It is the most secret installation of the war, the future encompassed by the past. To it come soldiers, roughnecks and scientists, including Anna Weiss, a mathematician and refugee from the Holocaust with whom Joe falls in love.

Their Day in the Sun

by Ruth H. Howes
Their Day in the Sun
Author: Ruth H. Howes
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2003-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781592131921
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The public perception of the making of the atomic bomb is an image of the dramatic efforts of a few brilliant male scientists.

Tales of Los Alamos

by Bernice Brode
Tales of Los Alamos
Author: Bernice Brode
Publisher: Alamos Historical Society
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997
Genre: Los Alamos (N. M.)
ISBN: 9780941232173
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"A light-hearted first-hand account of everyday life in the strange and secret community between 1943 and 1945"--P. [4] of cover.

The Atomic Weight of Love

by Elizabeth J. Church
The Atomic Weight of Love
Author: Elizabeth J. Church
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-10-20
Genre: Interpersonal relations
ISBN: 9780008209292
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A luminous and enthralling story of birds and science, ambition and sacrifice, revolutions - both big and small - and the late blooming of an unforgettable woman. I first loved him because he taught me the flight of a bird. I was too young to realise that what I really yearned to know was why birds take flight - and why, sometimes, they refuse. Meridian Wallace has lived through the Second World War, the atomic age, the Vietnam War and the dawn of the new millennium - yet she has always been torn between who she is and who circumstances demand her to be. In 1941, spirited, ambitious and determined to prove worthy of the sacrifices her mother made for her, Meridian won a place at the University of Chicago to study ornithology. The last thing she expected was to fall in love with a man two decades older: her brilliant physics professor, Alden Whetstone - or for him to be recruited to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to take part in a mysterious wartime project. When Meridian defers her plans to join him, she agrees to give Alden a year of her life. But this is a world, and a time, in which a wife cannot be a scientist and a woman cannot choose her own destiny. What begins as an electrifying intellectual partnership soon evolves into something quite different. As the decades pass, Meridian strives to resist the clipping of her wings. It is a choice that will make her enemies and bring her heartache, but it also opens up unexpected possibilities: of freedom, and friendship and transformation...

Restricted Data

by Alex Wellerstein
Restricted Data
Author: Alex Wellerstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2021-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 022602038X
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"Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike any other previous or since. Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day. Drawing on massive amounts of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time at the author's request, Restricted Data is a narrative account of nuclear secrecy and the tensions and uncertainty that built as the Cold War continued. In the US, both science and democracy are pitted against nuclear secrecy, and this makes its history uniquely compelling and timely"--