100 Books Like Atomic Anna

This book holds a cherished place in my heart as it delves into the intricate dynamics of mother-daughter relationships and the profound journey of self-discovery. Growing up, I often felt the weight of cultural expectations, and choosing a different path inevitably strained my familial bonds.

As I read, memories of my mother and sisters flooded back, reminding me of the unique connections we share. An artfully crafted story that made me question so much about myself and the way that culture has influenced me as a person. Tan’s lyrical prose eloquently voices the experiences of so many young girls who have long been silenced, making this, without a doubt, one of my most treasured reads.

Franzen is at his best when depicting character, and The Corrections goes deep, creating a family drama that is rooted in detailed psychological portraits of his subjects.

In doing so, he meticulously builds their worlds, motivations, and fears, creating nuanced portrayals that not only reveal individual personality, but also the texture and color of life in America in the late 20th century.

Yet the true theme of the book is family dynamics: what does it mean when your mother insists that you come home for Christmas, and what does it mean when you don’t really want to go?

I remember my daughter, an astute and sensitive reader from a very young age, coming downstairs in tears after finishing this book when she was in high school.

Her tears were understandable; though Homegoing, remarkably, addresses the lives of members of seven generations of two connected Ghanian families in a mere 320 pages, we as readers come to care deeply about each of the fourteen characters whose stories fill the book.

The storytelling is that concise, yet also that rich and distinct, depicting two separate—but tragically related—trajectories for these families caught in the inevitable and devastating web of slavery, from the late 1770s to the present, and from the infamous Cape Coast Castle to Alabama, Harlem, and San Francisco—and back again.

Smith is a master at depicting multi-racial families (something she knows all about, as she grew up in one).

Her narratives take up the complex nature of the relationships between parents, children, and siblings, while delving into issues of race, class, politics, infidelity, and self-knowledge. Smith is expert with her use of voice, as she composes character through idiosyncratic styles of language and expression.

Life in this novel is colorful and messy, as it cleverly investigates the impossibility of really knowing those closest to you.

I am captivated by the details in this book and refer to it again and again in my research because it discusses employment in many sectors of the nuclear power industry. After reviewing 19 studies of nuclear industry employment, it allocates the construction costs of a Pressurized Water Reactor known as the System 80+, the basis of the South Korean APR1400, to labor and other expenses following the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS).

It aggregates these expenses into industries and then uses the US Bureau of Census labor cost data to determine how many employees are directly supported by the labor expenses in each industry. Further, it discusses how different macroeconomic (input-output and computable general equilibrium) models forecast indirect and induced employment in a nation’s economy as a whole.

This book, written for lay readers, was originally published in France, which generates 40% of its electricity from nuclear power. It is a deep dive into electricity generation (megawatts) and nuclear weapons (megatons). The book my colleague and I wrote is, in a sense, an update emphasizing the developments of the last decade in fail-safe reactors.  In these so-called small modular reactors, safety is controlled by laws of physics (gravity drives convection, driving cooling that never turns off), and construction techniques go beyond expensive one-of-a-kind reactors to the cost-controlled modular construction technologies pioneered in aerospace industries and the like. 

Megawatts and Megatons are tough and, at times, uncomfortable topics to consider. However, democratic societies need informed citizens to function effectively. We should make up our own minds about issues. We cannot leave it to a few specialists or loud voices to tell us what to think.  

This book outlines the history of the nuclear power industry in the US from the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, less than one year after the denotations of the highly enriched uranium bomb over Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and the plutonium bomb over Nagasaki (9 August 1945) to 1968.

It describes the development of the Nuclear Steam Supply System and its supply chain, as well as the nuclear fuel cycle from uranium mining to the chemical separation of plutonium. Its objective is to determine whether there are any violations of American antitrust laws. It is full of naïve optimism, tables, and hand-drawn charts that give the reader a feeling of what American scientists and engineers believed the future would hold before the events of 1968.

This engaging book documents the diffusion of nuclear power from both technological and national perspectives. Its working hypothesis is that nuclear power is the result of both the development of nuclear weapons and the development of peaceful uses of the technology in generating electricity and producing medical radioisotopes. Because of this dual use, the authors believe that its development did not follow an economic logic.

Rather than explaining economic motivations, it analyzes the patterns of nuclear power diffusion from its origins to the emergence of advanced nuclear, so-called fourth-generation technologies and small modular reactors. There were disruptions in this diffusion: the accidents of Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011, which effectively ended the construction of new nuclear power plants outside of China and Russia.

This collection of Katsumata’s manga for legendary gekiga magazine Garo and others is a powerful graphic bridge between the politics and reality of this world, and the creatures and legends of the other. Katsumata takes us from the transitory and dangerous lives of nuclear workers at Fukushima Daiichi (decades before the 2011 disaster) to the tough and haunted lands of Tohoku (North East Japan) in the early twentieth century. Lonely kappa monsters, tanuki, and fox spirits feature as sympathetic lead characters, shapeshifting and conjuring a version of Fukushima and Tohoku that dazzled and inspired me.

This is one of the best books ever written! It won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, the National Book, and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. It traces the history of nuclear weapons from the discovery of nuclear fission through the Manhattan Project.

This epic (i.e., very long!) work describes the science, people, and politics that led to the research, development, demonstration, and deployment of the first nuclear weapon. The book reads like an H.G. Wells novel, writing about the actors in this chronicle of the scientists who enhanced quantum theory and applied it to thermonuclear fission, including Bohr, Fermi, Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Planck, Szilard, Teller, and von Neumann: the characters in the Oppenheimer film. Even if you do not finish it, you must start it!