Books like Changing Light

I discovered Marianne Wiggins through this stellar novel, which was a National Book Award Finalist.

It’s an epic love story spanning many decades and two wars, and what I especially appreciated was Wiggins’ ability to weave in both the beauty and physics of light, the science of electricity and radiation.

These elements are present when the story begins, and when the story leaves Oak Ridge, where the uranium was enriched, the atomic bomb and fallout continue to follow the couple’s son, aptly named Lightfoot. I felt like I became Lightfoot, navigating my own views and understanding of the atomic age and its moral complexities.

I was immediately pulled into this impressive, experimental novel of fragments, written in the collective “we.”

Nesbit chooses to write from the point of view of three wives confronting the complex terrain and atmosphere of Los Alamos. It’s a lyrical, impressionistic condensation of the history of “The Hill” and the clash of domesticity and science.

I love details, and this novel offers an abundance of flotsam and jetsam, revealing everyday life and the desert surroundings for fans who like to gobble up glimpses of the food, birds, flora, cosmetics, drinks, and so on, of this era and place.

The triumphs and horrors of the atom bombs’ power are told from the women’s distant points of view, but this is where the collective “we” becomes more powerful, as the reader, becoming “we,” is included in the wives’ mental and emotional processing of what their husbands built.

I admittedly balked at a dense poetry book.

I’m more of a prose reader. But I soon found myself utterly captivated by this Greek chorus of voices from the Manhattan Project—scientists, wives, receptionists, officers, locals, among others. I admired Canaday’s use of subheadings to keep me organized as many of these characters weave in and out, making multiple appearances. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kitty Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Gen. Groves, Albert Einstein, are just some of the famous voices included.

After reading this arresting, accomplished, impeccably researched collection, I learned that Canaday studied literature and physics in college. In Canaday’s deft hands, through the techniques of poetry and the magic of creating personality, I felt the power of what was being built and the power of conflicting human emotions surrounding the urgent task at hand.

There is much I admire in Hall’s experimental novel revolving around the charismatic, enigmatic father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer.

Even the book’s title, Trinity, named after the first atomic test that took place in Los Alamos, isn’t easy to pin down. Because Hall makes clear even Oppenheimer doesn’t appear to be fully cognizant of why he named the historic test “Trinity.” That ambiguity shadows all her characters, who are used as prisms in a kaleidoscopic attempt to focus on the many parts of Oppie. 

In my opinion, Hall succeeds in revealing something of his character and mindset that a well-researched biography can’t fully give us. I found Trinity to be a brilliant way to examine, from the human side, the many contradictions behind winning the race to the atomic bomb.

Due to my book’s world-important subject matter, I felt it was important to lay a solid background foundation. General Groves’ autobiography, the commander of World War Two’s Manhattan Project, provided it. Working closely with Dr. J. Robert “Oppie” Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, New Mexico and Col. Paul W. Tibbets at Wendover Field, Utah, together they created an operational atomic bomb combat unit.

Groves was instrumental in not only co-ordinating work between Oppenheimer’s people (theory) and Tibbets crews (combat practical), he supervised construction of the uranium and plutonium bombs at Oak Ridge, TN and Hanford, WA, respectively. The book details the incredible complexity of the most ambitious and expensive engineering feat in history. The Manhattan Project changed all our lives—forever.

Published in 1965 and written by then Washington and foreign correspondent of Time Magazine Lamont, this book remains for me an exceptionally compelling narrative history.

The lens here is focused tightly on the events leading up to the first-ever test of an atomic bomb, which was codenamed “Trinity.” Obsessively researched, yes, but it’s Lamont’s writing that makes readers feel as though they are there, in the vastness of the desert, witnessing a happening that changed the world forever.

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! 

This Scott O’Dell Award winner is historical fiction for middle grade readers.

Set in the New Mexico desert during World War II, Dewey and Suze become unlikely friends when their parents work on the top secret “gadget.” The gadget’s scheduled test lights up the pre-dawn sky for miles around but is explained away as an explosion at a munitions outpost.

A few weeks later Suze’s family takes Dewey with them to visit the green glass sea of Trinitite, a new mineral created as a result of the atomic bomb’s test. Readers will feel the humanity of how war affects us all. Readers who prefer fiction over nonfiction might find this a gateway to interest them in picking up a nonfiction title on WWII or the atomic bomb. 

The story of the youngest physicist at Los Alamos, Ted Hall, who volunteered to spy for the KGB and provided vital atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Although Hall’s treachery was discovered by American counter-intelligence, he was never prosecuted to avoid alerting the Soviets that the United States had decrypted their top-secret WWII cables. Albright and Kunstel tell the story of an idealistic, naïve and arrogant spy.

Most readers interested in the story of the atomic bomb don’t realize that the weapon was primarily an engineering project, not a scientific one. (Why it was called the Manhattan Engineer District). 

The man who built the bomb was really Groves, not Oppenheimer, who only helped design it. Norris’s book is fascinating for portraying Groves as a human being, not just a chubby general. Readers will recognize that Matt Damon was actually a pretty good choice to play Groves in the movie “Oppenheimer.”