It's Friday . . . time to share excerpts from one of my current reads with:
- Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.
- The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an ebook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.
Today I'm featuring:
Beginning: 1943 West
Over the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Arctic, the Atlantic; in sewers, in trenches, on the ocean, in the sky: there was a war going on. Sometimes it seemed far away, barely happening, but then a mother or wife placed a gold star in her living room window--her brother, her husband, her son, our neighbor--and the war became personal.
*********************
Page 56: "When we began there were twenty of us, then fifty, then the number of us grew too large to count, and in the first year alone we gave birth to eighty healthy children."
*********************
From barnesandnoble.com: Their average
age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London,
Chicago—and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, or at least
resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship as they were forced
to adapt to a rugged military town where everything was a secret,
including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in
barely finished houses with P.O. box addresses in a town wreathed with
barbed wire, all for the benefit of a project that didn’t exist as far
as the public knew. Though they were strangers, they joined
together—adapting to a landscape as fierce as it was absorbing, full of
the banalities of everyday life and the drama of scientific discovery.
And while the bomb was being
invented, babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up,
and Los Alamos gradually transformed from an abandoned school on a hill
into a real community: one that was strained by the words they couldn’t
say out loud, the letters they couldn’t send home, the freedom they
didn’t have. But the end of the war would bring even bigger challenges
to the people of Los Alamos, as the scientists and their families
struggled with the burden of their contribution to the most destructive
force in the history of mankind.
The Wives of Los Alamos is
a novel that sheds light onto one of the strangest and most monumental
research projects in modern history. It's a testament to a remarkable
group of women who carved out a life for themselves, in spite of the
chaos of the war and the shroud of intense secrecy.
Enjoy life with books . . .
Catherine
No comments:
Post a Comment