Beginning the World Again: A Novel of Los Alamos - Tapa blanda

"Roberta Silman has done a truly masterful job of bringing together the complex parts of the Los Alamos story-the science, the history, the place, the personal lives." -Helen Del Monte, Books and Fiction Editor, McCall's "I like Beginning the World Again a lot, especially the way Roberta Silman deals with time. Her portrait of Los Alamos rings true." -Freeman Dyson, author of Disturbing the Universe "Filtering the narrative through the character of bright, vivacious Lily Fialka and her brilliant young husband, the author deftly interweaves details of family life with the larger issues spurred by the scientists' deadly work." -Booklist "Located in quiet retirement in Vermont as the story opens, the narrator reflects on a time when she and her young scientist-husband were . . . at Los Alamos in the early 1940s . . . People [there] are portrayed as both terrified and obsessed with their creation as they race to have it ready to help end the war. Interesting fictional look at the human side of the Los Alamos experience and, due to the flashback aspect, the narrator can offer a perceptive juxtaposition of that experience with the current anti-nuke movement." -Southwest Review of Books

After a chance meeting in 1981, Lily Fialka confronts the defining time of her life: 1943-45 in Los Alamos, when her physicist husband, Peter, worked on the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project-a time of isolation, hard work, temptation, and loneliness, yet exhilaration and triumph; when great breakthroughs were made, but lives felt narrow; when loyalty was paramount, but the need for secrecy created unbearable tension. At the same time, Lily and her friends are haunted by what is happening to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Resistance in Germany, and his story serves as a counterpoint to theirs. In a sweeping historical novel that cuts across continents and reveals a deep knowledge of the science of the making of the bomb, Beginning the World Again offers valuable insights into that fascinating time.