“What we learned was this: there were no ways to control unknown threats.”
Some stories are fascinating. Some stories are hard to read. The Wives of Los Alamos falls into both categories.
I saw a review for this book in a magazine and added it to my to-read list. When I was browsing what e-books I could check out at my library, it was available, so I started reading it.
The book tells the story of the families who moved to Los Alamos with their husbands and couldn’t tell anyone where they were going. They would come to find out their husbands were working on the atomic bomb.
The book is almost entirely written in the third person “we.” If the topic hadn’t been so interesting, I don’t know if I would have been able to finish the book. It would have been much easier to read if the author had told the stories from the perspective of a few of the wives instead of a collective “we.”
These families moved without knowing where they were going or what type of house they would have. They learned to live with a limited water supply, close neighbors with thin walls, and very few grocery choices under rations. They had to have permission to leave the community. Their letters were censored. They weren’t even allowed to have a camera. Above all, they were not told anything about the work their husbands were doing.
I wouldn’t highly recommend The Wives of Los Alamos, but I would highly recommend finding a book on this topic. We visited the Trinity site in New Mexico and I had never thought that the men who did the work on the atomic bomb had brought families out to the desert with them. I would like to read a few biographies of the wives if they are out there. I would search for Manhattan Project, Los Alamos or Oppenheimer to find more books on this topic.