This Atom Bomb in Me
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- ¥1,500
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- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
This Atom Bomb in Me traces what it felt like to grow up suffused with American nuclear culture in and around the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. As a secret city during the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge enriched the uranium that powered Little Boy, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The city was a major nuclear production site throughout the Cold War, adding something to each and every bomb in the United States arsenal. Even today, Oak Ridge contains the world's largest supply of fissionable uranium.
The granddaughter of an atomic courier, Lindsey A. Freeman turns a critical yet nostalgic eye to the place where her family was sent as part of a covert government plan. Theirs was a city devoted to nuclear science within a larger America obsessed with its nuclear prowess. Through memories, mysterious photographs, and uncanny childhood toys, she shows how Reagan-era politics and nuclear culture irradiated the late twentieth century. Alternately tender and alarming, her book takes a Geiger counter to recent history, reading the half-life of the atomic past as it resonates in our tense nuclear present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Through a tapestry of interwoven vignettes, Freeman (Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia) revisits the surreal side of her Reagan-era childhood in a beautiful and haunting memoir. The grandchild of a Manhattan Project courier who subsequently worked for the Atomic Energy Commission during the Cold War, Freeman was born in, and subsequently spent much time at, her grandparents' house in Oak Ridge, Tenn, where the uranium was refined for the bomb that struck Hiroshima. Despite many markers of a conventional American childhood i.e., serving as a Brownie Scout, watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood other details Freeman recalls are both strange and quietly sinister, such as men being whited out in family photographs. When, one day, she happens upon a deer giving birth, she wonders if the shaking, awkwardly moving fawn has been mutated, before realizing what she had actually seen was a "beautiful creature on the not-yet-brown grass of summer becoming what she was supposed to become." Freeman's work combines lyrical description and academic theory, bringing in the ideas of such theorists as Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, along with personal accounts and examinations of cultural touchstones. In all these ways, Freeman attempts to untangle the strange web of her youth over the course of this evocative, quietly probing account.
