Audio By Carbonatix
Books and documentaries abound on the subject of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, the Los Alamos-based lab where scientists researched and built the atom bomb during World War II. But what about the young wives who followed their husbands to Los Alamos, where they lived in a shroud of military secrecy, without much of a clue as to what was really going on there? It’s an interesting angle, and one that Boulder author TaraShea Nesbit polishes well in her debut novel The Wives of Los Alamos (Bloomsbury, $25), which takes full advantage of the situation’s inherent drama.
“I wanted to explore young marriages put into an environment with a level of secrecy that created distance between the two partners, and I wanted to think about the lives of a particular educated class of women in the 1940s — their world as social beings, their power, their interiorities — as well as their participation and complicity in this thread of history,” Nesbit noted of the book in a recent interview.
Nesbit will read from and sign copies of the page-turner tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Tattered Cover Book Store, 2526 East Colfax Avenue. Admission is free; find details at tatteredcover.com or call 303-322-7727.
Tue., Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m., 2014
