Author: Phyllis Fisher

Publisher: Japan Publications (USA)

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13:

This account of Phyllis Fisher's life at Los Alamos during the secret development of the atom bomb is highly personal--warm-hearted, humorous, and sensitive--and at the same time conscious of the wider meaning of events as they unfolded on that high, remote plateau. Her husband, Leon Fisher, was one of the young physicists who helped develop the bomb. She was a social worker, the mother of a two-year-old son. She did not known what was being developed in the secrecy and isolation of Los Alamos until just shortly before Hiroshima was destroyed. Her book, based on letters and recollections, tracers her experiences on the "hill," her difficulties with regulations, restrictions, and rumors, as well as with her husband's silence. Her beautifully written account is leavened with delightful humor, human insights, and poetic descriptions of scenes on that enchanting and terrifying mesa. It ends with her trip to Hiroshima about four decades later, where she saw for herself the terrible evidence of a cruelty men hoped they had outgrown. The book describes the plight of a young wife and mother in a world out of control. She was driven to write it out of an affection for the human race. It is an apology, a plea for peace. This book is compelling because of its rasp of the meaning of her experience--that she was part of the world's changing. The 6,000 men and women at Los Alamos changed the world in that place. There is no need to go farther back in history. The lesson for our time began in 1945 with the explosion of Alamogordo.--From Foreword by Alan Cranston.--Jacket flap