Customer Reviews

Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From a remote, very remote ranch in the mountains of New Mexico, Los Alamos became an instant city in 1943 as it grew to six thousand people, among them the best physical scientists from around the world. With them came thousands of other workers, and their families. Los Alamos became the birthplace of the Atomic Age as it revolutionized modern weaponry and science.

Rather than being exclusively scientific - as are a number of other books -- Inventing Los Alamos concentrates on the people. It uses the oral history point of view to create a social history of the people and the culture that developed.

The book covers not only the early World War II days of developing the Atomic bomb, but also the Cold War Era, and even a short section on the work being conducted at the site now.

This is a most interesting account of the side effects of the scientific work done there.

This is a great book for anyone remotely interested in the development of America's nuclear program and especially the city known as the birthplace of the Atomic Age. What makes the book unique is both the reader friendly narrative style of the writing and the author's focusing on the establishment of the town and men and women that created a livable community out of wartime chaos while confronting the myriad of social and cultural issues of the Atomic Age prior to the rest of the country...or world. A fresh look at the development of the Atomic Age culture.

I was at Los Alamos in 1988, 31 years after the period covered by the book. Yet there were still clearly common attributes of the town's culture, than spanned those intervening years. The scientific elite of the town in both 1988 and in the book's period, had an insularity. Bred in part perhaps by the sheer intellectual fascination of the problems they were working on. And which they could not explain to outsiders.

But the book also explores the working class sections of the town. A group often overlooked in other "official" histories. It explains informal demarcations of the time, in the social mixing.

A further nuance was not just class but ethnicity. New Mexico was and is a relatively poor, rural American state. Many of the locals were Hispanics, trying to scratch out a living on poor soils. So the lab was always able to find a plentiful labour force. Which had some resentments against the elite, often Anglo scientists. In 1988, this was perhaps not as pronounced. But still present.

INVENTING LOS ALAMOS: THE GROWTH OF AN ATOMIC COMMUNITY provides a powerful social history of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the Atomic Age. It began as an 'instant city' created in 1943 for this purpose but came to accommodate scientists and over 6,000 residents brought in to achieve a goal. Most books focus on science: this provides urban studies collections with more: an in-depth survey of the community which grew from a political and scientific objective.