This is a non-fiction book published in 1999. Its focus is on experiments with radioactive materials on humans. It is shocking. Some of the experiments described include:
•18 people injected with plutonium without their consent in 1945-46. One was a four-year-old boy.
•751 pregnant women given a radioactive tracer without their consent in 1945-1947.
•74 boys at a state institution recruited to join the “science club” in the 40’s and 50’s for which they received special outings and radioactive compounds in their oatmeal.
•131 prisoners in Oregon and Washington irradiated in the 1960s.
The early experiments were to determine what effects scientists working on developing nuclear bombs prior to WWII might be exposed to in their labs. A 23-year-old chemistry graduate, Don Mastick, recruited to Los Alamos, got 10 mg of plutonium in his mouth when a vial exploded.
“After the accident, Mastick’s breath was so hot that he could stand six feet away and blow the needles on the radiation monitors off scale. His urine contained detectable plutonium for many years.”
His treatment consisted of two different mouth rinses every 15 minutes for 3 hours. Then he had his stomach pumped several times. After that he was handed the beaker containing his bodily fluids and told to separate out the plutonium!
Once nuclear bombs were developed, many tests involved military personnel. A number of nuclear bombs were detonated in Nevada. One larger than that dropped on Nagasaki was tested in Feb. 1951. Three young soldiers, including Jerry Schultz, ages 19 to 21, were supposed to gather weather data about 6 miles from point of impact.
“The AEC official had warned Schultz that the atomic bomb the aircraft was lugging toward them would be the biggest ever dropped from a plane. Be sure to protect yourselves, he had warned. ‘How do we do that?’ Schultz asked. There was a long pause and then the voice said, ‘Frankly, we don’t know.’”
Details about the tests of nuclear bombs at the Pacific Proving Ground, as it was known, are also included. I found it unbelievable that young servicemen were sent in just a few hours later to clean up ships hit by nuclear bombs. Testing pilots flew through the immediate aftermath of bombs to gather data.
It is definitely an eye-opening book about what went on prior to WWII and during the Cold War. Many reports on these activities were declassified in the 1990’s. The book also includes a detailed history of the nuclear experiments going on at Berkeley, Chicago, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford during the war. I had never heard much about this nuclear development period, although I listened to Glenn Seaborg’s annual talk to general chemistry students at Berkeley in the early 90’s. That was definitely a feel good talk with pictures of him with every president and students coming up afterwards to get his autograph. The building where he first made plutonium now has a plaque up. I worked in a building connected to this building for 5 years and never realized that’s where plutonium had been discovered. The half-life of plutonium 239 is something like 24,000 years!
Monday, May 9, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French
This is a fiction book with a very novel premise. Marylou Ahearn lost her daughter, Helen, when she was 8. Marylou attributes Helen’s death to a radioactive drink she had at her doctor’s office when she was pregnant. It is now more than 50 years later and Marylou is obsessed with finding and killing the doctor in charge of that unbelievable study to give pregnant women radioactive drinks.
Dr. Wilson Spriggs was in charge of the study. He’s now living in Florida with his daughter, her husband, and their three children. Marylou moves to their neighborhood in Florida, changes her name, and insinuates herself into their lives. She first approaches Suzi, their youngest daughter, while out on a walk. Soon she is over at their house quite a lot. Suzi is vulnerable because she feels her mother, Caroline, never pays her attention. The two older children, Otis and Ava, have Asperger’s. Caroline spends most of her attention on Ava while Otis is left to his own devices, which involve a lot of science experiments in the backyard shed.
The story seems to take some incredible turns, but it is enthralling. It is unclear to Marylou if Wilson Spriggs remembers the study at all.
“Okay. She’d tabled her initial plan to murder Wilson, because there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in murdering him if he didn’t know, or understand, why he was being murdered, but it wasn’t that she felt any sympathy for the wretched old coot.”
So, Marylou turns her attention to the rest of the family, but much of the trouble that ensues is due to the problems in the family in the first place. An affair, a hurricane, a pedophile and, least-likely, a home-built breeder reactor all overwhelm the family and Marylou.
Incredibly, the two most unbelievable events in this fiction book are actually based on real life. I’m trying to track down Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files, which details studies that actually took place at Vanderbilt University where pregnant women were given radioactive cocktails. And, I’m currently reading The Radioactive Boy Scout by Ken Silverstein. This is a non-fiction book about a high school boy who got enough of a start on building a reactor in his shed that an EPA clean-up crew in full protective gear descended on his neighborhood. They’d discovered radiation high enough to endanger 40,000 nearby residents.
Dr. Wilson Spriggs was in charge of the study. He’s now living in Florida with his daughter, her husband, and their three children. Marylou moves to their neighborhood in Florida, changes her name, and insinuates herself into their lives. She first approaches Suzi, their youngest daughter, while out on a walk. Soon she is over at their house quite a lot. Suzi is vulnerable because she feels her mother, Caroline, never pays her attention. The two older children, Otis and Ava, have Asperger’s. Caroline spends most of her attention on Ava while Otis is left to his own devices, which involve a lot of science experiments in the backyard shed.
The story seems to take some incredible turns, but it is enthralling. It is unclear to Marylou if Wilson Spriggs remembers the study at all.
“Okay. She’d tabled her initial plan to murder Wilson, because there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in murdering him if he didn’t know, or understand, why he was being murdered, but it wasn’t that she felt any sympathy for the wretched old coot.”
So, Marylou turns her attention to the rest of the family, but much of the trouble that ensues is due to the problems in the family in the first place. An affair, a hurricane, a pedophile and, least-likely, a home-built breeder reactor all overwhelm the family and Marylou.
Incredibly, the two most unbelievable events in this fiction book are actually based on real life. I’m trying to track down Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files, which details studies that actually took place at Vanderbilt University where pregnant women were given radioactive cocktails. And, I’m currently reading The Radioactive Boy Scout by Ken Silverstein. This is a non-fiction book about a high school boy who got enough of a start on building a reactor in his shed that an EPA clean-up crew in full protective gear descended on his neighborhood. They’d discovered radiation high enough to endanger 40,000 nearby residents.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
This is an easy, quick read with a very pointed message. The author, a Yale law professor, believes that pushing kids to be their best, whatever the tactics, is a superior parenting practice. She calls this type of parenting “Chinese parenting” as opposed to “Western parenting”.
It is a lot of work to parent this way. She spends hours after school drilling the children or forcing them to practice their musical instruments. She picks them up at school during non-essential classes (in her opinion) like PE or music or art to do more practicing. She has two girls. The eldest, Sophia, adapts relatively well to this parenting strategy. At fourteen, Sophia plays the piano at Carnegie Hall.
“Once, Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth-grade teacher administered every Friday…. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time.”
I have to wonder if every child had a parent pushing them to succeed and was so utterly invested in their success what our nationwide test scores would look like. Sophia recently was admitted to both Harvard and Yale. Of course, she was never allowed to have a playdate, go to a sleepover, try out for a play, watch TV or get anything lower than an A.
There is another side. Lulu, the author’s other child, does not take so well to the threatening parenting style. Here’s one episode when she’s seven years old.
“Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed, and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have ‘The Little White Donkey’ perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, ‘I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?’ I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years….. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, and pathetic."
Can you imagine? The child is seven. Lulu continues playing an instrument though she does switch to the violin and eventually quits at age 13. She takes up tennis. I wonder what she will do next. In the scheme of things her rebellion was small, as her grades at school were still excellent.
The author emphasizes that all her actions were done out of love and that her children knew that. She has come in for a lot of flack as to whether she was emotionally abusing them. I think she has a point about developing a work ethic in children, but her tactics seem pretty extreme. Plus, how does she have the time to do this?
You can hear an interview with the author on NPR here. Or listen to other moms discussing her parenting tactics, also on NPR.
It is a lot of work to parent this way. She spends hours after school drilling the children or forcing them to practice their musical instruments. She picks them up at school during non-essential classes (in her opinion) like PE or music or art to do more practicing. She has two girls. The eldest, Sophia, adapts relatively well to this parenting strategy. At fourteen, Sophia plays the piano at Carnegie Hall.
“Once, Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth-grade teacher administered every Friday…. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time.”
I have to wonder if every child had a parent pushing them to succeed and was so utterly invested in their success what our nationwide test scores would look like. Sophia recently was admitted to both Harvard and Yale. Of course, she was never allowed to have a playdate, go to a sleepover, try out for a play, watch TV or get anything lower than an A.
There is another side. Lulu, the author’s other child, does not take so well to the threatening parenting style. Here’s one episode when she’s seven years old.
“Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed, and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have ‘The Little White Donkey’ perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, ‘I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?’ I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years….. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, and pathetic."
Can you imagine? The child is seven. Lulu continues playing an instrument though she does switch to the violin and eventually quits at age 13. She takes up tennis. I wonder what she will do next. In the scheme of things her rebellion was small, as her grades at school were still excellent.
The author emphasizes that all her actions were done out of love and that her children knew that. She has come in for a lot of flack as to whether she was emotionally abusing them. I think she has a point about developing a work ethic in children, but her tactics seem pretty extreme. Plus, how does she have the time to do this?
You can hear an interview with the author on NPR here. Or listen to other moms discussing her parenting tactics, also on NPR.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Gone Tomorrow by P. F. Kluge
Gone Tomorrow is a novel set at a small college in Ohio. The bulk of the book is a discovered story/memoir by a retired English professor. It details his last year at this small college. Prof. Canaris was a well-known author based in LA when he took a teaching position, seemingly on a whim. His story moves back and forth in time explaining why he stayed.
Here he gets a preview of life as a professor from an older, tenured professor:
“‘But you have no idea how this place will come at you. Headaches, problems, issues. Letters of recommendation, reports, committees, invitations, lecture. All delivered with respect, flattery, affection, appealing to your heart, your art, your character, your stomach, ego, id, libido… Well maybe not that, not the libido. You may like it. You may love it. But the world won’t know you and you won’t recognize yourself. And you will not have done whatever you came here to do.’”
Prof. Canaris is there to write a book. However, it appears the predictions above come true because as he reaches retirement age there is no sign of the book. He is killed in a hit-and-run accident shortly after he retires and it is his literary executor who finds the one-year memoir/story and tries to determine whether this book, The Beast, exists or not.
I enjoyed Kluge’s writing. Here Canaris discusses books:
“Books stay around if we let them. They survive one move after another, they sit on shelves for decades, reminding us not so much of how much we have read as how much we have forgotten, an uneven contest between reading and memory which might well end with someone surrounded by all the world’s books yet incapable of summoning up his own name.”
As an English professor Canaris complains about grading student paper with missing quotation marks and such. I found it curious that in the Canaris story/memoir I ran across such things. I wonder if this was done deliberately by the author or just a bad job of editing. Regardless, it is definitely one of my favorite fiction books read so far this year.
Escape to Books
Here he gets a preview of life as a professor from an older, tenured professor:
“‘But you have no idea how this place will come at you. Headaches, problems, issues. Letters of recommendation, reports, committees, invitations, lecture. All delivered with respect, flattery, affection, appealing to your heart, your art, your character, your stomach, ego, id, libido… Well maybe not that, not the libido. You may like it. You may love it. But the world won’t know you and you won’t recognize yourself. And you will not have done whatever you came here to do.’”
Prof. Canaris is there to write a book. However, it appears the predictions above come true because as he reaches retirement age there is no sign of the book. He is killed in a hit-and-run accident shortly after he retires and it is his literary executor who finds the one-year memoir/story and tries to determine whether this book, The Beast, exists or not.
I enjoyed Kluge’s writing. Here Canaris discusses books:
“Books stay around if we let them. They survive one move after another, they sit on shelves for decades, reminding us not so much of how much we have read as how much we have forgotten, an uneven contest between reading and memory which might well end with someone surrounded by all the world’s books yet incapable of summoning up his own name.”
As an English professor Canaris complains about grading student paper with missing quotation marks and such. I found it curious that in the Canaris story/memoir I ran across such things. I wonder if this was done deliberately by the author or just a bad job of editing. Regardless, it is definitely one of my favorite fiction books read so far this year.
Escape to Books
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Elly Griffiths, mystery author
I haven’t read many new mystery authors that I’ve been really taken with lately. Elly Griffiths is an exception. The Crossing Places and The Janus Stone are set in an isolated part of England along the east coast. Ruth (or Dr. Galloway), the main protagonist, is a forensic archeologist, which entails investigating and dating old bones – like remains from the Bronze or Iron Age in England.
In The Crossing Places, Griffiths’ first mystery, Ruth is called to a scene on a beach and meets DCI Harry Nelson. The remains turn out to be much older than any case he has going, but he subsequently calls her to other scenes. In The Janus Stone a child’s skeleton is found under the doorway of a former children’s home and Ruth becomes involved in figuring out who this child could be.
The descriptions of the area where Ruth lives, a desolate saltmarsh, are also well done. Having only been to London, it’s interesting to read about a very different part of England. Here she’s walking near her house:
“For about twenty minutes she plods on, head down against the driving rain. Then she stops. She should have reached the gravel path by now. It is almost completely dark, with just a faint phosphorescent gleam coming from the marsh itself. Ruth gets out her torch but its shaky light shows her only flat marshland in all directions. Far off, she can hear the sea roaring as it thunders inland.”
In The Janus Stone Ruth is also dealing with an unexpected pregnancy as she heads out to various sites:
“They climb the hill. Ruth trying to disguise how out of breath she is. Jesus, at this rate she’ll be immobile at nine months.”
I enjoyed the humor throughout the books, even as they’re digging up bones.
In The Crossing Places, Griffiths’ first mystery, Ruth is called to a scene on a beach and meets DCI Harry Nelson. The remains turn out to be much older than any case he has going, but he subsequently calls her to other scenes. In The Janus Stone a child’s skeleton is found under the doorway of a former children’s home and Ruth becomes involved in figuring out who this child could be.
The descriptions of the area where Ruth lives, a desolate saltmarsh, are also well done. Having only been to London, it’s interesting to read about a very different part of England. Here she’s walking near her house:
“For about twenty minutes she plods on, head down against the driving rain. Then she stops. She should have reached the gravel path by now. It is almost completely dark, with just a faint phosphorescent gleam coming from the marsh itself. Ruth gets out her torch but its shaky light shows her only flat marshland in all directions. Far off, she can hear the sea roaring as it thunders inland.”
In The Janus Stone Ruth is also dealing with an unexpected pregnancy as she heads out to various sites:
“They climb the hill. Ruth trying to disguise how out of breath she is. Jesus, at this rate she’ll be immobile at nine months.”
I enjoyed the humor throughout the books, even as they’re digging up bones.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)