Getting their due

A couple of new books that highlight women's roles in World War II, notably the New York Times bestseller The Girls of Atomic City. Denise Kiernan focuses on a secret city created in Tennessee, where a predominantly women work crew the enriched uranium for the United States' nuclear program. According to Kiernan, the women had no idea what they were working on, which I suppose avoided any moral ambiguity. Reviews are light, but it seems Kiernan is aiming at a broad audience, focusing more on the women's individual stories than the program itself.

Rocket Girl, the story of Mary Sherman Morgan, appears to have gone straight to paperback. Morgan was the first American woman rocket scientist, and had a better idea what was going on during the war, as she was designing explosives. She switched to rocket propellants after the war and her research led to a fuel capable of putting rockets into orbit. One of the unsung heroes of the early Explorer program.

Morgan's story brings to mind that of Hedy Lamarr, who is today recognized for helping to develop a missile guidance system, which is also used in cell phone technology. She worked on the system of "frequency hopping" with her husband, George Antheil, a pianist. Richard Rhodes, famous for his book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, wrote a book on Hedy's Folly in 2011, which looks like it would be a lot of fun to read.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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