Sep 26 2024

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, Pt. 3

One of the many astonishing things that Richard Rhodes does in The Making of the Atomic Bomb is to match the tone and pace of each of the major sections to their theme. It’s common enough in good novels, but uncommon in non-fiction, and vanishingly rare in a non-fiction work of this size and scope. The third and final part is just two long chapters, one on the Trinity test and the other on Hiroshima. They are tales of awe and terror. The middle section takes eight chapters to show the immense logistical effort to create what was necessary to build the first bomb, including wholly new cities and one of the world’s largest industrial plants, all in secret and in competition with everything else urgently needed to win the war. Those chapters are methodical, urgent, but also bureaucratic, tales of memos and transfers. The first section is all about understanding the atom, about the excitement of discovery. Words like “surprise” and “joy” recur throughout this part, as scientists take unusual experimental results and try to make sense of them, or propose theories about matter that can be tested, and then devise experiments to find out.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“As his protégé James Chadwick said, [Ernest] Rutherford’s ultimate distinction was ‘his genius to be astonished.’ He preserved that quality against every assault of success…” (p. 36) Rhodes details how Rutherford’s first experimental astonishment led to discoveries in radio waves that, for a time, put him ahead of Marconi. He went on to discover radioactive half-life, the difference between alpha and beta particles, to put forward the theory that an atom’s mass is concentrated in its nucleus, to co-develop atomic numbering, and to lead the laboratory that discovered the neutron. Those are some astonishing astonishments.

“[Niels] Bohr learned about radiochemistry from [George] de Hevesy. He began to see connections with his electron-theory work. His sudden burst of intuitions then was spectacular. He realized in the space of a few weeks that radioactive properties originated in the atomic nucleus but chemical properties depended on the number and distribution of electrons.” (p. 67) Within a year Bohr wrote a three-part paper titled “On the constitution of atoms and molecules” laying out an important step forward in modeling atomic structure, one that is still taught as a gateway to more complex models.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/26/the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb-by-richard-rhodes-pt-3/

Sep 25 2024

The Very Patient Gus Davis by Laurie Trumble Davis & Marjorie van Heerden

Who doesn’t love a French bulldog? With their compact size, sweet faces and affectionate natures, Frenchies are some of the cutest pups around!

Our hero Gus Davis is an adorable Frenchie whose best friend is his owner Bean. When she comes home from the store one day, Gus immediately sniffs out that she has cookies in her shopping. Bean tells him that he has to wait till after dinner, and tho Gus does his best, he just can’t help wanting to grab a quick treat beforehand. Waiting is so hard! Luckily for him, Bean is a dog owner who is as good-hearted as she is wise, and makes sure he has plenty of other things to distract himself with while he’s waiting for dinner to finally be ready. Will all these distractions be enough, tho, for hungry little Gus?

This is a terrific picture book on patience and resilience that will help teach young readers a very important life skill. Being able to amuse oneself while waiting is a valuable coping mechanism, and it’s lovely that Bean is shown as actively helping Gus to figure that out. It’s also really nice that patience is shown as something that you can practice in everyday moments, for even small rewards like watching a beautiful sunset. As with many other good habits, patience is the kind of muscle that only grows stronger with training and use.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/25/the-very-patient-gus-davis-by-laurie-trumble-davis-marjorie-van-heerden/

Sep 24 2024

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road by Manu Larcenet

When the lovely publicist at Abrams Comics pitched this graphic novel adaptation to me, I made him laugh by replying, “I’ll be honest: I desperately hated The Road but am wildly curious to see what Manu Larcenet brings to the story. He can’t make it worse!” You can read my original review of the source material here, and an even more accurate examination of it by another critic I admire here. And no, we’re not being contrarian: that Emperor genuinely has no clothes!

Even so, I love a good graphic novel, and was super happy to crack open this volume. Because a lot of times, even when I hate an author’s writing, I can recognize that there’s still a pretty great story hiding inside the irritating mannerisms. Stripped of Cormac McCarthy’s tedious prose style, I wanted to see whether the plot still worked as entertainment — nvm the issues with narcissism, allegory and genre that I’ll get to briefly later on in this review.

To my immense relief, Manu Larcenet knocks it out of the park with this graphic adaptation. I do admit that I didn’t recognize the ending as being the same as it is in the novel, but that could also be because I was rolling my eyes too hard to remember all the details back when I was reading the original in 2011. I have no doubt that Mr Larcenet was absolutely faithful in this telling, a commitment underscored by the passionate and illuminating letter he included at the end of this volume. He wrote it as a pitch to Mr McCarthy, and begins by talking about how much he loves the atmosphere of the book and the ways he enjoys drawing the contrasts it portrays. All he wants to do with his proposed graphic adaptation, he says, is to draw Mr McCarthy’s words.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/24/cormac-mccarthys-the-road-by-manu-larcenet/

Sep 23 2024

Rise Of The Spider by Michael P Spradlin

This first book in The Web Of The Spider series for middle grade readers could not come at a more relevant time!

Young Rolf von Heusen is eleven years old in the spring of 1929. His main interests are football and palling around with his friends Ansel and Joshua. He thinks that his hometown of Heroldsberg, Germany is the most wonderful place in the world.

His older brother Romer does not share the same perspective. At fifteen, the once athletic and studious teenager has lost interest in both school and football. Instead, he starts hanging out with some brown shirted newcomers to town, Hans and Nils, who are opening up a youth branch of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party. They try to sell it to Rolf and Ansel as a character- and skill-building group, like Boy Scouts, but the younger boys are immediately suspicious of the lack of adult guidance and supervision. Besides which Ansel’s dad, a newspaper reporter, often talks about politics at the dinner table and loathes the Nazis with a passion.

The von Heusen dinner table hasn’t been the most tranquil place in the world lately either, with Rolf’s toy manufacturer father and Romer getting into constant fights about the state of both the economy and the country. When their father learns that Romer has joined the Nazi Youth, he goes ballistic. But it’s another discovery that Rolf makes about his brother that could tear their family apart for good.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/23/rise-of-the-spider-by-michael-p-spradlin/

Sep 21 2024

Das Konzert by Hartmut Lange

Everybody who’s anybody among Berlin’s dead craves an invitation to Frau Altenshul’s salon. She has devoted her afterlife — much as she had devoted her life — to beauty, whether that was beautiful music, beautiful art, or the simple beauty of conversation among like-minded people. Max Liebermann was a painter who had lived a long life, and he is a regular visitor to the salon; more than that, he can call Frau Altenshul a friend. His indifference to the social jockeying that continued after the end of mortal life is just part of what keeps him high in her esteem. She also values his long experience, the openness of his discussion, and his passion for art.

Das Konzert by Hartmut Lange

The dead of Frau Altenshul’s salon are still attached to this world because they met their ends violently. Untimely ripped from life, they are unable or unwilling to go to their final rest. They can see the world as it is, and the world as it was at the time of their death, but as Lange depicts this afterlife they are unable to affect the material world, and they are also unable to develop themselves further. They are stuck in between. Or are they?

Liebermann and Altenshul hear that an acclaimed pianist, Rudolf Lewanski, has come to Berlin. He was a rising star of the musical world before the Nazis shot him at age 28 in the occupied Polish city of Łódź. As has become clear in the novella’s initial chapter, the visitors to Frau Altenshul’s gatherings are all Jewish, and they all perished in the Holocaust. Lewanski is a particularly unquiet ghost; since his death, he has wandered the continent, a few weeks in London, a few months in Prague, here and there, never still. Frau Altenshul tries to persuade him to stay in Berlin, saying that in the new era — the book was published in 1986 and seems to take place roughly about that time — he has nothing more to fear in the city.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/21/das-konzert-by-hartmut-lange/

Sep 20 2024

Tantalizing Tales — September 2024 — Part Two

Had a mini panic attack when I thought we were in October already: reading all the spooky stories currently rolling out will definitely do that to a reviewer! But here we are considering the middle to late part of September and all the intriguing books that I haven’t quite had the time to get to yet but am sincerely hoping to.

First is a holdover from August that I’m finally having to admit defeat at being able to slot into my packed/chaotic schedule. Not Nothing by Gayle Forman is a heartwarming intergenerational tale with a historical angle. Our young hero Alex has had it rough. His father’s gone, his mother is struggling with mental health issues, and he’s now living with an aunt and uncle who are less than excited to have him. Almost everyone treats him as though he doesn’t matter at all.

So when a kid at school actually tells him that he’s nothing, Alex snaps and gets violent. Fortunately, his social worker pulls some strings and gets him a job at a nursing home for the summer rather than a stint in juvie. At the nursing home, he meets Josey, a 107-year-old Holocaust survivor who stopped bothering to talk years ago, as well as Maya-Jade, the granddaughter of one of the residents with an overblown sense of importance. Unlike Alex, Maya-Jade believes that people care about what she thinks and that she can make a difference.

Alex and Josey form an unlikely bond. With Josey confiding in him, Alex starts to believe that he can make a difference, too — a good difference — in the world. If he can truly feel he matters, Alex may be able to finally rise to the occasion of his own life.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/20/tantalizing-tales-september-2024-part-two/

Sep 19 2024

I, Too, Am Here by Morgan Christie & Marley Berot

Time to take a break from spooky season reads to cherish a book that will mean so much to any immigrant or person of color.

Inspired by Langston Hughes’ iconic poem I, Too, this children’s picture book follows a young girl who tries to figure out racism and xenophobia as it’s directed at her family. Her grandmother is a hardworking Black immigrant who used the money earned from three jobs to bring her son, the narrator’s father, over to join her in her new country. Her mother moved away from the United States of America’s Jim Crow South, where Mom saw and experienced legally enforced inequality and the struggle for civil rights firsthand. Even in the present day, small incidents at school remind our young narrator that people can still react poorly and hurtfully to the color of her skin out of sheer prejudice.

To help comfort and inspire the narrator, her mother reads to her the poem I, Too, and explains that she belongs right where she is. Diversity is strength, and no one should feel ashamed of their cultural background or racial heritage. While the book does not further expound on the fact that it’s the content of one’s character and actions that are the only basis upon which people should be judged as members of any even halfway decent society — understandably given its remit as a picture book — it does provide an affirming message to any child who fears that the hatred of others means that they don’t have a right to grow up and live where they are.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/19/i-too-am-here-by-morgan-christie-marley-berot/

Sep 18 2024

The Strange Tales Of Oscar Zahn: Volume 1 by Trí Vương

Me while reading this book: Why am I crying?!

Me reading the artist’s bio at the end: Oh, because this is one of the creators behind Everyday Hero Machine Boy, which was another extraordinary graphic novel that I also did not expect to make me cry.

If you’ve read my last two reviews, you’ll know that this has been an unsettlingly emotional week for me, not helped by my eldest interrupting my reading of The Strange Tales Of Oscar Zahn last night to show me the latest PSA from Sandy Hook Promise. Poor kid didn’t expect me to be openly weeping by the end of the announcement, as he gave me consoling tissues, hugs and an “I’m sorry, Mommy!” Nothing for him to apologize for, I told him, even as the mantle of anxiety and sorrow that comes with living in 21st century America weighed me down. And good thing, I told myself, that I’d taken ninety minutes out of my afternoon earlier to go get a spa pedicure, which definitely helped work at least a little of the prior tension out of my body.

And while we’re at it, it’s time for a little PSA of my own: if you, dear reader, have been thinking about doing some self-care — a nap, some yoga, a spa treatment, whatever you’ve been wistfully wishing you had the time to do — take this as your sign to go for it. We live in a stressful peak-capitalist world that overemphasizes productivity and appearances at the expense of internal health and I have no doubt that you deserve a break.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/18/the-strange-tales-of-oscar-zahn-volume-1-by-tri-vuong/

Sep 17 2024

Goth Parenting by Casey Gilly & Robin Robinson

subtitled The Dark Joys of Raising Baby Bats.

Readers, everything is making me emotional recently. Whether it was yesterday’s Camp Twisted Pine stabbing me in the heart again with a pain first inflicted almost a year prior, to today’s wonderful Goth Parenting reinforcing to this tired (and temporarily single) mom that I’m doing okay if not outright great, I have been having outsized feelings lately. Fortunately for my mental health, any negativity has been counteracted by the warmhearted nature of both books, and especially by this delightful guide on being a goth parent. ‘Cause you know who are undoubtedly some of the best parents in the history of popular media? Ur-Goth parents Gomez and Morticia Addams. They love their kids wholeheartedly, support their interests even when they conflict with their own, and are unapologetically, unreservedly themselves, setting a terrific example for their kids as the latter sally forth into the world and figure out who they are as individual human beings. And that’s exactly the kind of thinking that permeates this wonderful little volume on how to parent as a person who enjoys the darker or even just more offbeat side of living.

This fast, humorous read touches lightly on many aspects of parenting, divided primarily into sections by the age of the little one. It dispenses sage advice, from baby proofing the goth home to dealing with rebellion in older children. At all times, it emphasizes the importance of empathy and care when raising children, all in a tone that is darkly luminous, rather like the silver of a full moon gilding the nighttime clouds before it.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/17/goth-parenting-by-casey-gilly-robin-robinson/

Sep 16 2024

Camp Twisted Pine by Ciera Burch

Oh wow, getting into this hit hard. Like Ciera Burch, I never went to sleepaway camp, and wound up writing a book/game on the subject. I designed that roleplaying game on my former best friend, the same way choreographers create dances on certain performers. Unfortunately for me, that person I relied on and trusted more than anyone else in the world destroyed our relationship almost exactly a year ago. So getting into this book that otherwise seems very tailor-made for me reopened a lot of still-healing wounds, forcing me to contend with emotions that I thought I’d already dealt with successfully.

Because this isn’t just a fun story about kids going to summer camp, with a diverse cast, sapphic first crush, loads of nature info, supernatural adventure and a setting in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens (with, yes, campfire stories about the Jersey Devil!) It’s also very much the tale of a girl who’s been thrust into the role of the quiet, obedient eldest daughter, who loves nature but loves it most from the cool tranquility of library research, whose parents’ marriage has undramatically but irreversibly fallen apart. When Naomi’s parents first float the idea of sending her and her younger twin brothers to Camp Twisted Pine for a few weeks, Naomi is resistant not only because she’s not the outdoorsy type, but because she knows perfectly well that her parents are going to use the trip as an opportunity to reset their home life and move her Dad out of the family home without actually telling any of the kids.

Naomi, being an eminently reasonable kind of person, just wants her parents to talk to her. She doesn’t want to come home and find that life has changed all around her. Her parents might think it’s okay to make decisions about her life without consulting her, but there really are some things that need to be discussed as a family, not just handed down by fiat. And even tho Naomi knows that she can’t change her parents’ feeling about each other, it still hurts to be treated like an object, as if her feelings about all the change their family is going through don’t matter. Worst of all, when creepy and downright dangerous things start happening at camp, she tries to call her dad — the parent she knows will actually give her the time of day — and he refuses to listen to her, assuming that she’s just making excuses to come home. In fact, none of the camp counselors will listen when she tries to tell them that one of her cabin mates has gone missing in the woods.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/16/camp-twisted-pine-by-ciera-burch/