This 1959 national best-selling novel is a story of two lovers under the moral burden of bringing atomic energy into the world. In the romanticized retelling of the events of the Manhattan Project, several of the main characters, including Oppenheimer and Lawrence, are renamed, while peripheral scientists and other characters borrow historical identities. Buck takes extreme liberties with the real Los Alamos story, and the books science is oversimplified. The language is melodramatic and the conflicts simplistic. The book should not be read for insight into any aspect of the Manhattan Project.

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