The Sound of a Thousand Stars
Fittingly, this novel set amidst the Manhattan Project is dark and deep. It bristles with intelligence and is stuffed with data, including historical as well as scientific facts. It also traces the course of a painful love affair. Arriving in Los Alamos in 1944, Alice Katz, a rare young woman Ph.D. in physics, meets Caleb Blum, a former physics graduate student, both drafted into the top-secret project by J. Robert Oppenheimer, their professor at Berkeley. She comes from a princess-like secular Jewish background, while his is Orthodox and poor. By choosing to be physicists, both have rebelled against their upbringings, but this doesn’t mean they’re a perfect match. Secrets and lies constantly tear them apart.
Unlike many World War II novels, The Sound of a Thousand Stars realistically evokes the constant worry and guilt felt by those on the home front during wartime. Even though many of the workers on the Manhattan Project, including Alice and Caleb, don’t know what horror they are creating till it is revealed, their dread is palpable. Ghastly accidents underline the mortal danger they, too, face.
Rachel Robbins’s title plays on Oppenheimer’s famous quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, likening an atomic blast to “the radiance of a thousand suns” but adding, “I am become death.”
Inspired by Robbins’s grandparents’ actual experience in Los Alamos, her book began as nonfiction and, as she points out, “at its core [it] functions as a feminist critique of women in STEM.” These underpinnings occasionally obtrude, although she creates vivid characters, including fictional portraits of theatrical, tortured Oppenheimer and flamboyant Richard Feynman. The touching tale of Haruki, a survivor of Hiroshima, also threads through this deathly serious, brainy, brain-singeing text.
