When Ike, a Wanapum Indian bus driver distressed over shrinking salmon runs, drives people upriver to the area that was once green orchards, Bruce is outraged at the scene of devastation. Bruce, a Middle-East wars vet, there to present his great uncle's memoir, is harassed by an angry ex-rancher. Three of the newcomers disrupt the scene with their own urgent missions. Others are more worried about the radioactive waste seeping from the nuclear plant.
The settler families normally gather for a calm time of nostalgic storytelling, though several still nurse anger over their eviction in 1943 for the bomb site. Not far away looms the defunct Hanford Nuclear Plant that secretly produced the plutonium for the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII. Includes some wonderfully evocative writing about how globally significant events can affect the lives of everyday people." Steve Olson, author of The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age In 1998, five newcomers arrive at the annual Settlers' Reunion at the Columbia River.
An intriguing novel about a little-known episode in American history.
0 kommentar(er)
