Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

by Lydia Millet

Book Overview

Transported to the 21st century, Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi grapple with the legacy of the atom bomb in this "shattering and beautiful" time travel novel (Entertainment Weekly).

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart plucks the three scientists who were key to the invention of the atom bomb--Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi--as they watch history's first mushroom cloud rise over the desert on July 16th, 1945...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932360859
• ISBN13: 9781932360851
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Soft Skull
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, important novel

I haven't read anything this ambitious and successful in a long time. The ending took my breath away. Reviewers who dismiss this ingenious book by calling it names reveal more about themselves than about this graceful and extraordinary story. Finally, a writer not afraid to take on big things! Highly recommend.

Beautiful Writing

After reading Lydia Millet's latest book, "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart," I bought all her books. In a week I devoured "George Bush, Dark Prince of Love" and "Everyone's Pretty." Sadly, I have just finished "My Happy Life" and am down to the last, "Omnivores." I admit I am obsessed with Millet's writing: It is exquisite, flowing, the subject matter jarring, disturbing, crazy-ass weird and captivating. I haven't been this enthralled with a writer since I discovered Vonnegut as a teenager(before that, of course, there was Judy Blume and, I'm sort of embarrassed to say, V.C. Andrews). Millet is a brilliant, beautiful writer. I am so grateful for her work and can't wait for her next feat.

Radiant physicists return to the scene of the crime

Although this is fiction, even Science Fiction, there is a lot to learn from this book. Briefly, three Atomic Scientists from World War Two (Oppenheimer, Szilard and Fermi, all from the so-called Manhattan Project) return, and visit Japan, where their Scientific work bore fruition. Millet has combined a lot of Historical and Scientific fact into her novel, and it really reads like a page turning thriller. One of the best books of the year.Highly recommended!!!

Excellent book

Millet's latest foray is a bigger, bolder, and riskier effort than her previous highly regarded novels. Taking on issues of apocalyse, nuclear war, religion and marriage in modern America, the book is a home run. It is funny, thought provoking, and always an enjoyable read. Transporting Oppenheimer to the present day, Millet presents our contemporty world with great wit, humor, and perceptiveness.

A Remarkable Breakout

In this marvelous book, a Santa Fe librarian named Ann has strange dreams about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called "father of the atomic bomb." She thinks of it another sign of her disrupted sleep patterns, but this is before an armed man comes into the library and begins shooting it up. Before he is killed by one of his own ricocheting bullets, he tells Ann that "the old ones are coming." Shaken, Ann goes to a friend's restaurant for a drink. Next to her at the bar is a man reading a biography of Oppenheimer who looks just like the Oppenheimer in her dream. He is joined by an elfin man speaking Italian. They talk about what will happen to them in the future. The Italian, now speaking accented English, will die in 1954. The tall, skinny Oppenheimer-type, will live until 1967, and they will both die of cancer. They joke about this uneasily, and then leave. They are not alone. In author Lydia Millet's vision, both Oppenheimer and the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi disappeared from the Trinity nuclear testing site at the moment the test bomb went off, and reappeared in Santa Fe on March 1, 2003. In Chicago, a fat rude dynamo named Leo Szilard awakes under a table in the undergrad dining room at the University of Chicago at the same moment. Szilard and his buddy Albert Einstein had written a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 warning him about German research into an atomic weapon, thus starting the race for the bomb. Szilard, as brilliant as he is exasperating, puts two and two together faster than the other physicists and hops a bus for New Mexico; the train is too expensive for his 1945 dollars. Ann is already fascinated by the three, and before long the scientists are living at her house, smoking, surfing the Web, and inhailing donuts, barely tolerated by her tolerant husband. The scientists have been researching what happened post-Trinity. They need to see it for themselves. What ensues is part personal revelation and part world circus as the scientists and a growing number of acolytes take what they've learned and head for Washington. Millet's graceful writing and wry humor bring her story exploding to life. Those iconic men of science Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Szilard are rendered human and are no less brilliant for their frailty and quirkiness. If the detonation of the atomic bomb brought forth Godzilla, couldn't it also propel its very creators into another time zone? She informs, teases, moves, and enchants her readers with this masterful work of imagination and heart. This novel is terrific reading and shoud not be missed.