[Backlist] One highly specific and subjective Oppenheimer reading list

On the joy of returning to old favorite books. (PS: I made you another drink at the end.)

From the backlist.

As expected, Oppenheimer won big at last weekend’s Oscar ceremony, wrapping up more than six months of buzz around the sweeping biopic, and yielding my new favorite acceptance speech moment (Robert Downey Jr. thanking his terrible childhood, his wife for finding him as a snarling rescue pet and loving him back to life, and also his stylist “in case nobody else does.”). But I digress.

Last summer, when the whole high-contrast #BARBENHEIMER phenomenon first exploded on the scene, all the water-cooler chatter had me thinking about growing up in Santa Fe, occasionally aware of the long, dim shadow cast by the work done at Los Alamos labs some 34ish years before I moved to the state.

As a kid in 1970s/80s northern New Mexico, Los Alamos was, primarily, the place we had to travel in order to go ice skating. We’d wind our way around the mesas and up mountain roads to the tiny rink where we learned to glide forwards and back, and eventually to spin, either to keep turning or to stop dramatically, hissing a little spray of shaved ice off the edge of the blade.

Even if it wasn’t always in the foreground, the legacy of the Manhattan Project did loom large, especially as the Cold War intensified and Sting sang of the Russians loving their children too, of saving his son “from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.”

At some point, my mother introduced me to Frank Water’s 1966 novel, The Woman at Otowi Crossing. It’s a fictional account based on a real life woman (Edith Warner), who ran a tea room that straddled the communities around the San Ildefonso Pueblo and the one that popped up at the secret installation just over the Otowi Bridge in the early/mid-’40s. There are parts that probably don’t age well, but it’s one of those books that has stuck in my consciousness and is still a captivating story of the dawn of the atomic age juxtaposed with the psychic awakening of one remarkable woman who befriended all those around her, including the physicists up the hill.

Unfortunately, cinematic releases aren’t the only events prompting thoughts of the Manhattan Project’s bitter fruits in a year when Russia has suspended participation in its last nuclear arms control treaty with the U.S. But this missive is about joy, perhaps even stubbornly choosing joy as a part of this life when global powers seem to be lining up on opposing battle lines around the world. While the catalyst for this meander is somewhat somber, there is great pleasure in returning to books that really hit you the first time you read them and have offered new revelations — either in them or in yourself — on subsequent reads. And isn’t it fascinating how when you’re paying attention to something, suddenly there are all sorts of connecting threads that reveal themselves, new pieces that build on the picture around those returned-to books, brushing in a little detail in the sky or a contour on the ground?

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So, prompted by the threads that spin from water-cooler movie talk, here’s a short and highly subjective reading/listening list related to the Manhattan Project from a GenXer who grew up in New Mexico and who was curious about but not obsessed with what happened just up the road from the skating rink:

The Woman at Otowi Crossing, by Frank Waters

A novel based on the life of Edith Warner during the birth of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, it tells the story of Helen Chalmers and her psychic, spiritual journey alongside the history of the secret work of the nuclear physicists she befriends in her tea room.

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The House at Otowi Bridge, by Peggy Pond Church

Some time after I’d read Waters’ novel, I discovered Church’s book (published in 1960), which has been described as a dual memoir of Church and Edith Warner, their friendship, and their shared ties to the place where Oppenheimer’s secret project developed. Church’s father founded the Los Alamos Ranch School, which was taken over by the federal government to house the Manhattan Project.

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“Los Alamos from Below,” from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”

I bought this book early last summer based on a list from The Atlantic called “Nine Books That Will Actually Make You Laugh,” hooked by the fact that it was written by a genius physicist, not something you typically see associated with humorous writing. (The stories were actually put on paper by Ralph Leighton, as told to him by Feynman over a number of years.) There are several essays in the collection that detail Feynman’s time at Los Alamos, including this one.

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Field Trip podcast from The Washington Post, episode 4, White Sands National Park

Another summer 2023 discovery, the Field Trip podcast explores five of our National Parks through lesser known details and what they describe as the sometimes messy past of these places. White Sands is home to the Trinity Site, where the atomic bomb was first tested in 1945, something that has had lasting effects on the area and the people who live there. The park’s shifting sand also holds ancient fossilized footprints, and, strangely, African oryx.

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And, finally, here’s that drink I promised you…

Given the locale we’re talking about, a fairly straightforward margarita seems in order. If memory serves, I had my first restaurant margarita at El Nido in Tesuque, NM, with my big brother and his friend when I was about 16 (it was a different time). The venue is apropos here because, according to a piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican, legend has it that when they were transporting the “gadget” from Los Alamos to White Sands for the Trinity test, the drivers made a stop at El Nido for dinner and maybe dancing, leaving the bomb unattended outside.

Watercolor sketch of Pajarito Plateau outside Los Alamos, NM.

CLASSIC MARGARITA*

1.5 oz tequila

.75 oz fresh lime juice

.75 oz Grand Marnier (or other quality orange liqueur)

Shake and serve on the rocks.

P.S.: Absolutely salt the rim.

P.P.S.: If you want it a little sweeter, you can add a bit of agave nectar, but I like my margaritas tart—cure scurvy and strip tooth enamel tart—so I’m more apt to squeeze another wedge of lime in mine.

*P.P.P.S.: There’s some debate about whether a true “classic” margarita should have any orange liqueur at all, and though I do quite like a 2-1-1 tequila-lime-agave nectar mix, my older brother was a self-trained chef for whom Grand Marnier was the pinnacle, and so our margs always included it.

Cheers to the almost-weekend!