Theodore Taylor's "The Bomb" is a very readable history lesson, quite unlike anything you might have been taught at school about the United States' early experimentation with atomic warfare, way back in the mid-1940s. You might already know that American war planes dropped the world's first two atomic bombs, nicknamed "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. The explosions — and their radioactive fallout — killed and maimed hundreds of thousands, thus hastening the end of World War II but at a terrible human cost.
Author Theodore Taylor's "The Bomb" fictionalizes a much smaller historical event, the sort that gets barely two lines of mention in a typical history textbook — the American decision to use Bikini Atoll, a small island-paradise in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as an atomic testing site.
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