"Succeeds as both a graphic primer and a philosophical meditation."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Trinity, the debut graphic book by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, depicts the
dramatic history of the race to build and the decision to drop the first
atomic bomb in World War Two.
This sweeping historical narrative traces the spark of invention from
the laboratories of nineteenth-century Europe to the massive industrial
and scientific efforts of the Manhattan Project, and even transports the
reader into a nuclear reaction--into the splitting atoms themselves.
The power of the atom was harnessed in a top-secret government compound
in Los Alamos, New Mexico, by a group of brilliant scientists led by the
enigmatic wunderkind J. Robert Oppenheimer. Focused from the start on
the monumentally difficult task of building an atomic weapon, these men
and women soon began to wrestle with the moral implications of actually
succeeding. When they detonated the first bomb at a test site code-named
Trinity, they recognized that they had irreversibly thrust the world
into a new and terrifying age.
With powerful renderings of WWII's catastrophic events at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Fetter-Vorm unflinchingly chronicles the far-reaching
political, environmental, and psychological effects of this new
invention. Informative and thought-provoking, Trinity is the ideal
introduction to one of the most significant events in history.
