The Brooklyn Rail

Jenn Shapland’s Thin Skin

As Jenn Shapland describes in the titular essay of her new collection, Thin Skin, Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico for reasons of personal sentiment—he had traveled there as a child in an attempt to improve his health, and he hoped that the natural beauty of the landscape would inspire his scientists. Yet the impact of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which he directed, ricocheted across time and space.