Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance

In this riveting memoir, poet and novelist Dunthorne (Submarine) parses his family’s complicated legacy in WWII-era Europe. What begins as a study of his grandmother’s escape from the Nazis in 1935 soon evolves into an unsettling interrogation of the author’s great-grandfather, Jewish chemist Siegfried Merzbacher, whose development of radioactive household products eventually led him to produce chemical weapons and gas mask filters used by Nazi forces. Combing through 2,000 pages of Merzbacher’s memoirs, plus his personal letters and diary entries, Dunthorne pieces together a fractured history of the chemist’s prolific work, which began in the toothpaste industry, and his deep guilt, which haunted him until he died. In unvarnished prose, Dunthorne recounts conversations with families affected by Merzbacher’s weapons and his own visits to sites across Western Europe with concealed radioactive waste. Along the way, he unearths his family’s buried legacy and struggles to understand his great-grandfather’s motivations. Dunthorne strikes a near-perfect balance of history and personal reflection, and his questions about Merzbacher’s moral dilemmas resonate. This is a must-read. Agent: Georgia Garrett, RCW. (Apr.)