Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rack, by A. E. Ellis. A chilling novel of a cynically run tuberculosis sanatorium in which hope dies quickly, the patients more slowly...
...similar question is raised about the novel's hero, Physicist Sebastian Bloch, in whom readers will find it hard not to see at least some Oppenheimer traits: he has "a universal mind," an otherworldly face and a mesmeric personality. Bloch also belongs to a Communist apparatus, but carries no party card. Young Mark Ampler, a U.S. security agent who enrolls at Bloch's university to keep tab on the physicist promptly falls under his spell. Pearl Harbor packs Mark off to war and sets Sebastian fervently to work on the Bolt, or the Monster, as Author Chevalier interchangeably...
...Sellout. In the novel, Mark innocently relays a story that U.S. security agents have concocted with the deliberate purpose of trapping Physicist Bloch in a lapse of loyalty. But the question of why Sebastian indicts his friend with a damaging yarn of his own is only glancingly answered. Chevalier hints that merely working on the A-bomb has corrupted Sebastian's moral sense. Another suggestion is that he has "sold out" to a nebulous power elite and forgotten the "little people." This charge reduces itself to guilt by dissociation: Bloch's crime is not so much libeling...
...control the use and abuse of the superbomb. In this light, Mark Ampter is a human sacrifice to Bloch's God complex. This^ view may be colored by Chevalier's personal resentment (although he claims that "this book was written not with hatred but with love," the novel's underlying tone suggests an ex-worshipper stomping on a fallen idol). But strangely enough, the Atomic Energy Commission came to a very similar conclusion about Oppenheimer. In its own bureaucratic language, it also spoke about pride and arrogance of judgment: "The record shows that Dr. Oppenheimer has consistently...
...Devil's Advocate, by Morris West. An effective novel about a cancer-stricken priest who finds his first (and last) contact with life as he turns spiritual detective, investigates the lives of a possible saint and of the sinners involved in his death...