{"product_id":"children-of-radium-a-buried-inheritance","title":"Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn the tradition of \u003ci\u003eWhen Time Stopped\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Hare with Amber Eyes\u003c\/i\u003e, this subversive family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author's great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWhen Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried's voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Siegfried was an eccentric Jewish scientist living in a small town north of Berlin, where he began by developing a radioactive toothpaste before moving on to products with a more sinister military connection--first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. By 1933, he was the laboratory's director, helping the Nazis to \"improve\" their poisons and prepare for large-scale production. \"I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error,\" he wrote. \"I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Armed only with his great-grandfather's rambling, nearly two-thousand-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg--a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil--to uncover the sprawling, unsettling legacy of Siegfried's work. Seeking to understand one \"jolly grandpa\" with a patchy psychiatric history, Dunthorne confronts the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family: Can we ever understand our origins? Is every family story a work of fiction? And if the truth can be found, will we be able to live with it? \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003ci\u003eChildren of Radium\u003c\/i\u003e is a witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising meditation on individual and collective inheritance that considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt, and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.","brand":"Joe Dunthorne","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":46336560595180,"sku":"9781982180751","price":28.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0684\/1791\/3068\/files\/9781982180751.jpg?v=1743685604","url":"https:\/\/intl.allstora.com\/products\/children-of-radium-a-buried-inheritance","provider":"Allstora","version":"1.0","type":"link"}