Fear Itself - Hardcover

Candida Lawrence is the author of two previous memoirs, Reeling & Writhing and Change of Circumstance(MacMurray and Beck). Lawrence has been published in many literary magazines, winner of an award from American Short Fiction and was publisher of the Coydog Review. She is 80 years old and lives in Mill Valley, California.

Lawrence writes about her tough life with fierce exactitude and generous candor because her sufferings are also the lot of others. In Reeling and Writhing (1994) and Change of Circumstances (1995), she chronicled her marriage to a sadistic man, her kidnapping of her children after she lost custody, and her radical mastectomy. In her third searing, pared-to-the-bone memoir, Lawrence recounts nothing less than crimes against humanity. The disturbing disclosures build slowly as she revisits her first marriage to a physicist involved in making the first atomic bombs. They both work at the nuclear facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then in a "hot" building for Monsanto Chemical Corporation, and later live outside Berkeley near a giant cyclotron. But no one makes the connection between these environs and Lawrence's many miscarriages. Like Terry Tempest Williams in Refuge (1991), Lawrence reveals with eloquent restraint and galvanizing personal evidence the tragic consequences of the government's reckless mishandling of nuclear materials in the hope that such abominations will never again take place. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved