Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader ed. by John Bradley (review)

tion—contradicts the caveat ofNobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine, both a key theorist and a popular writer of chaos, that an individual is not a system. This important question is obscured as Slethaug repeatedly elides two distinct critical approaches, chaos theory and metachaotics. Moving back and forth between them is problematic in other ways as well, especially when it leads to the confusion of theoretical vocabularies. It is sometimes not clear just which concepts fall under the rubric of chaos theory (really an aggregate of loosely related theories). The term "complementarity," the basis for Slethaug's discussion of the dual protagonists in Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach, is a case in point. Chaos theorists do discuss systems that exist in multiple states, but typically in terms of bifurcation theory, an area Slethaug does not examine in any detail. Even in his conclusion Slethaug fails to distinguish between chaos theory and metachaotics. With Barth his sole example ofnovelists consciously using chaos theory, Slethaug's claim that its mostwidespread application in fiction is the "conscious articulation offacts and ideas drawn from chaos theory" rings false. It is truly unfortunate that the only twoworks by minoritywriters in this study have been selected as examples of the pessimistic anti-life stance that Slethaug associates with recursive form. While disorder becomes life-enhancing in many of the novels under consideration, order and repetition are anathema, sometimes literallydeath. Slethaug invents criticalvocabulary to describe narrative structures based on repetitions ofvarious kinds. Ifthe term "recursion oflack" characterizes the narrative structure ofMichael Dorris' YellowRaftin Blue Water, it might equally well describe the more familiar narrative structure of The Sound and the Fury. When Slethaug addresses himself to the self-similar recursion characteristic of strange attractors, he can offer but one example—John Barth's example of the frame tale as fractal—that takes us beyond the traditional notions ofmacrocosm and microcosm, terms Slethaug himselfuses. That these terms are so closely tied the conception ofa determined, ordered universewould seem to foreclose thevery discussion that chaos theory has complicated. ^ John Bradley, ed. Learning to Glow:A Nuclear Reader. The University of Arizona Press, 2000. 317p. Karen Connolly-Lane University of Minnesota In her "glowing" foreword aptly titled "The Practice of Humanity," Alison Hawthorne Deming captures both the essence and the appeal oíLearningto Glow: this is a book that argues elegantly and successfully for the power and the value of 116 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * SPRING 2002 Reviews anecdotal evidence. Editor John Bradley artfully combines the poignant, often poetic memories of "everyday people" and "ordinary working folks" who have endured the nuclear age, and proudly proclaims the emotional, historical, and scholarly value of their stories (xv). The result is a first-rate anthology, one that prohibits its readers from reducing their recollections, and their assessments, of America's ongoing nuclear age to the chronological limits of the 1950s or the philosophical realm of the cold war. The anthology consists ofthree distinct parts flanked by a foreword and introduction on one end, a list of recommended reading and an index on the other. Each of the three parts—"In the Belly of the Beast," "Coyote Learns to Glow," and "Beyond Despair"—is named after one ofthe essays included in the section it introduces. Part one traces the experience ofgrowing up in a world steeped in the fear, and the reality, ofatomic power. Part two explores the devastatingly real impact of nuclear fallout on the environment and all its inhabitants. Part three focuses mainly on the brutal destruction ofHiroshima and Nagasaki and on the healing that, remarkably, has taken place. Together, all three partswork to tellwhat Bradley terms a "people's history of the atom" and to celebrate the capacity for hope and regeneration exemplified by these diverse people, in both their deeds and their words (xx). Though the book's weaknesses are few, I found both the section titles and the inclusion ofTerryTempestWilliams' "The Clan ofOne-BreastedWomen" mildly disapppointing. While titles like those noted above do serve to highlight the anecdotal nature ofthe book and to emphasize the importance ofits individual components and contributors, they do little to help the reader to negotiate the overall text, to figure out what's coming...