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Hot War to Cold War Shaena Lambert Radiance. Random $32.95
Reviewed by Donna Coates
In 1952, seven years after the Americans brought an end to the Second World War by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a dozen "Hiroshima Maidens" (also known as "atomic-bomb victims," or hibakusha) travelled to Tokyo and Osaka, where Hiroshima doctors administered check-ups and treated keloids. Three years later, the Americans invited twenty-five "Hiroshima Maidens" to the US for reconstructive surgery. In Radiance, Vancouver writer Shaena Lambert blurs these dates and events by bringing only one "maiden," the eighteen-year-old Keiko Kitigawa, to New York City in 1952 to have a disfiguring facial scar and keloid removed. Lambert presumably alters the time frame to emphasize that the two superpowers-the Americans and the Soviets-were both developing super bombs hundreds of times more destructive than the atomic bomb, and that the Americans were preparing to detonate their first "h-bomb" in 1952. At the same time, the American public was becoming increasingly concerned about the Soviet espionage network's penetration of the US government, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities was conducting witch hunts against alleged...