{"product_id":"the-atomic-weight-of-love-9781616204846","title":"The Atomic Weight of Love","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn her sweeping debut novel  Elizabeth J. Church takes us from the World War II years in Chicago to the vast sun-parched canyons of New Mexico in the 1970s as we follow the journey of a driven  spirited young woman  Meridian Wallace  whose scientific ambitions are subverted by the expectations of her era.  In 1941  at seventeen years old  Meridian begins her ornithology studies at the University of Chicago. She is soon drawn to Alden Whetstone  a brilliant  complicated physics professor who opens her eyes to the fundamentals and poetry of his field  the beauty of motion  space and time  the delicate balance of force and energy that allows a bird to fly.  Entranced and in love  Meridian defers her own career path and follows Alden west to Los Alamos  where he is engaged in a secret government project (later known to be the atomic bomb). In married life  though  she feels lost and left behind. She channels her academic ambitions into studying a particular family of crows  whose free life and companionship are the very things that seem beyond her reach. There in her canyons  years later at the dawn of the 1970s  with counterculture youth filling the streets and protests against the war rupturing college campuses across the country  Meridian meets Clay  a young geologist and veteran of the Vietnam War  and together they seek ways to mend what the world has broken.  Exquisitely capturing the claustrophobic eras of 1940s and 1950s America  The Atomic Weight of Love also examines the changing roles of women during the decades that followed. And in Meridian Wallace we find an unforgettable heroine whose metamorphosis shows how the womens movement opened up the world for a whole generation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647132033077,"sku":"ByrdShop_1616204842","price":24.52,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781616204846.jpg?v=1781688911","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-atomic-weight-of-love-9781616204846","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}