Janus Manhattan's Children : Dad's Bomb or Mom's Medicine ?

I think of  "Janus Manhattan's Children"  as a sort of women's book that should be read, first and foremost, by men --- because women generally, 'already get it'.
It attempts to explain why today's boomer children - today's dominant voting bloc and who make up most  of today's most wealthy and powerful people, are so conflicted over the sixth extinction and dire climate change.

Naturally, it puts the entire blame for their conflicted nature on a conflict their moms and dads had years earlier, just after WWII ended.

Seriously !

NEWSEUM and USA TODAY WEEKEND pointed the way

The book took its shape when I learned the fascinating gender-oriented results of an end of century mass poll of Americans on the most important news stories of the 20th century, as conducted by USA TODAY Weekend and the Newseum in 1999.

Men - as poll responders, as panels of historians and as panels of journalists - all thought wartime Manhattan's Atomic Bomb Project was clearly the biggest story.

But the women poll responders thought decidedly differently : seeing wartime Manhattan's Natural Penicillin Project as the biggest story of the century.

Now it is well known that most writers of books are men  but that most readers of books are women.

Naturally, I saw a big disconnect here in the amount of published book space devoted to the wartime drama of The Bomb versus the drama of Wartime Penicillin and quietly resolved to fix it ....

The Manhattan Pilot : Harlem Shuffled

What could seem more innocent than a project initiated by pacifists and an airplane named after someone's mother?

And what could seem more threatening than a project invigorated by a group of veterans of the frontline trenches and a heavy bomber ominously named 'The B-a-a-d Penny' ?

The cliches of innocence and harm align neatly enough in Hollywood movies but in the real world, events often show themselves to be a great deal more paradoxical.

In 1999, a survey by Newseum and USA Weekend of 36,000 American men and women revealed that they thought the top news story of the entire twentieth century involved a little boy and a baby girl and took place in an eighty acre area on a tiny island not far off the American coast.

In that tiny eighty acre area, the pacifists and the frontline vets worked on their projects almost within sight of each other, albeit while existing in totally different moral universes.

And as every good eighty acres should, this story involved a mule.

His name was Henry Dawson.

This is not his biography, but it is his story....