Dan O'Neill's Firecracker Boys

[Nola]

I just finished reading Dan O'Neill's The Firecracker Boys. He was in Juneau on Friday to give a presentation on his more recent book, but I missed it to see a presentation on giant octopus research. Darn! Has anyone read this book?

[Kara]

Nope. But it was recommended to me. What'd you think? I've been trying to find it as an audio book for my grandpa.

[Nola]

Below is part of what I wrote in my review of The Firecracker Boys. It would depend on who your grandfather is and his interests.

I really got interested in the book about half way through. The first part was not that easy for me to read. Reading the methods at the end of the book, it makes sense. This was never intended to be a book. The original plan was to make a documentary, but the author said the TV station decided that it could not show it because the TV station was funded by an agency criticized in the book. There are a lot of people and their backgrounds to keep track of and a lot of extended quotes, neither of which makes for smooth seamless reading.

By the second half of the book, I was familiar with the scientists who had come out against Project Chariot and the story had become shocking, so it held my interest better. Close to the end of the book, there is a lot of material on contamination, mostly unrelated to the main story. This was probably not the smoothest way to present this material, but I found it all very interesting. I have traveled by some of the areas discussed in this section, and had no idea of what had happened there.

This is the only book I have read so far that spoke about Celia Hunter and Ginny Wood. This book is a great chance to learn about the early environmentalists and the start of the environmental movement.