Radioactive Daughter

At the end of World War II, a young female Egyptian nuclear scientist is invited by the US Government to learn about the peace-time uses of our atomic program.

Our scientist is torn between her wish to please her stern yet supportive father with scientific achievement and her desire to taste the delicious temptations of post-war America — apple pie at the automat, handsome, hell-bent GI’s, and the nascent feminism of women physicists (Of course, Egypt had a powerful women’s liberation movement in the first half of the twentieth Century.)

The rational young stranger is hurled into a topsy-turvy world as the United States blasts into the triumphant pride and paranoia of the Atomic Age. She has a knack for meeting the right people at the right time — or the wrong time depending on your point of view —gossiping with playwright & senator Clare Booth Luce, waltzing with Einstein, biting into pears with Joan Hinton — the American physicist who left the U.S. to help create Mao’s China, and doing the polka with Rita Hayworth as a crazy tribute to Marie Curie. She even joins the Geiger Counter team who fly over the Marshall Islands and, later stares at the mushroom clouds over the Nevada desert.

The story is a post-Hiroshima travelogue of the U.S. where the scientist is chauffeured across the country by a Neal Cassidy-esque driver. Her path is an all-American road trip careening from the Statue of Liberty to the Tennessee hill country to the secret city of Los Alamos to the Nevada testing grounds. Our scientist is relentless in common sense, intelligence, and good manners. But is she a powerful woman on the brink of promising career, a pawn in a deadly game of realpolitik, or a steely, strategic spy? Amid the hairpin turns and glorious scenery of Big Sur, a fatal collision reverberates into the 21st century.