Children of Radium : A Buried Inheritance

Winner of the Wales Book of the Year Award for Creative Nonfiction * #1 International Bestseller * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker

In the tradition of The Hare with Amber Eyes, this profoundcomic[and] unconventional (The New York Times) family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the authors great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.

When Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfrieds voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.

Siegfried was an eccentric Jewish scientist living in a small town north of Berlin, where he began by developing a radioactive toothpaste before moving on to products with a more sinister military connectionfirst he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. By 1933, he was the laboratorys director, helping the Nazis to improve their poisons and prepare for large-scale production. I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error, he wrote. I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.

Armed only with his great-grandfathers rambling, nearly two-thousand-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburga place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soilto uncover the sprawling, unsettling legacy of Siegfrieds work. Seeking to understand one jolly grandpa with a patchy psychiatric history, Dunthorne confronts the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family: Can we ever understand our origins? Is every fami