The Year of the Bomb by Ronald Kidd

This book does a great job describing some of the fears that people from the United States dealt with in the 1950s. It's amazing how much fear can be instilled in people from propaganda; yes, even the United States falls prey to this. The 1950s weren't the glowing times we like to remember from Happy Days or other TV shows. There were rough times, too.

A group of boys live in the town where Invasion of the Body Snatchers was filmed. They make friends with some people on the set and get to see the inner workings of some of the film making process. They even get to be extras for one scene.

While on the set, they meet an undercover FBI agent who is conducting an investigation on several people to determine if they were Communist sympathizers. Some of the people being investigated were part of the film crew. Others were people who lived nearby, including Richard Feynman who had worked on the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos.

Genre: historical fiction

Audience: gr 6 or 7 likely

Topics: atomic war, fear, nuclear bomb drills, movie sets, suspicion, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (movie), pod people, Communism, Communist scare, Red Scare, Russian spies, 1950s, McCarthyism, FBI, ask questions, learn the truth, Los Alamos, Richard Feynman, Don Siegel

Mrs. Beckwith's Rating: 4 of 5

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