Patrick Burns, author of 'In the Shadow of Los Alamos,' will be the UNM Bookstore Saturday, April 12 at 2 p.m. to discuss and sign copies of the book, recently released in paperback. Burns is a singer, songwriter and music teacher in northern New Mexico.
Book cover: 'In the Shadow of Los Alamos' by Patrick Burns.
At the age of 35, in 1928, Edith Warner moved from Pennsylvania to northern New Mexico. She found a house to rent “in the shadow of Los Alamos.”
Warner’s neighbors soon made regular visits to her “tearoom,” getting acquainted, and introducing her to their world and culture. These friends included San Ildefonso Indians and later, in the 1940s, the scientists who arrived to work at the nearby top-secret Los Alamos Lab, including Robert Oppenheimer and Neils Bohr.
Now available in paperback and published by the University of New Mexico Press, In the Shadow of Los Alamos: Selected Writings of Edith Warner presents her essays, journals and incomplete autobiography that survived in spite of her instructions they be burned upon her death. Burns’s useful introduction outlines Warner’s life and sets it in local and historical context, along with a collection of period photographs and a facsimile of Edith’s famous chocolate cake recipe.
Through her writings, readers are offered a look at this modest woman whose friendships with Pueblo Indians and atomic scientists epitomize the paradoxes of life in New Mexico.
For more information, contact Lisa Walden, general book manager, (505) 277-7494 or e-mail lwalden@unm.edu.
Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at March 25, 2008 09:29 AM