offers a radical revisoning of the nature of war and gender, through an illuminating interplay between between private suffering and public tragedy. The book sets the story of the invention, development, manufacture and use of the first atomic bombs against the background of struggles played out in the private lives of major figures in history and ordinary citizens. Griffin shows how, for instance, formative moments in the childhood of Henirich Himmler’s, the head of the SS,who supervised the production of V2 rockets by concentration camp prisoners, or conflicts in the marriage of Paul Tibbitts, the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, reveal the critical underside of war, the system of denial, secrecy and repression that fuels both public and private life. From the understanding that the usual separation between these two worlds is a habit of the Western mind (one that shapes conventional notions of history and history itself), she moves the domestic or “feminine” world to center stage, lending it thus a heterfore unrecognized signifance in the unfolding of public events.