The Atomic Hamburger

Book excerpt: The Boyers, a sheepherding family in Idaho decide to move into the fast food business when the Federal lands they used to graze their sheep are turned into a Federal nuclear energy research center. Hence the name of their diner, The Atomic Hamburger. Hoping to become rich with the expected economic boom of the nuclear research facility, their diner becomes the main place where the characters meet and interact. A young man, Howard McCracken, after the suicide of his mother, decides to become a psychiatrist and he ends up on the front-lines of World War II working under General Patton Two young nuclear scientists mentored by Einstein go to Idaho to work in the nuclear research facilities and end up lunching at The Atomic Hamburger and... The novel focuses on the war periods of World War II, Korea and Vietnam as it follows several families from the 1920s through the 1970s while it explores mental disorders and posttraumattic stress as it relates to combat experience and other situations and their relations to suicide.