Highways to the World: The Engineer, the Teacher, and the Dangerous 20th Century

From one Golden Age of Texas highways to another, wrapped around an extended wartime period building the atomic bomb in the secret city—of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Carolyn Calvin Kneese's father and mother lived near the dangerous heartbeat of the twentieth century. As a child, Carolyn knew little of the engineering work her father did the globe-changing political purposes behind it. Highways to the World is one daughter's personal journey into history. Here are striking portraits of events, from small-town Texas childhoods to life as a cadet at Texas A&M after World War I, from the family's rescue by the US Navy during the Suez Crisis in 1956 to overseas aid—assignments invariably tied to our nation's anticommunist foreign policy. With a tough detective's eye and a loving daughter's heart, Carolyn seeks out her parents' side-by-side forms in these snapshots from their century.