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Why is the Cold War hot?

Article Excerpt
It was a little scary to think about next year--not just having a new building and new teachers, but being so old. Being a little girl was much easier. I never had to worry about things like bombs and communists, like my expanding chest, like boys ... I never had to worry about being blown up by someone with a bomb who hates America.

--Karen Cushman, The Loud Silence of Francine Green

"It can destroy the world in a single second," she said, and her voice was dreamy. "All life will just go phhht ... Everything gone, just like that. It'll all be empty, forever and ever."

--Ursula Dubosarsky, The Red Shoe

"Don't you read the papers, Flo?... Don't you know what's going on in Vietnam? It's 1941 all over again, but this time it's worse. It will bring the end of everything."

--Iain Lawrence, Gemini Summer

"Plenty missiles to destroy the whole world a dozen times over," said Diggy.

"All over the world they're getting ready," said Ed.

"Somebody'll press the button," said Col.

--David Almond, The Fire-Eaters

"We're all going BOOM!"

--Tim Wynne-Jones, Rex Zero and the End of the World

No fewer than four novels set during the Cold War have landed on my doorstep over the past year--and those are only the ones that I noticed. Thinking of them, and of David Almond's The Fire-Eaters, which appeared just a few years ago, I had to wonder why so many children's writers have turned recently to the 1950s and 1960s in their fiction. The Cuban missile crisis, McCarthyism, the space race, Russian defectors--is this the language with which children's writers address the anxieties that press upon us today? Has the Cold War become a metaphor for issues too dangerous or nerve-wracking to confront directly, or for political criticisms that could doom their publishers to bankruptcy and charges of anti-patriotism?

Maybe. It could be, too, that writers are responding to a familiar emotional topography, recognizing a landscape of dread they recall from...

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