Blessed Assurance: At Home With the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas - Hardcover

In 1982, with Cold War anxieties running high, A.G. Mojtabai set out for Amarillo, Texas, home of Pantex, the final assembly plant for all nuclear weapons in the United States. Through the lens of this particular city, she sought to focus on our adaptation as a nation to the threat of nuclear war. Her interviews began with Pantex workers assured of both the necessity and the safety of the work that they did, and in the steady, beneficent, advance of science. Working alongside them were fundamentalist Christians who believed in inevitable catastrophe, and who testified to quite another, blessed, assurance of Divine rescue from the holocaust to come. This startling juxtaposition of apocalyptic and technocratic world views was not confined to Pantex. Blessed Assurance brilliantly examines this clash of spiritual visions as it presented itself repeatedly in the streets, churches, and corporate offices of Amarillo. The voices that you hear in this book are those of the people of Amarillo speaking for themselves. Their narratives powerfully reveal their hopes and fears, their sense of the meaning of history, and the future of the human race. Blessed Assurance won the year's Lillian Smith Award for the best book about the South in 1986.

Amarillo is home to Pantex, the final assembly plant for all nuclear weapons in the United States. In this highly readable work, Mojtabai ( Mundome and other novels) brings to light the pervasiveness of apocalyptic themes in the minds of Amarillo's inhabitants. She examines the plant's managers and employees, the other citizens in town, and their views of the nuclear war threat. The bulk of the book is made up of her exploration of the fascinating, sometimes bizarre, eschatological beliefs of the many fundamentalist sects in Amarillo. Mojtabai conveys the essence of those beliefs in clear, concise prose. An understated yet forceful account of how one town rationalizes its support of the ultimate weapon of death. Randy Dykhuis, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, Mich.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.