White Lightning

In 1920s Chicago, twelve-year-old Marvin Mahan stands at the edge of a blacksmith shop, watching fire consume metal, and asks the question that will define his boyhood: what is the relationship between fire and water, between transformation and elements? His father, a mining engineer named Chase, recognizes something burning in his son that mirrors the coal fires of the factories reshaping their city. Marvin's burning curiosity propels him toward experiments with hydrogen, toward understanding the building blocks of matter, toward the kind of scientific wonder that defined an era when Americans believed the future could be engineered from the ground up. This is a novel about the electricity of discovery: the moment when a young mind grasps that the world is made of something, that it can be understood, taken apart, rebuilt. Lewis captures the particular magic of childhood when chemistry feels like magic and every experiment crackles with possibility. Written by a University of Chicago professor with a poet's ear and a father's tenderness toward his protagonist, White Lightning offers a nostalgic portrait of early twentieth-century America, where industry roared and a boy could still believe that understanding the elements might help him understand his own expanding world.