" From 1946 through 1958, the United States used the islands in the western Pacific as a test site for nuclear weapons. The most devastating of these, a hydrogen bomb code-named Castle Bravo, was detonated on March 1, 1954, on Bikini Atoll. Castle Bravo was about 1,000 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the fallout sickened people living on the neighboring atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik. The islanders were given no advance warning, and were not evacuated until several days later. Intrigued by a Bikinian song of mourning that made reference to nuclear testing and its fallout, both figurative and literal, she contacted the liaison between the U.S. government and the Bikinian people. He encouraged her to come and listen to the inhabitants’ songs in person. Not long after that conversation, Schwartz relocated to the Marshall Islands, where she spent two years conducting the research that became her dissertation, “Resonances of the Atom...