Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See portrays a young German orphan named Werner who comes upon a small radio and becomes entranced with its mechanics. Werner spends hours breaking the radio down, modifying, and rebuilding it and soon becomes proficient enough to fix other household radios in his small mining town. But Werner is reaching his maturity at the same time as the Third Reich and so he finds himself “privileged” to attend a special academy for Nazi Germany. Here, Werner’s mind for science and engineering again sets him apart but he is warned by a Nazi mentor, “A scientist's work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time.”
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