The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan

(Touchstone, $27)

It’s amazing that the story Denise Kiernan tells in this book isn’t more widely known, said Kim Ode in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. During World War II, a town of 75,000 sprang up overnight in rural Tennessee, most of its residents having arrived knowing nothing about the work they’d been hired to do other than that it would aid the war effort. Many of the citizens of what became Oak Ridge, Tenn., were young women, and Kiernan has wisely chosen to create her town portrait through the experiences of a small number of them. Every detail about these young secretaries, chemists, and technicians who unwittingly helped develop the atomic bomb proves fascinating—“right down to the shin-deep mud of their makeshift town in which many high heels were lost.”

Heavy surveillance set the tone of life for these recruits, and Kiernan re-creates the Orwellian atmosphere “with cinematic vividness,” said Emma Garman in TheDailyBeast.com. Watchtowers dotted the landscape, letters home were heavily censored, and talking about work, even with other residents, was forbidden. The women who became technicians monitored panels of dials and never realized that they were enriching uranium. When news arrived that a nuclear bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, the women “so rivetingly commemorated” in The Girls of Atomic City “at last saw the puzzle of their lives solved.” Many took pride in the part they’d played in ending the war, though pride often mixed with shame and guilt.

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Kiernan “may have overstuffed her book a bit,” said Patty Rhule in USA Today. The 16 women she features “become hard to tell apart,” and interwoven chapters on the science behind the bomb “slow down the story.” She also skims over potentially more fascinating information: “A brief mention of an injured black worker who became a human guinea pig for radiation’s effect on the body left this reader wanting more.” But “the girls of Atomic City” have waited many decades to finally be celebrated. “It’s high time their story was told.”