The Girls of Atomic City: Revew/Summary

So, after reading Hidden Figures and seeing the movie I was interested in more women who helped with modern inventions and the war effort. In my search, I came across Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of The Women Who Helped Win World War II. If I was hoping this was anything like Hidden Figures I was sorely mistaken. While as a work of it’s own the book is delightful and well written, it read more like a history book than a biography of the women living at Site X.

Summary

Site X was founded as part of the Manhattan Project during WWII to help build “The Gadget” which would win the war. The women who lived and worked at the site lived under constant guard and supervision so as not to reveal the secret. Each of the women met in the book knew just enough to do their job, and do it well. The Project was the nation’s largest secret and also had the largest plants and buildings of any in the world, at the time. All of this happened at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The lives of the women changed the day they went to work for Clinton Engineer Works (CEW). They went from living very open lives to having secrets and not knowing who to trust. Each person on the Reservation (as Site X was also known) could be a spy and report any suspicious activity or loose tongue to the government. Life went on, apart from this secrecy, as normally as possible with the war. Kiernan shares the stories of nine women who worked at various jobs on the Reservation: Celia Szapka, Toni Peters, Jane Greer, Kattie Strickland, Virgina Spivey, Colleen Rowan, Dorthy Jones, Helen Hall, and Rosemary Maiers. These women range from a chemist to a cleaning woman, a nurse to a pipe checker. Each job was important and would bring about the goal of winning the war or at least completing The Gadget (Kiernan, 2013).

Video of the Author explaining her interest in the book

Denise Kiernan shares her interest in the Project and why she did it. The book was less interesting than this short video clip.

Review (Contains some spoilers, but most know the result of The Project and The Gadget)

As I said earlier the book was enjoyable but not what I had hoped for. While the title claims to be about “The Girls of Atomic City” I felt that I learned more about the city than the “girls.” Each of the stories is presented in a disjointed almost puzzled way making it easy to confuse which woman is which. Kiernan (2013) shares the lives of much more than the nine women mentioned in the introduction leading to confusion and no real connection with the characters. As an overview of life in Oak Ridge this is a good book to read, but for someone who wants to learn about women during WWII, it provides only surface information.

The book does give a feeling of secrecy, though if the reader examines the Principal Cast of Characters at the front of the book some of this is lost. The disjointedness may come from an attempt to create the partitioned type of lives the women lived, each woman was expected to keep work

Billboards like this were common in Oak Ridge

separate from social life or suffer consequences, which ranged from a stern talking to up to the loss of a job. The set up of the book is nice though I found the intermixed information specifically about Tubealloy or the Product to detract from the story though they added to the history. If I was only looking at a book for reading this would not be it, but because I enjoy history I was able to make it through.

Two of the most striking stories for me were not even about the women but two men. They did touch the life of Rosemary (the nurse) but other than casual meetings in the hospital she is not the main focus. The first was a young soldier who was kept apart because he knew too much but was mentally unstable (Kiernan, 2013). This story is never finished and what happened to him is a mystery. The result of the second is just mystifying, Kiernan (2013) explains that this is because of a lack of records on the second man or miscommunications. The second man was in an accident and badly injured but instead of receiving immediate medical aid was used to test the effects of The Product (plutonium). This story also had an unsatisfactory ending, and simply did not relate to the title.

For a book supposedly about the women of Oak Ridge, a surprising amount of space is occupied by men. I do not mind reading about men and know they did much but I picked this book because I thought it would be about the women helping build or work near the Gadget or its parts but was disappointed in it. However, the book is interesting and does shed some light, though limited, on the women of Atomic City.

Reference

Goodreads. (2017). The girls of Atomic City: The untold story of the women who helped win world war II [Image] Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15801668-the-girls-of-atomic-city?ac=1&from_search=true

Kiernan, D. (2013). The girls of Atomic City: The untold story of the women who helped win World War II. New York: Touchstone Books. 

Rennawarren [User name]. (2011, June 18). We interrupt this program… [Weblog comment (billboard image)]. Retrieved from https://spaceshuttleatlantislaunch.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/we-interrupt-this-program/

Simon & Schuster Books [User name]. (2013, January 14). Denise Kiernan on the girls of Atomic City [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKYxj6n4xho