Book Review: The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan is my favorite kind of history book. It takes the backdrop of a major even in history – in this case the creation of the atomic bomb – and puts in front of it the stories of everyday people who were involved. This is not the story of Oppenheimer or Fermi, though they are in here. This is not the story of Roosevelt or Truman, though they are obviously part of it. It is the stories of a few young women (and men) who worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, not even knowing what it was they were working on, and how those experiences shaped them.

The book was well written and a quick read. Kiernan did a great job in interspersing the history and the science in with the stories of the women, so that the reader understood the work the women were doing, even though we know that at the time, they knew only exactly what they needed to know.

In the course of the story, we met not only women who worked as secretaries, as janitors and leak testers, but also women who worked as chemists, statisticians, and even a few physicists who worked directly with Fermi or whose understandings of the research set the stage for all of what was to come.

My biggest problem with the book was that it was laid out in chronological order, so we often jumped from one woman to the next, and I often had trouble remembering – was this young woman one of the secretaries, or was she a dial operator… I always remembered who they were as people, but often struggled to place them in their role at Oak Ridge.

I think the stories of the women themselves could have been told in a more comprehensive way if the book had been laid out by woman, instead of by the timeline. But since the purpose of the book seemed more to tell the story of Oak Ridge than the women themselves (despite the title), the format worked in that.

The other thing the format did, that I think would have been lost a bit if it had been laid out differently, was highlight the differences between the white people who worked in Oak Ridge and the black. Reading how the life of Kattie (the one black woman profiled) was so different from that of all the white women was very powerful. And Kiernan does not make the mistake of trying to “explain” or sugar coat the situation, nor does she try and throw modern morals on it. She simply presents it as it was, and it makes for a very powerful statement about how our society has treated black people, even in the “modern” era.

If you like non-fiction books, if you like World War II history, and especially if you like the stories of normal people caught up in big events, I would recommend this book.