The Girls of Atomic City: The untold story of the women who helped win World War II by Denise Kieran (read 8/23/19 to 8/29/19)

GoodReads description “This is the story of the girls/women of Oak Ridge Tennessee who unknowingly helped to create the Atomic Bomb. The Tennessee town of Oak Ridge was created from scratch in 1942. One of the Manhattan Project’s secret cities, it didn’t appear on any maps until 1949, and yet at the height of World War II it was using more electricity than New York City and was home to more than 75,000 people, many of them young women recruited from small towns across the South. Their jobs were shrouded in mystery, the penalty for talking about their work—even the most innocuous details—was job loss and eviction. They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb "Little Boy" was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents of Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. Though the young women originally believed they would leave Oak Ridge after the war, many met husbands there, made lifelong friends, and still call the seventy-year-old town home.”

From the very start I was excited. I like that there is a listing of who everyone is at the start. Sometimes I get names mixed up in historical books, and it is great to have a reference when I ask myself “who is this again.”

This book contained lots of facts, but a good mix of personal storytelling as well. Still never kept all the characters straight, but it was a really good read. I enjoyed the flow of the book, it really kept the events moving along and never got too bogged down with facts, yet I learned a lot at the same time.

I liked that the authors choose to follow different women from different social and economic backgrounds throughout the book, how were things for a scientist, a secretary, an operator and a janitor. White versus black? It let the reader know what was the same across the board, and what was not. Sometimes the differences were mind boggling.

I also really liked that the last chapter and some of the notes at the end of the nook told more of what happened to the women after the project was wrapped up, a sort of where are they now.