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The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
Touchstone
March 2013
On Sale: March 5, 2013
400 pages
ISBN: 1451617526
EAN: 9781451617528
Kindle: B008J4GTU4
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
The incredible story of the young women of Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, who unwittingly played a crucial role in one of
the most significant moments in U.S. history.
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, but they were buoyed by
a sense of shared purpose, close friendships—and a surplus
of handsome scientists and Army men! But against this vibrant wartime backdrop, a darker story
was unfolding. The penalty for talking about their work—even
the most innocuous details—was job loss and eviction. One
woman was recruited to spy on her coworkers. 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. The reverberations from their work there—work they
didn’t fully understand at the time—are still being felt
today. In The Girls of Atomic City, Denise Kiernan
traces the astonishing story of these unsung WWII workers
through interviews with dozens of surviving women and other
Oak Ridge residents. Like The Immortal Life of Henrietta
Lacks, this is history and science made fresh and
vibrant—a beautifully told, deeply researched story that
unfolds in a suspenseful and exciting way.
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