The Girls Of Atomic City Summary

Denise Kiernan’s book, “The Girls of Atomic City”, a New York Times best seller in its first week of publication, tells the story of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. A created in 1942 and one of the Manhattan Project’s secret cities that didn’t appear on maps until 1949. The town consumed more electricity than New York City and homed over 75,000 people. Many of those people were young women that were recruited from small towns in the South with promises of good pay and war-ending work. Their work was covered in mystery and workers faced job loss and eviction if they talked about work. All the workers knew there was something going on but didn’t realize what they were doing until the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and that’s when they discovered they were providing uranium for the atomic bomb.

Through out the book, it became clear to me that she was more interested in the women of the book rather than the city. This does make sense considering the name of the novel, but she still made it clear that she was more interested in making the women in the story the focus, even though the story included blacks working in the city as well, which was a big deal back in World War II. She also made the men of the story look like bad guys. Kiernan said, “The project like high school girls, especially those from rural backgrounds. Recruiters sought them out relentlessly, feeling young women were easy to instruct”(69). Made it seem like that she meant for the men to seem controlling and demeaning towards the women.

In conclusion, The Girls of Atomic City drew on the lives of the women of lived there who are now in their eighties and nineties. It brings back a remarkable and forgotten moment of American history and Kiernan captures the spirit of these courageous women. It is the result of seven years of research and interviews with the surviving girls and takes us behind the scenes into the lives of these