by Janet Beard
The title of this book is misleading - only two (half) of the main characters are women - and one has to wonder if author Janet Beard, who was born and raised in eastern Tennessee, titled it this way because of Denise Kiernan's bestselling nonfiction, The Girls of Atomic City (which I now want to read).
Joe is a black man from Alabama who is part of a construction crew building plant facilities and the town of Oak Ridge to house all the workers needed for a top-secret operation. Sam is a Jewish physicist from New York who previously taught at Berkeley, hired for the science side - he knows they are manufacturing the uranium needed for an atomic bomb. June and Cici are Tennessee girls, two of many women hired to monitor dials and switches on big machines called calutrons - and to not ask any questions.
The fictional stories of these characters pale beside the descriptions of life in Oak Ridge in late 1944 into 1945, something I knew nothing about. Indeed, for me the most interesting aspect to this book were the period photographs from Oak Ridge. I hope that the final version of the book includes these, preferably larger, and definitely with captions to provide more information about them, as these black-and-white images from the 1940s are all governmental works and thus in the public domain.
© Amanda Pape - 2017
[I received this advance reader edition through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. It will be passed on to someone else to enjoy.]
No comments:
Post a Comment