trade-size paperback.

from the back cover:
At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, consuming more electricity than New York City. But to most of the world, the town did not exist. Thousands of civilians - many of them young women from small towns across America - were recruited to this secret city, enticed by solid wages and the promise of war-ending work. Kept very much in the dark, few would ever guess the true nature of the tasks they performed each day in the hulking factories in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains. That is, until the end of the war - when Oak Ridge's secret was revealed.

Sent on as requested from the NonFic VBB List.

I’ve been to Oak Ridge once when I was in college at UT in Knoxville. I’m looking forward to reading this history of the area. Thanks for sharing!

I was interested in this partly because I went to school at UT in Knoxville, just east of Oak Ridge, and wanted to know more about the war effort. It does a good job of conveying the work done at Oak Ridge, much of it by women just out of high school. I think that the style made this a more difficult read. The story is told mostly chronologically and interspersed with the story of uranium ("tubealloy"). The author gives us so many characters that there's a "cast of characters" at the front so you can keep them straight. Much of the time she uses the jargon that was in use at the time. It actually slows the story down as you need to remember who is the General (General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project) and the Scientist (Oppenheimer) and what is 49 (plutonium) and tubealloy (uranium). I think it's supposed to convey viscerally how things were talked about at the time. It slows the story down and makes you feel disconnected. I also felt that despite the amount of time they were discussed, I really didn't feel connected to the women. The author did a good job of drawing women from different backgrounds and includes a black woman to illustrate the racial issues that she faced. I did like the discussion of the mixed feelings of all the workers after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. So many people were proud of the work that they did, especially as they were told that they were helping to end the war quicker (and many of these women had loved ones in the war and wanted to contribute to bringing them home), but they were also appalled at the massive loss of life inflicted. It was also very interesting to consider that so many folks worked at Oak Ridge and because of the security measures it was not until the bomb dropped that the workers and folks outside the compound knew what was being done there. These days with the internet and media everywhere I doubt that this project could have been hidden for so long.

Placing in bookbox. Happy trails!