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 a map until 1949, and yet at the height of World War II it was using 20 percent 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. It was a thrilling and exciting timeâ€¦their jobs were shrouded in mystery, but they were buoyed by a sense of shared purpose, the friendships they forgedand 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 workeven the most innocuous detailswas job loss and eviction. One woman was recruited to spy on her coworkers. They all knew somethingbig 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 now call the seventy-year-old town home. The reverberations from their work therework they didn't fully understand at the timeare 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 vibranta beautifully told, deeply researched story that unfolds in a suspenseful and exciting way.

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