Date: 25 January 2015
Location: Joyce
The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
We gathered at Joyce’s house for our January meeting to discuss The Girls Of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan. It was one of our larger book group meeting with nearly all our members there. It was specially nice to have Gary and Peggy there again.
I think almost everybody enjoyed the book, and we had a lively discussion of the book and the atomic bomb with so many engineers and physicists in our group. Claudia had even worked at Oak Ridge, not during the war – just wanted to be clear about that – and others had some work and family connections with Oak Ridge.
It was an amazing story. At the height of World War II this city of 75,000 people was built in Tennessee. It used as much power as New York City and most of the world did not even know that it existed.
Thousands of workers, many of them women from small towns across the south, were recruited to this secret city, enticed by good wages and the promise of ending the war. Most of them never guessed what they were making.
Denise Kiernan did a great job of giving us a view into these women’s lives at this time in history.
— Linda F