(Cazenovia, NY – April 2014) The “Open Afternoon Book Club” for adults at the Cazenovia Public Library meets in the Story Garden every third Wednesday at 1 p.m.
The April selection, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan, is a New York Times bestseller that tells the incredible true story of the top-secret World War II town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the young women brought there unknowingly to help build the atomic bomb. (Amazon.com)
Kiernan’s contribution to atomic-bomb history is a type of oral history. Her account derives from intensive interviews with ten women who labored in a range of occupations at Oak Ridge from janitor to machine operator to secretary to engineer.
With surrounding scaffolding of the scientific fundamentals and the 1942-45 technical development of the bomb, the narrative runs as a collection of individuals’ life stories that recall circumstances of recruitment and the spartan conditions at Oak Ridge, on and off the job.
Some commonalities of experience include the secrecy in which the women worked and the discrimination they endured—racial segregation in the case of the janitor and sexism in the cases of white women workers. (Booklist)
Kiernan is a journalist, producer, and author. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and has authored several history titles. The Girls of Atomic City became a New York Times bestseller in its first week of publication.
Future selections for the “Open Afternoon Book Club” are The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro and The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert.
The “Open Afternoon Book Club” is free and open to the public. Books are available at the circulation desk. All are welcome.
For more information about this club or other events at the Cazenovia Public Library, call 655-9322 or visit www.cazenoviapubliclibrary.org.