Girls of Atomic City & Honor

Some good things I've been reading lately include Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City, a non-fiction book about Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the women who worked there during WWII on a super secret project.  In a nutshell, these folks were doing the grunt work of the Manhattan Project, enriching the uranium that would provide the explosions.  Because of the high levels of secrecy surrounding the project (most of the people working there didn't know what it was they were working on), the organizers recruited young women from neighboring areas, who they believed would be obedient and work hard.

The amazing book not only gives you the day to day lives of several of the women who worked there, it also looks at women's contributions to the development of nuclear technology as a whole.


I've also torn through the novel Honor by Elif Shafak.  The story is set in Kurdish communities in Turkey and London, follows multiple generations from the 1950's through the 1990's, with the bulk of the book set in London of the late 1970's with punks and racial tensions mixed into the milieu.  It looks at Muslim tradition and women's and men's roles, and unfolded with incredible beauty and surprise.