#Review secrets boutique series

The hype was high when Victoria's would open in the heart of Stockholm.

You have the right attitude when you walk into the store that is perfectly okay. To read an uncut version of this review - and more local book coverage - visit, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.This text has been translated automatically. It 'could have been the end of the world or the beginning.'

In that photo of George, she remembers the fireball. 'What I see in my childhood, in my family, is just a magnification of what I see in Oak Ridge, in the nation at large.' 'The comfort of my life is founded on the nuclear weapons industry,' she writes. As a granddaughter, Emily Strasser grapples with how her grandfather's work implicates her. That moment's residue remains not only in collective memory but, according to scientists, in the air and water and soil around Oak Ridge. 6, 1945 - learning for the first time what he'd been doing - worsened an inherited illness.Īs we approach the 80th anniversary of the Japanese bombings, Half-Life of a Secret ' offers an important way to rethink a critical moment in global history. She wonders if hearing news of the Hiroshima bombing on Aug. One of George's Manhattan Project co-workers clued Strasser in to the fact that George, too, may have wanted to kill himself. George and his brother, working nearby, found her. Chickens fed, she continued on to the barn, where she hanged herself. George was in his teens when she left the house one morning to feed the chickens, as usual. His mother's suicide was such a carefully guarded secret that few family members knew about it. With mental health stigmatized, the nature of his suffering was often coded on records his granddaughter examined. Isn't that crazy? We were programmed for doing that.'Īt home, George Strasser raised a picture-perfect family and earned good money in a profession he'd trained hard for, but he struggled with demons not fully understood. Asked 'How many people are working out there?' they might jest, 'Oh, I guess about half of them.' Colleen, a former 'leak test operator' whom Strasser interviewed, said, 'We were so stupid we didn't know anything else. 'Eighty cents an hour,' they might quip, proud to make twice the minimum wage. When asked by outsiders, 'What are you making out there?' Oak Ridgers learned playful, evasive answers. How could a workforce of thousands unknowingly build a bomb capable of mass destruction? But wartime Americans, carefully vetted for patriotism, pledged to reveal nothing, to see nothing. Of course, 'new and better' sounds cold at first. For the Strassers and others like them, it meant 'something new and better.'

#Review secrets boutique series

The Army Corps of Engineers had chosen the site because it offered, as one architect she interviewed put it, 'a kind of clean, uncluttered, uncommitted area with nothing to stand in the way of an ideal plan.' Once the poor farmers, sharecroppers and Native people who had long called the area home were evicted, the government put up 'a series of homely little American villages' for the thousands of workers it would need to employ for bomb building. Like most newcomers to the 'secret city,' Strasser's grandparents knew little of Oak Ridge's true purpose when they moved there in the early 1940s.

Delving into government archives and family memorabilia, supplemented by interviews and personal visits, she puts the family story in the context of a nation at war. For Strasser, family secrets are intertwined with national ones. Meanwhile, he struggled with personal secrets: his mother's suicide and his own alcoholism and mental illness. An outsider as an intellectual growing up in a large farm family, George Strasser had made his way up the ladder working as a chemist on Oak Ridge's secret Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Behind her grandfather, 'fire blossomed in silence.'Ī blend of memoir and historical investigation, Strasser's book explores what her grandfather, who died before her birth, must have seen with those eyes, what lay behind that silence. 'I felt myself floating, unmoored from time and space, drawn by my grandfather's eyes, eyes that knew everything yet said nothing,' she writes of her childhood memory. On the opening page of Emily Strasser's 'Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning With a Hidden History,' she describes lying beneath flowered sheets in the safety of her grandmother's house near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, transfixed by a photograph of her long-dead grandfather standing in front of a nuclear explosion. 'HALF-LIFE OF A SECRET: RECKONING WITH A HIDDEN HISTORY' by Emily Strasser (The University Press of Kentucky, 336 pages, $27).