Half-Life of a Secret

In 1943, a young chemist named George Strasser moved with his wife to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a city built in secret for the sole purpose of enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb. Not listed on area maps, Oak Ridge was governed by the strictest security, and those who worked there were provided only the minimum information necessary to complete their jobs. George learned the true purpose of his work, along with the rest of the city and the world, on August 6, 1945, when Truman announced the bombing of Hiroshima over the radio. After these strange beginnings, Oak Ridge would become a linchpin in the nation's growing nuclear weapons industry, and George would spend a career building more and more powerful bombs while suffering increasingly debilitating mental illness.

Decades after George's death, his granddaughter, Emily Strasser, set out to confront the devastation wrought by secrecy on both familial and global scales. Sifting through official archives and family memories alike, Strasser travels to the deserts of Nevada, the living rooms of Hiroshima, and the contaminated waterways of Oak Ridge to investigate the far-reaching ramifications of her grandfather's work on communities, the land, and the wider world. This deeply researched memoir weaves the personal and the political, the reported and the lyric, to probe a toxic legacy with grave consequences.