Atomic Women: The Untold Stories of the Scientists Who Helped Create the Nuclear Bomb by Roseanne Montillo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Atomic Women: The Untold Stories of the Scientists Who Helped Create the Nuclear Bomb by Roseanne Montillo Elizabeth Bush Montillo, Roseanne Atomic Women: The Untold Stories of the Scientists Who Helped Create the Nuclear Bomb. Little, 2020 [272p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-316-48959-1 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-316-48958-4 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 Middle and high school students who have learned about the development of the atomic bombs that devastated Japan and hastened the end of World War II already know this story and its main players: Leslie Groves, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi. Perhaps, if they were lucky, they even heard a bit about the foundational work of Marie Curie and Lise Meitner as it related to radiation, nuclear fission, and sustained chain reactions. Here Montillo retells the same tale while putting two generations of women scientists from Europe and the United States into starring [End Page 404] roles and relegating the men who variously mentored, hired, and/or hobbled them, and ultimately ignored the importance of their accomplishments, into a supporting cast. The book treats the female engineers, metallurgists, chemists, and physicists with the same narrative interest generally accorded to male-centered narratives, i.e., light on domesticity, heavy on career, with careful emphasis on explaining the nature of their scientific contributions. The result is an eye-opening historical reconstruction that respects the intellectual diversity of the women behind and within the Manhattan Project, and it should establish such names as Leona Woods, Elizabeth Graves, Joan Hinton, and Elizabeth Rona as essential to understanding both the stunning scientific success and the catastrophic consequences of America’s “win” in the atomic race. Author notes, a timeline, source notes, and bibliography are included. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois