Emily Strasser's book reads like several detective novels at once—except that the stories and secrets she unearths are her own family's, wrapped inside the larger secret of the development of the atomic bomb in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Beautifully detailed and impeccably researched, Strasser proceeds with unrelenting curiosity and patience, 'breathing in history' and exhaling poetry. Brava!
~Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban
Winner of the 2024 Reed Environmental Writing Award
With a detective's focus, a philosopher's yearning, and a granddaughter's devotion, Strasser deftly fuses memoir with biography, lyricism with hard truths, and a hidden history with the forgetful present. This book is intimate and epic, harrowing and healing. It chases the phantoms of America, reveals the contamination of secrecy, and finds grace in a fraught inheritance: hers and the nation's.
~Dan Zak, reporter for the Washington Post and author of Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age
Winner of the Minnesota Book Award in the Memoir & Creative Nonfiction category
The author knows Hiroshima, fears nuclear weapons, but loves her family. She knows her grandfather helped create the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs because of a photograph she saw in his house. The photo showed him, definitely him, observing what is undeniably a nuclear explosion. Her Herculean effort to learn more about this grandfather leads deep into family/Oak Ridge/atomic mystery. And along the way, the photo disappears. Half-life of a Secret presents a family, a city built to build the bomb, consequences, and the painful, time-transcending tentacles of war. The story is profound and cleverly crafted, but if you love to see perfect words in startling yet perfect places, you will love Emily Strasser by the end of page one.
~Steve Leeper, Former Chairman of Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation and cofounder of Peace Culture Village
Finalist for The Chautauqua Prize
A well-researched, poignant journey of discovery, Emily Strasser's Half-Life of a Secret interrogates and reveals the secrets, stories, and human and emotional cost of the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons facility. From Tennessee to Hiroshima, Strasser's weave of historical fact and the story of her grandfather brings a much-needed truth and relevancy to a difficult and ever-present topic: the devastating legacy of nuclear weapons and the choices we face to the present day. A must-read.
~Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Emily Strasser's Half-Life of a Secret offers not only a fierce literary vision, but also a profoundly ethical one. This work of investigation and self-investigation is the rare book that becomes more beautiful the more you read. Audacious in her insistence on care and her refusal of easy answers, Emily Strasser engages fearlessly with the biggest questions of living in a debut as urgent as it is timeless.
~V. V. Ganeshananthan, author of Brotherless Night
Strasser's prose reaches beyond the straits normally reserved for academic presses in which this book was published, and her patience against some of the biggest ethical questions humans face is a thing of great strength. A profound debut of memory, research and imagination that mines conflicts of heart and intellect.
~Kerri Arsenault, Star Tribune
Emily Strasser's Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History is a book for our time. In an age when intergenerational trauma is being explored and researched, Strasser is providing us with important work in this genre.... This well-written and well-researched book is a warning of the high costs of moral accountability that we all must pay for our actions and the actions of others in our sphere of influence.
~Colorado Review
