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Reviews:
O Magazine (May 08 issue): A loving, affecting memoir of an American Eden turned toxic.
THE TOWN OF SHIRLEY, on the East End of Long Island, has never been chic, and certainly never part of the fevered Hamptons summer scene, but to a 4-year-old and her hard-up young parents it did seem like a kind of paradise when they moved there in 1981. In Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town (PublicAffairs), Kelly McMasters charts how she came to understand that despite all she loved about Shirley (especially the loyalty of the neighborhood and the sense of open space and security she felt growing up there), it was somewhere to be ashamed of. More urgently, she learned that-all joking about Shirley’s locals “glowing in the dark” aside-the acreage they lived on was the dumping site for three leaking nuclear reactors and countless chemical spills. Block by block, friend by friend, the number of cancer cases grows, including 16 local children diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare cancer that typically hits one in four million children a year. In one of the book’s most riveting moments, Randy Snell, the father of a stricken child, finds an official report that concludes that the only known cause of his daughter’s disease is “low-level radiation exposure.” McMasters tells the story of families such as the Snells and her own-her mother had benign tumors removed from her thyroid and breast-with passion and clarity. She also pulls off a small miracle in the telling, making rundown, unbeautiful Shirley a place of dignity, a place of heroic people and stubborn fighters, a place you’d be proud to call home. -ELAINA RICHARDSON
Dan's Papers (April 11, 2008): Click here for the full review.
In effect, this memoir paints a beautiful picture of Shirley, a town that from its conception was full of contradictions, its beauty being the most ironic. ...Welcome to Shirley is written with passion and humility and McMasters clear and vivid style keeps readers on edge. McMasters writes a complex tribute to a once promising summertime beach community filled with broken people defeated by the emergence of cancer clusters and regarded as damaged goods. A must read for Long Islanders. - VICTORIA L. COOPER
Booklist (February 15, 2008):
McMasters’ early years were peripatetic, making the family’s decision to settle down in scrappy blue-collar Shirley, Long Island, momentous. Here, on the edge of a wildlife preserve, they secured their first home and for the first time became part of a community. But all was not well in the early 1980s in this
shoddily constructed small town, or at nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory. Journalist McMasters writes with precision, affection, and venom about the history of her hometown, chronicling the misdeeds of its speculator founder, William Turnbull Shirley; lovingly portraying neighbors; and indicting
Brookhaven, a flawed nuclear facility and “one of the nation’s most hazardous waste offenders,” for allowing tritium and other radioactive substances to fatally contaminate the area’s groundwater and soil. So high were the cancer rates in Shirley, a street was dubbed Death Row, and cancer survivors launched a fierce battle against the federal government. Joining the growing circle of environmental health memoirists, McMasters marshals the facts and articulates feelings with eloquence and drama, telling stories of personal suffering to expose crimes against the public, and nature itself. -DONNA SEAMAN
What People Are Saying:
All places are mute till someone speaks for them--this book bears
marvelous, scalding witness to the kind of horror that's been repeated
in so many spots that we've almost gone numb. But no one will be
numb after reading this account.
—Bill McKibben, author The Bill McKibben Reader In Welcome to Shirley, Kelly McMasters pays homage to the small
unfashionable town where she grew up. Unlovely to outsiders, Shirley
had its own beauty—a strong community that took care of its own,
the natural wonders of sea and woods. It was a place that ought to have
been safe. But while the residents were having birthday parties, and
4th of July barbecues, while they were going to work or school, their
neighbor Brookhaven National Laboratory was leaking nuclear and
chemical waste into the aquifer. The consequences were devastating.
With echoes of such great writers as Thornton Wilder and Edgar Lee
Masters and Upton Sinclair, McMasters has written an eloquent
love song to her home-town, and a scalding indictment of the powerful
facility that brought fear and death to her neighbors. This is a great
book about small town America. It should be required reading for us all.
—Abigail Thomas, author of the memoir Safekeeping and A Three
Dog Life, selected as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the LA Times
and the Washington Post
Welcome to Shirley is an uplifting and disturbing tour of deep nostalgia for
home and an entrenched institution that earns its designation as a Superfund site. McMasters slips along the fine edge between the personal and the
journalistic; between profound nostalgia—she loves this place, and longs
for it—and an adult reckoning with the realities of her gritty town. McMasters'
voice is devastating in its clarity and urgency and great tenderness.
—Meredith Hall, author Without A Map: A Memoir
It makes sense that in the era of Love Canal, A Civil Action and An
Inconvenient Truth, the bildungsroman or novel of education must grow
up—or outward. This is the story of a woman who came of age near
the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where an idyllic childhood of
neighborhood parties and close friends came with abnormal strings
of mortality. Kelly McMasters delivers this all-American atomic town to
us with a rare precision and beautiful nostalgia in the true Greek
sense, a sickness for home. McMasters' is an American life as
ordinary—and wholly remarkable—as our damaged industrial centuries:
Norman Rockwell with his brush dipped in isotopes.
—Susanne Antonetta, author of Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir The heartbreak of this story is in the small details, which leave a
lingering sense of lives that might be forgotten if they were not
recalled here. Both personal and political, and steadily compelling,
Welcome to Shirley is a thoughtful, delicate elegy to an ideal.
—Lydia Millet, author of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and How the Dead
Dream, and winner of the PEN-USA Award for Fiction
This intimate portrait of hardscrabble Shirley, Long Island and the
ways in which activities at nearby Brookhaven Lab affected its
citizens shows through individual lives—and deaths—how
environmental injustice works. Native Kelly McMasters combines a
warm personal perspective with vigorous reportorial objectivity to tell
this gripping story of the underside of the Promised Land.
—Suzannah Lessard, author of Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger
in the Stanford White Family, and former staff writer at the New
Yorker
Pre-Pub Reviews:
"Powerful...debut explores the author's happy childhood next to a
controversial nuclear laboratory that leaked toxic waste into a Long
Island aquifer. McMasters follows up this moving material with pages
that delve into case-study numbers and scientific quotes ... Sincere
and expertly researched."
—Kirkus Reviews
"McMasters summons considerable research and critical powers…"
—Publishers Weekly |
