Reviews
Pacific Northwest Quarterly -
"The
interviewees speak well for themselves, but these vignettes are made all the better
by introductory notes. For example, we are told that physicist Eugene P. Wigner
was 'in his mid-eighties when interviewed at his Princeton University office...
physically small and a bit stooped, but jaunty with his black beret and energetic
manner' (p. 16). Working on the Bomb is not only a good book about Hanford, but it
is also a fine example of how oral history should be written."
-J.
William T. Youngs, Eastern Washington University
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists -
"The
best oral histories serve as a forum for objectifying an era, an event, a life—whatever the topic. I have in mind the works of Studs Terkel, for example,
or Steven L. Sanger's Hanford and the Bomb: An Oral History of World War II, in
which Sanger interviewed a wide spectrum of Hanford employees on a variety of
topics. As is always the case, when asked "What happened?" each interviewee
relates a unique story that says as much about the teller as it does the events
in question. It is out of these interleaved accounts that one can glean a sense
of the times and a likely scenario of events. Such oral histories often enrich
documentary histories by giving a sense of the motivations lurking behind the
documents themselves."
-Stanley Goldberg
Military History Quarterly -
"Many
thanks for letting me see your oral history of Hanford. There is some wonderful
stuff here: 'The kids never knew what their daddy was doing... He told the
kids he was making Pepsi-Cola'."
-Robert Cowley, editor
Journal of the History of Science Society (Isis) -
"With
the passing of the Manhattan Project generation, eyewitness accounts such as Working
on the Bomb and The Plutonium Story: The Journals of Professor Glenn T. Seaborg become rarer. Thus we must be grateful that these books preserve so much firsthand
information not recorded in official documents. They will be of greater value
to future scholars and readers who try to imagine what this project meant to those
who lived through it."
-Russell
B. Olwell
