Established in 1942 and by 1945 home to 75,000 people, the Clinton Engineer Works (CEW) in Tennessee was not on maps, and its mission was so highly classified that its nature was unknown even to its ever-expanding workforce. Today, the area once coded as “Site X” is known as Oak Ridge, and what happened there in the 1940s was part of the Manhattan Project.  With labor generally—and men especially— in short supply on the home front, the Project at CEW strenuously recruited  women, especially young, poor, and poorly education women who would do what they were told and not ask questions. In The Girls of Atomic City (Touchstone, $16), Denise Kiernan’s social history of this unusual community, the nurses and statisticians, chemists and technicians, tell their stories at last. Kiernan interviewed each of her subjects at length, and her lively, often slangy narrative preserves their voices; this is history as it was lived, full of the normal experiences of love and ambition, but also rife with exploitation, intimidation, and unacknowledged experiments with radiation.