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Half-Life of a Secret

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A sharp interrogation of personal as well as American history, guilt, and secrecy. 

 

In Half Life of a Secret Emily Strasser follows the career of her grandfather, George Strasser, as a nuclear chemist in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Through the braids of mental health, family, science, and history, Strasser reveals greater truths about how we as Americans should think of the creation and use of atomic weapons.

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Emily Strasser is the author of Half-Life of a Secret, a deeply researched memoir that won the 2024 Reed Environmental Writing Award and the 2024 Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Gulf Coast, among others. Strasser was a 2018–2019 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow and currently teaches at Tufts University.

Because confronting our nation’s past with transparency, empathy, and accountability is laborious and essential work, especially in an era of global conflict. 

Author at Ģtv

Join us in person or on Thursday, Oct. 23, for Emily Strasser’s reading and book-signing. Emily Strasser’s event will take place at 4:30 EST in Persson Auditorium. Refreshments available.

Beyond the Book

  • “Each revelation…feels like tiny bombs themselves,” says Kerri Arsenault in .
  • Emily Strasser touches on her research in , which tells their audience to “Be prepared to be surprised by what she learned about us.”
  • of Emily Strasser’s BBC Podcast, “The Bomb”.

Oak Ridge went from being a city that whispered to a city that shouted.

Half Life of a Secret