WELCOME TO SHIRLEY A Memoir from an Atomic Town KELLY MCMASTERS

"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 Laboratories 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

"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

"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.
— Suzanne Antonetta, author of Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir

"McMasters tells the story…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, O, The Oprah Magazine

"Readers with an interest in the environment will be haunted by much that's in here, while McMasters's love for Shirley might spur some to appreciate and even protect their own hometown."
-Library Journal

"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."
-Booklist

"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 of The Bill McKibben Reader

"Sincere and expertly researched"
-Kirkus

"It is a tragic, at times horrific tale—yet McMasters manages, with great grace and introspection, to deliver an eminently readable book of hope and strength."
-Long Island Press

"McMasters somehow waxes rhapsodic in this bittersweet chronicle of small-town life and scientific irresponsibility, whose sentimentality sets it apart from similar accounts."
-The Onion A.V. Club

"…the interweaving of autobiography and fact works beautifully"
-Washington Post Book World

"If Ms. McMasters has an archenemy, it is not the Mitty-esque Mr. Shirley, who was from Brooklyn, but the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Shirley's most notable, and according to her, most noxious neighbor: Nobel Prizes and a Superfund site all under one roof. Yet she did not write the book...to scold the laboratory, but as a way of apologizing to Shirley for being ashamed of it."
-The New York Times

"McMasters offers a mixture of Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action, the 1995 bestseller about Woburn's contmainated water supply and its difficult lawsuit, and her own stories of playing in the woods with her group of Shirley friends."
-The Boston Globe

"Welcome to Shirley is a stunning example of the damage inflicted by national science on common people in the nuclear age. We hear the stories occasionally, and take pause for a moment. Erin Brockovich, Chernobyl, Shirley—we all know this stuff happens. McMasters shines a light on a small community that, were it not for her and a few others, might never have made the papers."
-The Brooklyn Rail

"A disturbing, ambitious book twining [McMasters'] life in Shirley in the 1980s with the relationship the town and its residents have to Brookhaven National Laboratory, a nearby high-energy physics and nuclear research complex, and the potentially disastrous environmental consequences of that geographical fact."
-The Los Angeles Times

PAPERBACK
ISBN 978-1-58648-698-3
Pub date: 04/27/09
Price: $14.95/17.50 Canada
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
336 pages
Carton Quantity: 36
Memoir
Selling Territory: US, C
Pub history: 978-1-58648-486-6