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Environmental
concerns have been on everyone's minds lately. Whether it's
a possible cancer threat from colored Nalgene bottles or bacteria
in the food supply, it seems that we are finally facing up
to the possibility that not all modern advances have been
good ones. In Welcome To Shirley: A Memoir of an Atomic
Town, Kelly McMasters writes about growing up in a lower
middle-class town in the shadow of Brookhaven National Labs—a
laboratory responsible for research netting six Nobel Prizes,
including one for the discovery of the charm quark.
Brookhaven
was also, until the 1990s, the probable cause of leakage of
a variety of carcinogens into the local groundwater, including
tritium. Readers learn about the people affected by their
proximity to the labs—including the postal worker who
developed the breast cancer awareness stamp—but not before
learning an incredible amount of distracting and unrelated
anecdotes about the author.
The story
takes readers from McMasters's family's move to Shirley from
upstate New York when her father, a golf pro, lands a job
at an exclusive country club in the Hamptons. People who work
in the Hamptons can't afford to live there, so the family
settles in nearby Shirley, attracted by its small town feel
and welcoming neighbors. Young Kelly becomes friends with
many of the neighborhood girls, and they form a tight crew
that often spends evenings at each other's homes.
Kelly's
best friend Tina is the first of the group to be affected
by the shoddy waste disposal from Brookhaven. Her father works
there and often jokes that the kids shouldn't come too close
when he'd been "slimed" at work. Tina's father dies of cancer
when she is very young, and after that, she distances herself
from the group. But it isn't until a few years later when
Kelly's mother begins to volunteer at local hospices that
Kelly begins to understand how many people in Shirley have
cancer and how many people believe that it was caused by something
from Brookhaven.
Unfortunately,
parts one and two are a mix of Kelly's life with some difficult-to-parse
hard science. Sentences like "The EPAs's limit of 20,000 pCi/L
does not mean that the agency condones someone drinking water
that tests at 19,999 pCi/L," don't do much to illuminate the
problems in Shirley. And Kelly's home life is very typical—riding
bikes with her friends, talking about serial killers in the
woods—and certainly not the stuff of memoir. Readers
will find themselves wondering what the long anecdote about
some friends accidentally shooting a car has to do with the
story or why they need to know that her mother's first roommate
moved to Staten Island. Also not particularly interesting
is the long chapter devoted to the origins of the town.
It's
not until part three that the book comes together. Here McMasters
interviews activists and survivors, interspersing their words
with the science necessary to understand the issues at hand.
Their continued frustration and amazement at the lack of information
and lack of support from doctors, researchers, and the Brookhaven
lab really come through the page, and readers will easily
feel their frustrations. When father Randy Snell discovers
a doctor's report noting that his young daughter's rare cancer
could only be caused by "low level radiation exposure," he
is sure he is on to something. But Brookhaven's assertion
is that 16 kids in a small town with this cancer could happen
by chance and doesn't indicate that there is any cancer cluster.
Time
and time again, activists are shouted down by government scientists
and doctors too lazy to do any original research. Readers
will get riled by statements from Brookhaven spokespeople
saying things like, "Yes (the mercury in the Peconic River)
came from the lab, but when I was a kid I played with the
mercury in my thermometers and I'm fine, I don't have cancer."
McMasters
misses a lot of opportunities because of the time she spends
focusing on her own non-eventful childhood and teen years.
Her mother had multiple benign tumors, just like many other
people in the town, but rather than talk to her mother regarding
her feelings and fears about this, McMasters discusses how
she holes herself up at Vassar. A more in-depth discussion
on why so many doctors discount cancer clusters would have
also helped clarify an important part of the book. And, although
McMasters keeps emphasizing that Shirley is a lower-middle-class
town, she never shows us exactly what that means. Readers
get no sense of place or time—no talk of toys, or clothes,
or how people decorate at Christmas. We have no idea why some
people stay or move back after college, other than for the
family they have there.
However,
parts of the book offer an interesting look at how small-town
people try their best to cope with unresponsive government
officials. Overall, Welcome to Shirley can be as frustrating
as the Brookhaven Lab's spokespeople, but it also conveys
an important message about the people's strength in the face
of adversity.
(June,
2008)
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