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Atomic Farmgirl: Growing Up Right in the Wrong Place
by
Teri Hein
Atomic Farmgirl is a wise, irreverent, deeply personal story of growing up right in the wrong place. The granddaughter of German Lutheran homesteaders, Teri Hein was raised in the 1950s and 1960s in rural eastern Washington. This starkly elegant landscape serves as the poignant backdrop to her story, for one hundred miles to the south of this idyllic, all-American setting ...more
Paperback, 272 pages
Published
April 18th 2003
by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
(first published 2000)
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I flew through this book & read it in only a few hours. Hein's narration has a hypnotic, regular cadence that I couldn't seem to tear myself away from. I could also identify with Hein's place as a young girl growing up in a rural setting, and I was hungry to find out how her life out in Washington state could be paralleled to life in rural upstate New York.
Hein does such a good job of reminiscing about the setting and good times with the neighbors that I nearly forgot the book's mai...more
Hein does such a good job of reminiscing about the setting and good times with the neighbors that I nearly forgot the book's mai...more
This is one of a few nonfiction books that I have really loved. After getting into it, I had to keep reading and reading. It is so reminiscent of the time and place that one feels as if they are there. I was 13 year older than Teri and in the city of Omaha, but I, too, had to "duck and cover." I am now living on the eastern edge of the Palouse and find the country as beautiful as Teri describes. I have lived for many years in parts of the country that are known as wheat country, a...more
Sherry (sethurner)
rated it
Gypsy, our Welch mare, seemed as tall as a house and as wild as the stallion she wasn't when she remembered the clover on the north side of the house and took off.
Remembering is something that Teri Hein does well. I picked up the memoir on a trip to Portland. The book caught me eye because my grandmother was a child in Washington. She crossed the Columbia River to go to school in Hanford, a place that no longer exists as a town because the US government took it over and constructed...more
Remembering is something that Teri Hein does well. I picked up the memoir on a trip to Portland. The book caught me eye because my grandmother was a child in Washington. She crossed the Columbia River to go to school in Hanford, a place that no longer exists as a town because the US government took it over and constructed...more
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Teri Hein’s compelling memoir Atomic Farm Girl raises startling questions about nuclear technology, our government’s ability and intention to regulate nuclear plants, and the effects of radioactive exposure on a community's wellbeing. Set in the bucolic wheat fields of eastern Washington and filled with loving tributes to her neighbors, her family, and the indigenous peoples who populated the area before white emigrants arrived, it is a touching story set against a backdrop of government secrecy...more
Great read about a familiar place...the Palouse wheat country of eastern Washington. While it's non-fiction, it reads like a well crafted novel. But I know that the special charm of this book for me comes because Fairfield Washington is just 35 miles from my early Spokane home; my husband grew up in Hanford/Richland WA & we both attended WSU in the heart of Palouse country in the early 60's. It's a downwinder story presented w/o acrimony. Thanks ME for the recommend.
This was a great book. It was a very quick read. I enjoyed it because it is local history and I was able to see in my mind all the places she was going. I lived in Rockford, too, and could really understand her way of thinking and a little bit about her life. I used to drive all the back roads that she travelled on between Rockford and Cheney and I couldn't help but wonder if I ever say her farmhouse on those drives.
This a story about growing up on a wheat farm in eastern Washington. It is also about the suspected (and I'm only saying "suspected" because it hasn't been proven in a court of law and may never be) effects of radiation pollution from Hanford on the people in towns downwind from Hanford. Cancer is a recurrent theme. Even so, it is a mostly happy and touching story she tells.
I live just west of this area, and have relatives who are down-winders, so I found this book very interesting.
This as an interesting read and would have been more enjoyable if Sheila wasn't in Hanford!
I volunteer for Teri's writing center, 826 Seattle, so this review is not completely unbiased.
This is more a story about growing up in the 50's and 60's than it is a polemic against the damage inflicted upon a significant chunk of southeast WA residents by the Hanford Nuclear Plant. There's nothing really heavy-handed about how Teri describes the effects of radioactive iodine on the mortality rates in her small town; it just neatly fits into the story of her life.
A recom...more
This is more a story about growing up in the 50's and 60's than it is a polemic against the damage inflicted upon a significant chunk of southeast WA residents by the Hanford Nuclear Plant. There's nothing really heavy-handed about how Teri describes the effects of radioactive iodine on the mortality rates in her small town; it just neatly fits into the story of her life.
A recom...more
A wake up call on many levels... In a region w/ lots of land and few people, why is everyone getting cancer? It has nothing to do with diet. Air and water move and circulate not just in one area, but around the globe... the toxins and heavy chemicals produced in one place do not stay put. We all share them. There's no place to hide.
I like history, and this pertained specifically to an area of Eastern Washington called the Palouse. The book was an easy read, full of amusing incidences in her life. Although it had a somber tone and overall emphasis on government secrets and the dangers of nuclear power, it didn't make you feel terrible by reading it.
I tried to read this when I was about 15. I never made it beyond the halfway mark. Perhaps because I was too young, but perhaps as a result of other reasons as well . . .
although this book has an attractive cover and seems like it would be really interesting according to the blurb on the back, it's really just okay. i mean, i finished it.
I enjoyed this book because it takes place on the Palouse, mentioning countless familiar places. I found it thought-provoking.
this one is a little depressing, but its very good. i really like memoirs. and i kind of want to be a cowgirl...
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