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Michael L. Johnson, Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West, Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 1, June 2012, Page 351, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas154
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Like a lot of recent histories of places in the American West, Atomic Frontier Days is a narrative of tangled, contending motives and complex consequences that does not end happily. The story of Hanford, the most radioactively polluted site in the United States, has been told variously before—most notably perhaps in Michele Stenehjem Gerber’s On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site (2007), Hill Williams’s Made in Hanford: The Bomb That Changed the World (2011), and S. L. Sanger’s Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford (1995)—but not with the broad view of western-regional as well as local and national concerns that John M. Findlay and Bruce Hevly employ. In that regard, they argue that “previous historians have simply overlooked many aspects of the story” and that this book will “try to fill in some of the gaps and provide more historical context and, by doing so, encourage a less polarized understanding of the place and its significance” (pp. 6–7). The attempt succeeds.
