Half Life of A Secret: Reckoning With a Hidden History

In 1943, George Strasser moved with his wife to Oak Ridge for a war job working on uranium enrichment operations at Y-12. Little did he know that he would never leave, building his career and raising his family there. Decades after George’s death, his granddaughter, haunted by the secrecy surrounding his work and the mental illness he struggled with until his death, returned to Oak Ridge, seeking to understand the legacy of that place on her family, the land, and the world. In an exclusive event at the Oak Ridge Public Library, Emily Strasser, author of Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, will be interviewed by her father, George Strasser’s son, about the process of uncovering a complex and contradictory history that stretches from Hiroshima to Nevada, from to the backyards of Oak Ridge to the corners of our own psyches.