Welcome to Shirley:
A Memoir from an Atomic Town
By Kelly McMasters

 

The CW channel 11 Morning News (August 20, 2008):

View a live television interview about the book here.

The Brian Lehrer Show (April 30, 2008):

Kelly McMasters was reared in a different sort of "nuclear family." Listen to the interview with Amy Eddings by clicking here: Welcome to Shirley on The Brian Lehrer Show

The Bonnie Grice Show (July 16, 2008):

Bonnie Grice hosts a 2-hour Arts and Culture Magazine on NPR's LI affiliate WLIU every Monday through Friday, featuring interviews with arts and culture leaders. Listen to the interview here: Kelly McMasters on The Bonnie Grice Show

O Magazine (May '08 issue):

In Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town (PublicAffairs), Kelly McMasters ... 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

Washington Post Book World (June 29, 2008):

Some of her best passages describe the way local families supported each other; her morning wanderings into whichever house she had chosen to visit for breakfast; the town's magical 4th of July celebration; and her strong, kindly neighbor Jerry, who worked at Brookhaven and wouldn't allow any of the children to touch him after work until he had washed up...the interweaving of autobiography and fact works beautifully. -JULIET WITTMAN

The New York Times (July 6, 2008):

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. -ROBIN FINN

AV Club at The Onion (May 8, 2008):

McMasters somehow waxes rhapsodic in this bittersweet chronicle of small-town life and scientific irresponsibility, whose sentimentality sets it apart from similar accounts....her exhaustive sifting through medical and scientific evidence for what happened to Shirley is admirable, as is the fortitude with which she returns to her hometown for a critical look. -ELLEN WERNECKE

Dan's Papers (April 11, 2008):

In effect, this memoir paints a beautiful picture of Shirley, a town that from its conception was full of contradictions, its beauty being the most ironic. ...McMasters writes a complex tribute to a once promising summertime beach community filled with broken people defeated by the emergence of cancer clusters and regarded as damaged goods. A must read for Long Islanders. -VICTORIA L. COOPER

The Boston Globe (August 2008):

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. -CHUCK LEDDY

The Brooklyn Rail (May 2008):

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. -ANNA WAINWRIGHT (click here for the full review)

LA Times (May 2008):

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. -JACQUES STRAPP

Dame Magazine (May 2008):

McMasters’ achingly fine memoir is both a valentine to her hometown and a look at the rotting core of the American dream. Deeply personal and disturbing, Welcome to Shirley is both elegy to a beloved home and an indictment of environmental abuse. -CAROLINE LEAVITT

Metropolis Magazine (June 2008):

McMasters...pairs careful research into a nearby Superfund nuclear laboratory with evocative memories of her childhood, casting what could be an overwhelming drama of environmental horror in human terms.

Ms. Magazine (Spring 2008):

In novelistic fashion...McMasters recalls...the delights of her Long Island childhood.

 

BLOGS and other NEWS

--Eco-Libris, the supercool trees-for-books program, reviews Welcome to Shirley and puts a call out for more sustainable reading.

--Plenty Magazine takes an in-depth look at the cost of nuclear energy and includes Welcome to Shirley in the mix here.

--Read Karl Grossman's Opinion piece about how Welcome to Shirley relates to the Bush regime's ill-fated attempt to revive nuclear energy with $544 billion in subsidies (from the East Hampton Star)

--Read a poem for Shirley written in real-time by Roland Legiardi-Laura during Kelly's appearance on the Brian Lehrer show to celebrate National Poetry Month

--Read how Kelly offset her book tour's carbon emissions using NativeEnergy and planted a forest for Shirley thanks to EcoLibris on the Beacon Broadside blog

--Click here to read an exclusive essay by Kelly on the Powells bookseller site

--Find a playlist for the book at the largeheartedboy blog here

--Check out a green-themed excerpt from the book at Mother Jones Magazine's Blue Marble blog

--Read Kelly's confession about writing memoir on the Debutante Ball, a blog for first-time writers

--Kim Stagliano ran an interview with Kelly on her supersmart autism site

--ManicMommy posted an excerpt and gave away a free copy of Welcome to Shirley

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Shirley seemed to be doomed from the beginning. Located 65 miles from
New York City with a population of about 25,000 people, the blue-collar town has been plagued by one disaster after another—an empty promise of glamour
and glitz shot down by a bribe gone bad by the town’s charlatan founder; shabby beach bungalows-turned-welfare dens crowding the chaotic streets; drugs
flowing out of the local Indian reservation; a plane crash off the town's nicotine yellow beach; and a mysterious federal nuclear laboratory that has been leaking chemical and nuclear waste into the town’s water table for decades.