Rating: 
Summary: Stop at the title
Review: Apart from having a terrific title, this book is not very good. Teri Hein clearly loves the land on which she was raised. The personal stories she tells, as well as the extensive research she seems to have conducted into the region's history, do show as much.But the information is jumbled and formless. The book has no shape; the chapters tumble along, one after the other, with no apparent thought to how they're ordered. We're subjected to pages and pages of the Chief Qualchan story and other historical information, and then even more pages and pages of mildly cute stories about Hein's childhood, and there's not enough language or skill present here to tie it all together to make an interesting whole. A really good editor and a lot of rewriting might have made this an actual book. As the volume stands now, it reads like a history report by an extremely bright eighth grader.
Rating: 
Summary: Send this one to a friend
Review: Atomic Farmgirl is about many things. It is about Hein's family and growing up in the farm lands of eastern Washington. It is about the calamities that have struck this place for over a hundred years. It is about the nuclear industry and the tragedy it has bestowed on our landscape. Teri Hein gracefully avoids a knee jerk political book and challenges us to appreciate this un-simple story. Her book is very very human...and funny and wise and lovely to read. My friend sent it to me. Send a copy to your friend who lives on a farm....or in a city.
Rating: 
Summary: Someone find this person an editor!
Review: By virtue of this book's unusual structure and approach, it probably doesn't fit the political agendas of some people. But this book isn't meant to preach to the choir and it isn't meant as a simplistic rant against the evils of nuclear power, at least as far as I can tell. What it was for me in reading it was a lovely, poetic account of what a neighborhood really is and the sad truth about what can happen to it. Teri Hein made me laugh and cry in the same book. That is a very good writing.
Rating:
Summary: A Subtle Treat
Review: By virtue of this book's unusual structure and approach, it probably doesn't fit the political agendas of some people. But this book isn't meant to preach to the choir and it isn't meant as a simplistic rant against the evils of nuclear power, at least as far as I can tell. What it was for me in reading it was a lovely, poetic account of what a neighborhood really is and the sad truth about what can happen to it. Teri Hein made me laugh and cry in the same book. That is a very good writing.
Rating: 
Summary: Good intentions that fall short in the execution
Review: I am a sucker for any book that caters to the Northwest. I grew up in Richland, Washington within the shadow of the Hanford Nuclear site. When I saw that first-time writer Hein had written about growing up in the Palouse country of Eastern Washington and, even more consequential to me, being impacted by the radioactive fallout of the Hanford, this became a must read.
Hein is a teacher of children with cancer at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. Her writing experience before this book seems to have consisted of college essays. However, the experience of her family and her neighbors growing up on farms around Fairfield, Washington, approximately 25 miles south of Spokane emboldened her to write. In summary, of the ten farm families living in her extended neighborhood, seven of them had cases of cancer, thyroid malfunctions, lupus and other ailments that have taken the lives of many people. A not insignificant number of them were younger than fifty when they died. While never proven to be directly caused by the leak of radioactive material from Hanford, the density and severity of medical conditions led her and others to ask the obvious questions.
Within her immediate family, Hein's father suffered a brain hemmorage that almost killed him in 1967, when the author was 15 years old. In the fifties he had radical surgery to remove a cancerous thyroid, leaving him with a limp in his left leg and amoung other side effects. All of her three sisters and her mother take medication to compliment damaged thyroid glands. This is not uncommon in their area. The author herself has escaped any noticable illnesses.
While the connection between Hanford and public health has long been debated and studied over the years, this book does little to add to the data. Instead, Hein has written a memior that, through anectodal stories that are near and dear to her, tries to convey a sense of what it is like to see many around you afflicted in ways that are mysterious and frightening.
Unfortunately, while her motives are sound and honorable, Hein misses the mark. She spends far too much time writing about the commonplace life experiences of a farmgirl in the Palouse and not enough time writing about the illnesses and the connection with Hanford. For extended stretches of this book, I thought I was reading an essay entitled "How I Spent my First Sixteen Years of Life". While she writes with some decent passion and has some amusing stories to tell, she seems to have forgotten that the reason for writing this book is to describe the unusual and tragic consequences of the illnesses all around her. I wanted to stand on a soapbox and tell her, "Get to the point!". Page after page after page of describing the Flag Day parade in Fairfield, picnics to the creek, grooming horses, driving the farm machinery and other sundry memories did nothing to move the story along. This could have been a much more important book if Hein had balanced it with some research into Hanford and if she would have taken more time to not write about herself.
Rating:
Summary: Big Disappointment
Review: I am shocked at the rave reviews already posted about this book. I approached it knowing that it dealt with very important subject matter: Hanford and its pollution certainly needs to be looked at more widely. And, indeed, there is an important story in there somewhere, buried among the chit-chat, irrelevant gossip, and extraordinarily bad writing. It's too bad that the author found it necessary to throw in the name of every person, relevant to her story or otherwise, and to embody in the writing the family style she describes: one of denial and "keeping a cheeful face." She needed perspective, the courage to dig much deeper into the real story of sickness and sadness, and most of all, some craft lessons and a good editor. There are endless repetitions and numerous word usages that are just plain wrong (for a while I thought her mother was dead after she referred to her "demise," but it turned out she'd just had a short illness.) I felt as if I was traveling through a small town and ended up being kindly invited to join strangers for a holiday dinner. It was as if every distant relative was introduced and described in detail. The book had no momentum, no sense of shape, and was self-indulgent. Memoirs need to be as well written as any other kind of book. Unfortunately, too many of them seem to think that just talking onto the page is enough. I hope this important political story gets told in a readable fashion soon.
Rating:
Summary: The best of life woven with a deadly betrayal
Review: I first experienced the Palouse Hills in 1969 when, having just returned form Viet Nam, I was traveling in a 1956 Studebaker pick up with my wife, 11 month old daughter and our mostly Springer Spaniel, "Mut," to my next duty station, Davisville, Rhode Island, the debarkation point for the Antarctic in those days. We drove across the southern edge of the Palouse Hills and, being a farm kid, albeit from another very different agricultural region, I had always wondered what it must be like to live in that unique wheat growing region. After reading Teri Hein's "Atomic Farmgirl" I feel that I have become very familiar with the rhythms of life played out by those Lutheran wheat farmers. They love God, each other, their way of life and the land. But, they have suffered a plague that may well have been made worse by the deceit of their country. Atomic Farmgirl is a captivating book written is a lovely style that weaves huge threads of the best of life with the few but overwhelming broken and knotted strands of deadly lies that may have taken many of their beloved from them.
Rating:
Summary: extraordinary and haunting
Review: I got this book because of a great review in Creative Loafing that called it "extraordinary and haunting." I couldn't agree more. It's literary, it's historical, it's funny, it's tragic, it's good. And talk about timely.....in these days of warped homeland security, this book gives a birds eye view of what that is all about. The new foreward for the paperback version is , in two words, very concerning.
Rating:
Summary: extraordinary and haunting
Review: I got this book because of a great review in Creative Loafing that called it "extraordinary and haunting." I couldn't agree more. It's literary, it's historical, it's funny, it's tragic, it's good. And talk about timely.....in these days of warped homeland security, this book gives a birds eye view of what that is all about. The new foreward for the paperback version is , in two words, very concerning.
Rating:
Summary: extraordinary and haunting
Review: I got this book because of a great review in Creative Loafing that called it "extraordinary and haunting." I couldn't agree more. It's literary, it's historical, it's funny, it's tragic, it's good. And talk about timely.....in these days of warped homeland security, this book gives a birds eye view of what that is all about. The new foreward for the paperback version is , in two words, very concerning.
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