A memoir of life in a nuclear research town.

This review is being written by a white-trash guy who grew up in village a lot like author Kelly McMasters' blue-collar hometown, Shirley, on Long Island's south shore. It's one of those places beaten up by the weather and changing economic conditions, one that rich people speed by on their way to the fashionable Hamptons. Places such as Patchogue, where I grew up, Shirley and its neighbor, Mastic, have not been the subject of much literature.

McMasters is correcting that with a disturbing, ambitious book twining her 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.

Home is a very heavy nucleus.