Shirley seemed to be doomed from the beginning. Founded by a Vaudevillian huckster who touted it as a seaside haven despite the sand bar that blocks access to the shore, the town has been plagued by one disaster after another — a UFO, a childhood cancer cluster, and a mysterious federal nuclear laboratory in nearby Brookhaven that leaked toxic nuclear and chemical waste into the aquifer from which the residents unknowingly drew their well water.

This is Kelly McMasters' account of growing up in a cursed town and loving it anyway, and of a girl's awakening to tragedy and to a sense of mission. Told in a deliciously engaging voice, Welcome to Shirley balances the bitter with the sweet, the funny with the infuriating, in an unforgettable story of working class Long Island.

"Journalist McMasters's look at the toxic relationship between Brookhaven National Laboratory and the neighboring Long Island towns careens into a tedious memoir of childhood. McMasters moved to the unpromising working-class town of Shirley in the early 1970s when she was five and her golf pro father got a job with Hampton Hills Golf & Country Club. For a child without siblings, the street teeming with young families was a magical place to grow up, and McMasters made lifelong girlfriends. However, the town was economically depressed, despite its optimistic founding by Walter T. Shirley in the early 1950s. And Shirley was in the shadow of the top-secret Brookhaven atomic research laboratory, whose nuclear reactor was completed in 1965 regardless of the dangers posed to the growing community. Tritium, the waste from nuclear experiments, leaked into the adjacent rivers and aquifers for decades, and the author ploddingly traces the seepage into private wells. The town flirted with a name change to bolster property values, just as residents were plagued by alarming cases of cancer. Indeed, thanks to the Long Island Breast Cancer Research Project of 1993, a 'cluster' of cases was discovered within a 15-mile radius of Brookhaven. Intermittently, McMasters summons considerable research and critical powers, yet the litany of Shirley's resident misery resists an elegant synthesis." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Growing up in Shirley, New York, a down-on-its-luck working- class town at the opposite end of the upscale Hamptons on Long Island, McMasters (writing, Columbia U.), watched her mother and a disproportionate number of neighbors die of cancer. She chronicles the story of the longtime dumping of nuclear waste by a nearby leaking federal nuclear laboratory into the town's water table, and how the beleaguered town fared when the lawyer in the Love Canal case took the case in 1996. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

"McMasters tells the story…with passion and clarity. She also 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, O Magazine

"Journalist McMasters writes with precision, affection, and venom about the history of her hometown...Joining the growing circle of environmental health memoirists, McMasters marshals the facts and articulates feelings with eloquence and drama, telling stories of personal suffering to expose crimes against the public, and nature itself." Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Powerful...debut explores the author's happy childhood next to a controversial nuclear laboratory that leaked toxic waste into a Long Island aquifer. McMasters follows up this moving material with pages that delve into case-study numbers and scientific quotes ... Sincere and expertly researched." Kirkus Reviews

"All places are mute till someone speaks for them — this book bears marvelous, scalding witness to the kind of horror that's been repeated in so many spots that we've almost gone numb. But no one will be numb after reading this account." Bill McKibben, author of The Bill McKibben Reader

"McMasters has written an eloquent love song to the small, unfashionable town where she grew up, with echoes of such great writers as Thornton Wilder and Edgar Lee Masters and Upton Sinclair. This is a great book about small town America. It should be required reading for us all." Abigail Thomas, author of the memoir A Three Dog Life

"Welcome to Shirley is an uplifting and disturbing hybrid of the personal and the journalistic, slipping between profound nostalgia and an adult reckoning with the realities of her gritty town. McMasters' voice is devastating in its clarity and urgency and great tenderness." Meredith Hall, author Without A Map: a Memoir

"The heartbreak of this story is in the small details, which leave a lingering sense of lives that might be forgotten if they were not recalled here. Both personal and political, and steadily compelling, Welcome to Shirley is a thoughtful, delicate elegy to an ideal." Lydia Millet, author of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and How the Dead Dream

"In the era of Love Canal, A Civil Action and An Inconvenient Truth, McMasters delivers this all-American atomic town to us with a rare precision. McMasters' is an American life as ordinary — and wholly remarkable — as our damaged industrial centuries: Norman Rockwell with his brush dipped in isotopes." Susanne Antonetta, author of Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir

"This intimate portrait of hardscrabble Shirley, Long Island shows through individual lives — and deaths — how environmental injustice works." Suzannah Lessard, author of Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family

Kelly McMasters' essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Newsday, Elle Décor, Metropolis, and Time Out New York, among others. She teaches writing at Columbia University and mediabistro.com and is the co-director of the KGB Nonfiction Reading Series in the East Village. She lives in Manhattan and northeast Pennsylvania with her husband, the painter Mark Milroy.