The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

The Girls relates the stories of a number of women who went to work at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility that was helping to develop the atomic bomb in the 1940s--unbeknownst to them. Each job was a small cog in the machinery, secrecy was strictly enforced, and very few people really knew what the ultimate big picture was. (And many of them were surprised when the bombs were used in Japan and they discovered what they had been contributing to.)

The chapters about the individual women--including a nurse, a statistician, a janitor--are interspersed with chapters about the development of atomic energy (a lot of which, I'll admit, went over my head).
I loved how the women tried to turn their less-than-ideal housing into real homes. My favorite anecdote involved the woman who got a worker to turn scrap metal into baking tins for her. Even the guard who was supposed to keep her from cooking in her unit turned a blind eye when she shared her homemade creations with him. You have to love that kind of ingenuity.