Reviews with content warning for Chronic illness - The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

Reviews tagging 'Chronic illness'

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

109 reviews

greenlivingaudioworm's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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anyareads's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring sad medium-paced

4.25

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ehmannky's review against another edition

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dark emotional slow-paced

4.0

A horrifying tale of corporate negligence in the name of profit that led to hundreds of people who came in contact with the radium corporations having early and often incredibly painful deaths. I found it amazing how far these corporations would go to defend their profits, and how it echoes so much of what's happening in today's increasingly unregulated workplaces. It always seems like it's about to get better and then for decades these women just suffered needlessly and cruelly all because some men didn't want to pay a small portion of their profits for the women's care.

The things I didn't like were the audiobook's narrator (I know that's not the author's fault, but I did not care for her style of reading) and I didn't care for the author's note. I don't know, I just didn't really care why she cared about this story. I also think that more time could have been explored making connections to contemporary working conditions and more focus on how radium is still negatively impacting corporate workers today. But this isn't an academic book, and I can accept it for what it is.

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cuteasamuntin's review

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emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

I think the first time I cried while reading this was only a chapter or two in. At some point, I simply didn’t bother to wipe my eyes anymore. I found myself filled with righteous anger and furious anguish, unable to find my footing in the accustomed professional distance I have cultivated in my own career as a historian. Please note that the rest of this review contains spoilers consisting of readily-available historical information and references.

Going into this book, I had a passing familiarity with the Radium Girls and a pre-existing understanding of the long history of companies disregarding the welfare of their employees and customers in the name of profit. I thought I understood the Radium Girls’ role in the US developing stronger workers’ safety protections, accompanied by the description of teenage girls painting their teeth and nails with radium paint so they would glow. I knew they were lied to and that they died, but I’d always had the vague impression that it was perhaps 20 or so young women who died of radiation poisoning before they reached 30.

Kate Moore did an incredible job of honoring the lives and memories of the many, many women who were lied to, irreparably harmed, and emotionally abused and gaslit by their employers from the moment their work began in the early 1920s through their deaths at ages ranging from their teens to their nineties. Moore’s rage and grief at the injustice done to the America’s “ghost girls” is palpable throughout. Unlike I’ve experienced with many other works of popular history, I found this to bolster, rather than detract from, the narrative as it unfolded.

I was both professionally impressed and personally moved by Moore’s dedication to thorough research through compiling existing primary sources and performing her own oral history interviews of people related to the Radium Girls. She synthesized these sources into a cohesive and compelling narrative of US labor history. Moore clearly delineates between known facts and her own conjectures of intimate details or internal thoughts based on available evidence. Rather than distracting, I found Moore’s frequent integration of direct quotations from archival materials and her own interviews to be a powerful tool that also made me more willing to trust the points where she had to guess at missing details or the internal workings of the entities involved in this history.

While the work is densely packed with both immediately vital and contextually relevant but tangential information, I did not at any point find the major points obscured or the pacing to be slow or bogged down.

I find I have few words of my own to describe the companies who knew they were poisoning their employees and the towns around them, then lied, slandered, and cheated these people into their early, irradiated graves. Over 100 years later, we are still cleaning up after them. This book is a well-deserved memorial for the women whose pain and suffering led to better protections for workers and the entirety of the American public. May their memories be a blessing.

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lindsaysymes's review

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dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.75

What's might be worse than radiation poisoning? Capitalism (and men)

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milesss's review

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dark emotional informative inspiring sad tense fast-paced

5.0

Multiple times while reading I was moved to tears. An incredible account I could hardly put down. Engaging and emotional with attention to detail and honesty.

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camiclarkbooks's review against another edition

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dark informative slow-paced

4.0

This was probably not the book to read while dealing with unexplained, debilitating knee pain because it did have me wondering if I’d been exposed to copious amounts of radium (I was not).

“The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women” by Kate Moore was the thoroughly well researched story of the women who worked as watch dial painters during the late-1910s and 1920s. It was a glamorous, well-paying job. But little did the women know there was a terrible price to pay for working with paint made from luminous radium…

Moore’s book focuses on the women, giving them a voice for the first time in years. She shares with the reader the complete stories of the women across the United States who worked as dial painters, from the charmed lives they led while employed by the watch manufacturing companies to the horrible turn their health took just years later. Moore doesn’t shy away from the bleakest parts of their stories, or from the horrors of how their bodies literally began to fall apart.

The book was a fascinating look into a part of women’s labour history that I didn’t know much anything about. It was told in a way that blended firsthand accounts and interviews with information gleaned from newspapers and internal reports. The combination resulted in a knowledgeable story that humanized the women rather than just regulating them to be a forgotten part of history.

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