Reviews tagging 'Blood'

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

49 reviews

alexismong720's review

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative sad tense medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Cancer, Infertility, Domestic abuse, Gaslighting, Death, Grief, Terminal illness, Chronic illness, Medical content, Miscarriage, and Murder

jonie_rich's review against another edition

dark inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.5

I thought this was beautifully written! Be that as it may, you’re going to have to be in a good headspace to read this. It is grotesque, heartbreaking, infuriating, and chilling. The post script genuinely caused me to gasp. I had to take a break a couple of days in and read something else for a little while. However, I absolutely recommend this book, especially if this is a subject or a time period that you’re interested in. The author clearly did her research. I learned a lot while I was reading it and found it very compelling.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Body horror, Cancer, Chronic illness, Emotional abuse, Child death, Bullying, Confinement, Gore, Mental illness, Blood, Misogyny, Pregnancy, Sexism, Suicidal thoughts, Miscarriage, Animal death, Death, Gaslighting, Terminal illness, Grief, Infertility, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, and Medical trauma

achiunicorn's review

dark emotional informative medium-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical trauma, Cancer, Chronic illness, Death, Miscarriage, Body horror, Blood, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, and Terminal illness

princessdana36's review

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced

4.5

4.5 stars. I really loved the book and the accounts of all of the Radium Girls. I do think it was written in too much detail, but the stories were amazing. I couldn’t imagine fighting with every single last breath I had for justice.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Gaslighting, Cancer, Body horror, Medical trauma, Injury/Injury detail, Grief, and Blood

notapenguin's review against another edition

dark emotional informative medium-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Cancer, Chronic illness, Death, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Blood

Moderate: Domestic abuse, Infertility, and Miscarriage

cuteasamuntin's review

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Grief, Body horror, Medical content, Terminal illness, Injury/Injury detail, Chronic illness, and Gaslighting

Minor: Bullying, Cancer, Miscarriage, War, Fire/Fire injury, Infertility, Blood, Misogyny, Death of parent, and Gore

Moderate to graphic descriptions of

the effects of radiation, dental and medical procedures, acute and chronic infections, privacy violations, radioactive pollution, and criminal neglect of worker safety.

milesss's review

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Terminal illness, Sexism, Injury/Injury detail, Misogyny, Chronic illness, Death, Gore, and Cancer

Moderate: Grief, Medical content, Eating disorder, Infertility, Death of parent, Gaslighting, and Miscarriage

Minor: Abortion, War, and Suicidal thoughts

camiclarkbooks's review against another edition

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Terminal illness, Body horror, Chronic illness, Blood, Medical trauma, Medical content, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Death and Gaslighting

mondovertigo's review against another edition

dark informative sad medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Miscarriage, Gaslighting, Death, Blood, Terminal illness, Chronic illness, Medical trauma, Medical content, Misogyny, Injury/Injury detail, Infertility, Grief, Gore, and Cancer

Moderate: War

Minor: Abortion

miaaa_lenaaa's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.75

This is important
I didnt like a lot of the writing but i think a lot more people need to know about this and i respect her for writing it
Its often infuriating and hard to read and so fucking sad but this narrative needs to be told. The way that women and workers are constantly and consistently ignored for company gain does make you start to lose all hope in humanity thought.
That the worst possible scenario was barely listened to (and arguably not listened to) leaves little room for hope

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Misogyny, Death, Medical content, Miscarriage, Blood, Body horror, Cancer, Chronic illness, Death of parent, Murder, Terminal illness, Gaslighting, Medical trauma, and Grief