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Reviews tagging 'Medical content'
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
175 reviews
ids100's review against another edition
4.25
Graphic: Body horror, Cancer, Chronic illness, Death, Terminal illness, and Medical content
sylvestra's review against another edition
5.0
Graphic: Cancer, Death, Misogyny, and Medical content
Moderate: Infertility and Miscarriage
jasperkelley2015's review
4.5
Graphic: Cancer, Death, Infertility, Mental illness, Miscarriage, Terminal illness, Medical content, Grief, Murder, and Pregnancy
greenlivingaudioworm's review
5.0
Moderate: Body horror, Cancer, Chronic illness, Death, Infertility, Miscarriage, Terminal illness, Medical content, Grief, Medical trauma, Murder, Pregnancy, Gaslighting, and Injury/Injury detail
anyareads's review
4.25
Graphic: Cancer, Chronic illness, Death, Terminal illness, Medical content, and Gaslighting
Moderate: Body horror, Infertility, Miscarriage, Suicidal thoughts, Grief, and Injury/Injury detail
ehmannky's review against another edition
4.0
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.
Graphic: Chronic illness, Death, Terminal illness, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Death of parent
cuteasamuntin's review
5.0
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.
Graphic: Body horror, Chronic illness, Death, Terminal illness, Medical content, Grief, Gaslighting, and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Bullying, Cancer, Gore, Infertility, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Blood, Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, and War
Moderate to graphic descriptions oflindsaysymes's review
4.75
Graphic: Cancer, Chronic illness, Death, Miscarriage, Terminal illness, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Injury/Injury detail
tklear's review against another edition
4.75
Graphic: Cancer, Death, Domestic abuse, Infertility, Miscarriage, Physical abuse, Suicide, Medical content, Medical trauma, Abortion, Death of parent, Murder, and Injury/Injury detail
arayo's review
5.0
Graphic: Body horror, Death, and Medical content