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

Reviews tagging 'Medical trauma'

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

133 reviews

notapenguin's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative medium-paced

4.0

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greenlivingaudioworm's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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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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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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tklear's review against another edition

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informative inspiring sad tense medium-paced

4.75

Great compilation of all the research executed in a tale that unfolds our sketchy capitalistic past.

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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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