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A review by futurama1979
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
4.0
⟶ 4.5/5 stars
I cried my eyes out through the last five chapters of this book. In her author's note, Moore says she wrote Radium Girls to tell the story of the radium industry and the suffering it cause focused on the women who hurt and died, instead of focused - like previous books on the subject - on the legal or medical proceedings. I think she did this with marked success. Not only does she tell the women's stories, but she does so with dedication and undeniable pathos.
It was a painful read, and rightly so. It wasn't easy to go through descriptions of the pain the women endured, or documents showing how callous and cruel the companies were in their refusal to help, but that's the point. It has to be a hard story; a book like this cannot be light. The impact of this story, told how Moore told it, is colossal.
The only thing preventing it from being a 5/5 is that sometimes Moore's language borders on a touch too melodramatic for me. Very powerful, but sometimes a bit too much. Moore was originally inspired to write the book because she directed a play on the same subject; that theater, that drama, comes through in her work, and it can feel a little overdone at moments. But overall, genuinely beautiful book.
I cried my eyes out through the last five chapters of this book. In her author's note, Moore says she wrote Radium Girls to tell the story of the radium industry and the suffering it cause focused on the women who hurt and died, instead of focused - like previous books on the subject - on the legal or medical proceedings. I think she did this with marked success. Not only does she tell the women's stories, but she does so with dedication and undeniable pathos.
It was a painful read, and rightly so. It wasn't easy to go through descriptions of the pain the women endured, or documents showing how callous and cruel the companies were in their refusal to help, but that's the point. It has to be a hard story; a book like this cannot be light. The impact of this story, told how Moore told it, is colossal.
The only thing preventing it from being a 5/5 is that sometimes Moore's language borders on a touch too melodramatic for me. Very powerful, but sometimes a bit too much. Moore was originally inspired to write the book because she directed a play on the same subject; that theater, that drama, comes through in her work, and it can feel a little overdone at moments. But overall, genuinely beautiful book.