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A review by beckchicken
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
3.75
The epilogue of this book should be 21st century required reading.
It can be easy to feel like something that happened almost 100 years ago is a story of the past, but with a half life of 1,000 years, radioactive material is so much more than just an occupational hazard for those working with it. This book adequately honors the memory of the workers of Radium Dial, and is impressively well researched, especially given that a lot of the information in the early years of Radium Dial was intentionally covered up, and many of the issues were not reported on as they happened. The lives of the workers are the primary focus of this book, and I appreciate that by the end we know quite a bit about each of them. I would have liked to have seen a more in depth presentation of the implications for years to come, since Radium pollution will last for thousands of years, and has to this day impacted multiple generations of families.
It can be easy to feel like something that happened almost 100 years ago is a story of the past, but with a half life of 1,000 years, radioactive material is so much more than just an occupational hazard for those working with it. This book adequately honors the memory of the workers of Radium Dial, and is impressively well researched, especially given that a lot of the information in the early years of Radium Dial was intentionally covered up, and many of the issues were not reported on as they happened. The lives of the workers are the primary focus of this book, and I appreciate that by the end we know quite a bit about each of them. I would have liked to have seen a more in depth presentation of the implications for years to come, since Radium pollution will last for thousands of years, and has to this day impacted multiple generations of families.