“The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.”

Having been curious about the “Radium Girls”, it was interesting to read a book dedicated solely to them (I had previously read about them in passing in both The Poisoner’s Handbook and A Beautiful Poison). I just wish the writing was not so “rah! rah! rah! Stars and Stripes Forever”, going into the plucky, industrious, indomitable spirit of the women. So basically I spent the entire book having either

or

in my mind and it was slightly distracting. And also horrible, because this is not the type of subject you should really be even slightly laughing about. Especially since that spirit manifested in one case in having an arm amputated at the shoulder as to try and stop the cancer from spreading as fast; it worked, but that is an extreme decision that no one should really have to make.

It was fascinating to see Clarence Darrow’s and Frances Perkin’s names up; yet another instance in the long line of books I’ve read all winding up interconnected. I never realized that not only were a couple of factories around old familiar stomping grounds (I’ve eaten in a restaurant that is down the street from the site of the Newark Factory), but that I could also visit several of their gravesites. I did not realize that the Radium Girls helped to lead to the finding of OSHA; nor that the last time women started dying due to radium poisoning at their worksite was 1978, when my mother was in her Junior year of College, and the company lied to them and tried to cover it up. Boy, tell me corporations haven’t really changed without telling me corporations haven’t really changed.

The Reading Group Guide in the book was just laughable; one of the questions was “Although radium can be seen as an evil entity in the book, it’s also been used for the greater good. Explore how radium has changed the world in a positive way. Do you feel it was worth the sacrifice?”, and all I could think of was

Again, not a subject that should cause you to lapse into Pop Culture Memes. Also, for a book that was allegedly written to bring the intimate, personal lives of the women to the forefront, in some ways the book largely glossed over the surface of them. Which in a way is not that surprising, as Kate Moore got all her information from public records and what recollections about the women their children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews could either remember or dig up from familial mementos.

No surprise at all that the company, medical professionals, and in some ways society at large characterized them `as nothing more than “hysterical females”; nor that one of the largest boosts to their lawsuits was that due to their illnesses, the women were not able to tend to the households or their husbands as much as social mores expected them to. The prime example would be the gaslighting over the danger: companies hid the results of radioactivity tests from the women; the owner told one woman not to lip-point, a fact he later claimed not to remember during the subsequent trial; even in the case of Peg Looney, where to hide that the paint was toxic, the company sent a doctor to autopsy her body and remove her cancerous jawbone before the family doctor could even show up to the funeral parlor. The family didn’t even know her jawbone was missing until the Sarbonne Institute had Peg’s body exhumed to check it for radioactivity and asked her survivors where it was.

One thing that bothered me, and I will note this is a personal preference, is that there is a preview to the author’s next work nestled in between the Author’s Note and the Acknowledgements. I personally think it’s bad enough there are previews of books in other books (if I’m going to read the book I’d rather not have an entire chapter printed up somewhere else that I’m going to what? Read twice?), but if you’re going to, put them at the very end of the book, not where people have to flip past them to continue reading.

The fact that this is only the third book written to have the Radium Girls as its focus is just sad: after all these women went through, they deserve better than a largely simplistically written book like this.