Hardcover (May 2017), 496 pages.
Publisher: Sourcebooks.
BookBrowse Rating: 5/5, Critics' Consensus:  4.3/5
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In 1915, Austrian-born Sabin von Sochocky developed a luminescent paint that used radium to create a glow-in-the-dark effect. Realizing the material could be used for many purposes, he opened the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, to produce the substance, and as a side business, contracted with manufacturers to create watch faces that could be read in the dark.

He hired girls - some as young as 14 - to work in the shop as dial painters. Using fine brushes, the girls delicately traced the timepiece's hands and numerals with the glowing substance. The instruments weren't quite sharp enough to achieve the precision required, so they employed a technique called "lip pointing," whereby the brush was put in the mouth before being dipped in the radium: "lip-dip-paint"...and repeat. Over time, ingesting the radioactive substance caused radium poisoning, and many of the girls in Orange - as well as those at a competing business, the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois - died horrible deaths. The companies involved knew about the dangers of radium, but denied culpability, in some cases outright lying about the harm they caused.

While the lawsuits brought against these two corporations have been widely documented, the stories of the individual women have never been central to the narrative.... Beyond the focus on the individuals impacted by blatant corporate negligence, the author creates tension as the girls become ill. No one in Orange or in Ottawa had seen radium poisoning before, and doctors and dentists were puzzled by what could cause teeth to fall out with the sockets failing to heal, jaws to disintegrate, and joints to freeze in place. Indeed, as the girls died, their death certificates inaccurately listed causes such as syphilis and diphtheria. Although readers know that radium was the culprit, Moore still keeps the suspense high; I felt like I was reading a "whodunnit" in which I knew who the murderer was but had to wait for the lead detective to figure it out...

This exceptionally compelling book should appeal to a wide audience, including those who typically don't read non-fiction. I can't recommend The Radium Girls highly enough. ... continued

Beyond the Book: Radium
 

Every time we review a book we also explore a related topic. Here is a recent "beyond the book" article for The Radium Girls by Kate Moore:

The high demand for radium is at the heart of Kate Moore's book, The Radium Girls. Radium is a naturally occurring element, most of which is found in uranium ore; it makes up approximately 1 part per trillion of the Earth's crust, making it our planet's 84th most common component. One ton of uranium ore can contain as little as 0.14 grams of radium. We're constantly exposed to this highly toxic metal, but in very minute amounts.

The element was discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie in December 1898. While working to separate uranium from a mineral called pitchblende, Marie discovered that the material remaining after the uranium was removed was actually more radioactive than the chemical they originally sought. After refining tons of pitchblende (now known as uranite), Curie narrowed down the source of the radiation to two previously unknown elements: polonium and radium. Curie further discovered that radium - a soft, shiny, silvery metal - was about 3 million times more radioactive than uranium. The radium sample, which was identified as a new element, emitted a faint blue glow in the dark. ... continued

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