The Radium Girls : The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous-the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls.
As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses. The very thing that had made them feel alive-their work-was in fact slowly killing them: they had been poisoned by the radium paint. Yet their employers denied all responsibility. And so, in the face of unimaginable suffering-in the face of death-these courageous women refused to accept their fate quietly, and instead became determined to fight for justice.
Drawing on previously unpublished sources-including diaries, letters, and court transcripts, as well as original interviews with the women's relatives-The Radium Girls is an intimate narrative account of an unforgettable true story. It is the powerful tale of a group of ordinary women from the Roaring Twenties, who themselves learned how to roar.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This gripping history lesson uncovers one of the most shocking—and underreported—medical crises of the 20th century. After radium was discovered in 1898, its glow-in-the-dark quality started to be used to paint luminous dials onto watches and clocks, and the “radium girls” who did this full-time for the United States Radium Corporation had coveted jobs—until they started to get radiation poisoning. Journalist Kate Moore’s immersive writing explains why thousands of workers became ill and hundreds died—painters were instructed to sharpen their brushes to a point using their mouths, so they were actively ingesting the poisonous paint. Angela Brazil’s sympathetic narration makes the medical horrors many of the women went through feel even more heartbreaking. This story of what the radium girls had to endure to stand up against a powerful corporation is both fascinating and necessary.