The Radium Girls

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The reader of the book notwithstanding (this review is of the audiobook version and sometimes I thought a computer generated voice was trolling down the pages), the book itself is a definite 5 out of 5 stars. I found the subject to be so intriguing and the skilled exposure of each woman's life so artfully revealed, that the reader's deficiencies were easily forgiven.

Though I'd heard of the "radium girls" before, referencing the early 20th century factory workers who contracted cancer from working with radium, I had no idea the suffering they'd endured, the struggles they met, the absolute painful and life-threatening actions they undertook to not only hold their past employers liable for their negligent and murderous actions, but to convince the public once and for all of the poisonous properties found in radium.

To hear in this audio book version the descriptors of puss oozing, blood flowing, jaw bones snapping, does tend to turn the stomach, perhaps even more so than reading it from the print or electronic formats, but perhaps it also made me even more sympathetic to the innocent girls' plight, as surely hearing it verbalized so graphically made it more real.

What happened to the girls shouldn't have ever happened. Moore's version is one everyone should read - either in print, electronically, or this audio edition, not just because heroes should be celebrated, but because tyrants should never be forgotten.

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