This is the first non fiction book I’ve read in a long time and it is a good one. I had never read anything about the tragedy that consumed a large number of young women working with radium, painting dials on clocks and other instrument panels.

In the beginning radium was actually being hailed as a “health wonder” but it was soon discovered by many of the scientists working with radium that it could indeed be very dangerous. The young women took these jobs, offered by large factories, because they paid well and they were assured that there was nothing harmful in the paint that they were using. The most horrible part of the story was the telling that most of the girls actually put the brushes in their mouths to get a pointed tip to make their painting more precise!

The manufacturer’s deliberately withheld the information about the danger of this method of painting even when there were girls already having terrible side effects from the radium. Their bodies started to fall apart, many of them with jaw bone disintegration, others with symptoms in other bones in their bodies. This went on for a decade with information withheld, no assistance with medical bills, etc. and women dying from the complications. In the end some of them finally received justice but of course it was too late for many of the women.

This book is obviously meticulously researched and much time taken to delve into the stories of many individual girls. The problem I had with the reading was that there were simply so many women and the book wasn’t really told in a very linear fashion so that I began to forget which woman had what symptoms, what their doctors had done, etc. I found this confusing and I think I would have preferred that the author narrow the number of victims down to a smaller number in order to keep the information and stories flowing in a more readable format.

I appreciate the information that I learned from this book and would recommend it to fans of non fiction. It is well worth the read.

*will also post to Amazon upon publication

Posted to amazon on May 5, 2017

A really stunning and emotive book that tells the real life stories of dozens of young women who unknowingly to them were exposed to radium poisoning at work painting clock dials and the devastating effects this would have. Detailing the gruesome, horrifying illnesses they developed, the legal wranglings to have the cause and culpability recognised, and their final legacy; this book is one that I think will stay with me forever.

Everybody is already talking about this book. It’s fantastic. The true story of factory girls, painting watch faces with radium is one of my favorites so far of 2017. It’s suspenseful, heartbreaking, harrowing, infuriating & I could not put it down. I wanted to read more about these girls & the instant love affair with all things Radium. Can you fathom a doctor encouraging children to play & handle Radium? Can you picture a woman’s housecoat that glowed as bright as the aurora borealis after a shift painting watches? Are you able to imagine the horror a young girl must have felt to look into a the mirror on a dark night & see her jawbone illuminate which confirmed her death sentence? This is a perfect bookclub selection & sure to spur some lively discussions regarding government, safety in the workplace & women’s entry in the workplace. This book is amazing & Kate's writing style is unparalleled. We are Really Into This book.

I'm not going to sugar coat this. It is a heart breaking book. It is also incredibly inspiring. The author personalizes the girls that worked as dial painters beginning in the 1920s where radium was the new magic chemical. It healed, made your cheeks rosy, and was completely harmless. The girls were mostly very young, loved life, and had an optimistic future ahead of them. They were paid well to paint the dials with preciseness using their lips to point their brushes.

Naturally, we know how very dangerous radium is. One fact I found extremely fascinating is that radium consists of three known radioactive rays; alpha, beta, and gamma. Alpha rays do not do much damage as they can be stopped by something as thin as a piece of paper or skin. The other rays are the ones that burn the skin and cause damage from the inside out. Yet alpha rays are the most damaging if they get past the epidermis. Like if you lick your paintbrush into a point in order to paint a dial.

The book follows the women personally through their deteriorating health and then efforts to find medical help, compel the companies to pay for the medical help, and change practices. The corruption in the companies is appalling. The women use every bit of their waning energy to make changes in policy and be reimbursed for medical bills which have devastated them particularly in the wake of the Depression. They are pioneers in changing the policies of safety in the workplace and holding companies accountable for injury.

I feel like I got to know so many of the women personally through the narrative provided. It was historical and biographical yet almost written as a novel.

http://amusingreviews.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-radium-girls-dark-story-of-americas.html

Sensitively and thoughtfully written, the greatest value of this terrific book is to remind us of how easily things can go wrong. I liked that this was written from the perspective of the women who were affected. These are women to be admired for their tenacity in fighting the system. Moore has done a tremendous amount of research and she's written a book that will appeal to the non-scientist layman. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. This is not a fun read, because of the topic, but it's a very valuable and ultimately inspiring one. Highly recommend!

This book is as extraordinary as the story it tells. It grips the attention firmly from the very beginning and doesn't let go till the last pages.

The story might be interesting for many people, especially for those who live in America. Not long after radium was discovered more and more ways to use it surfaced, one of them was making watches that shine in the dark. A lot of young women got employed to paint the dials of the watches with a paint made of radium, and then the girls started getting very very ill. Despite their responsibility the company didn't want to compensate the employees.

Thus the girls' long and very brave fight started against their employer. The corporate greed and the ruthless behavior of the executives could be very similar to how some companies work in today's world, which in itself is a very interesting parallel yet this case is special because these girls were one of the first to have such victory over a company, their case inspired new safety guidelines nationwide.

The book was inspired by the personal stories of these incredible people, exploring the consequences of such negligence on a deeply touching personal level while giving an account of the terrible pains they had to suffer. I think this makes the value of this writing even higher since often history is told from a detached point of view, leaving out what actually made the events possible.

It's evident that the author has put a tremendous amount of work into it, and the result is a 480 pages long comprehensive material of what happened. The writing is smooth, easy flowing although there are some too melodramatic descriptions for my tastes. There are a lot of names to keep in mind but I think it's manageable even though I'm usually bad at remembering them.

I'd give 4.5 stars and recommend it to everyone who likes to read about extraordinary lives.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a honest review.

A harrowing and important read.

This book is about workers’ rights. It’s about industrial safety. It’s about damaging legal constraints and progress. It’s about women’s rights in the workplace and what importance has been placed on that over time. It’s about corporate greed and the lengths some people will go to keep making a profit.

It’s about radium and what we did and didn’t know about it.

In 1901 we knew radium was dangerous, but it was also incredibly useful – particularly to war efforts. Through the early 1910s and through the roaring twenties women – poor, working class women – were paid good money to paint clock dials and aeronautic instruments with radium so they would glow in the dark. They were trained to “lip point” their brushes (“Lip…dip…paint”), ingesting miniscule amounts with each stroke. They were told, repeatedly, that the radium was safe. The workers handled radium with their bare hands. They painted themselves with it for fun. One of their instructors ate it off a spatula to prove a point.

As a modern reader it’s terrifying. We know how deadly serious radioactive substances are, but this is the story – in part – about how we learned that. About how radium was originally presented and how perceptions about it changed, a lot of it because of these women.

This book does not pull the punch about what happens to these women. Nor should it. Glossing over what happened to the Radium Girls’ bodies and, in some cases, mental health would be a disservice. While the material is confronting Moore depicts the women’s ongoing health woes, pains, and bodily disfigurations with dignity and respect.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about women persisting despite adversity to fight for what’s important and this is an example for how long women have been doing it. The women remembered here banded together to make a difference for their families and future workers even when they were racking up crippling medical and legal debts. Even when their bodies were falling apart – some slow over decades, some horrifyingly fast. Even when their towns and communities turned away from them because they needed the work the companies provided.

People don’t like to face hard truths; it’s easier to stay silent and avoid the problem than it is to stand up. It’s easier to do your job and keep your house and suffer.

But it’s not right.

Reading about the Radium Girls felt like bearing witness. Take a knee, listen, and pay your respects.

One of the strengths of Moore’s presentation is how well she’s grounded the work with quotes she includes from the Radium Girls themselves and their descendants and supporters. Reading what the girls were told, what they felt, thought and experienced humanises the facts.

The necessary size of the cast meant that at points I found the cases and histories of the individual women hard to keep track of, but for a case such as this I’d prefer the writer go this way rather than focus on one or two individual cases. Because the number of women affected by this over decades – both identified and not – is staggering, and the landmark cases and decisions presented here are collective efforts. You can’t attribute Catherine Donohue’s case win just to her when all the other women were standing beside her the whole way. You can’t ignore the earlier cases and examples of groups of women shouting about what had been done to them just because their case wasn’t the one that won. They all built on one another. The information, the body of evidence, the experiences all built from one woman to the next.

This book made me angry and made me cry. The postscript particularly is equal parts frustrating and comforting. These girls mattered – their bodies and their work changed how we deal with radioactive substances, what we know about radioactive effects on the body, and nuclear safety more broadly.

This book is compelling, powerful and necessary – the story is still relevant today and worth yelling about.

A copy of this book was kindly provided by Sourcebooks and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Times have changed, and with them our understanding of toxicity. In the 1920’s “on sale were radium jockstraps and lingerie, radium butter, radium milk, radium toothpaste (guaranteeing a brighter smile with every brushing) and even a range of Radior cosmetics”. The radium factory girls wore “their good dresses to the plant so that they would become luminous when they went out to parties later.” After all, radium was safe. Except radium was never safe – and that had been known since very soon after its discovery in 1898. But no-one thought to tell the girls working with radium every day.
“They put the brush to their lips, … dipped it in the radium … and painted the dials. It was a ‘lip, dip, paint routine’ … all day long”. The idea of being in a room with an unshielded radioactive source I find frightening enough, but to put a brush that has been in contact with radium into one’s mouth just fills me with a visceral horror. But much worse was to come.
The book introduces you to several groups of vivacious, attractive young women, aged fourteen to about thirty. All with their lives ahead of them, their hopes for the future, their loves, their friends, their community – and then describes how, one by one, they sicken, prematurely age and die. They suffered months, years of excruciating pain, mouths filled with pus, teeth dropping out, jawbone disintegrating, huge bone tumours, physical deformities … And that was nowhere near the worst.
The women could not get a diagnosis for what ailed them. It was apparent that something was wrong: “Many of the girls I knew and had worked with in the plant began to die off alarmingly fast ... They were all young women, in good health. It seemed odd.” But they could not get the factory executives to take them seriously, nor the doctors or dentists to really investigate the sicknesses: “they didn’t share notes, and so each case was viewed in isolation”.
And every visit to the doctor or dentist cost money – lots of money. The sick women could no longer work – indeed some were fired for looking ill – so money became an increasingly acute problem.
Then in the Great Depression, their husbands and fathers lost their work. In Ottawa “the women had split the town—and the disapproval went right to the top, with ‘business interests, politicians, and the clergy’ all against the women bringing suit” against one of the few remaining employers in the region.
The radium companies lied, back-tracked, and did everything they could to discredit the women. Their so-called company doctor was a fraud, they hid evidence, and refused to put safety measures into place for the women still working in their factories.
The women’s fight for justice took years, time that many of the women did not have. Their tenacity and heroism in a fight against overwhelming odds was awe inspiring. They were not seeking a huge pay out, but an acknowledgement of their suffering, and funds to cover their medical expenses. They continued to fight through the courts, even when literally on their death beds. Some helped from beyond the grave.
This book made me sick to the stomach to read what these women had to endure – and so, so angry – but through their fight and dedication, we have stringent safety measures today covering all use of radioactive substances. They left their mark on legislation relating to occupational health, on international nuclear treaties, and on our understanding of the health risks of radioactivity. The Radium Girls left behind a monumental legacy – not just for their colleagues and their towns, but for the whole world.
I received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Greetings Bookworms,

I am super stoked to discuss today’s book! *I received a complimentary copy of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore from the publisher for review consideration. All gushing is 100% reflective of my true opinion. I’m just THAT excited about this book.*

A little bit of background: my husband is from a small town in Illinois. It’s not close enough to Chicago to be considered a suburb, but not really part of what’s considered “Central Illinois” either. It’s known to locals as the Illinois Valley, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot to people not from the area. I grew up in a Chicago suburb that had zero history. I mean, the “historical district” is a set of houses built in the 1960s. There are nearby suburbs with more history, but my town had been farmland for a very long time and it is seriously lacking in old time charm. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been so drawn to places with old brick downtown sections and interesting historical tidbits. My husband’s corner of Illinois is chock full of these types of stories, which I’ve been gobbling up since we started dating 14 years ago.

One of the stories he told me took place in the town right next door to his in Ottawa, Illinois. We were driving past the old Westclox factory one day (which is technically in Peru, another nearby town, but I digress) and he told me that back in the day, the dials of the watches made for Westclox were painted with radioactive paint and that it made a lot of employees sick. (To be fair to Westclox, these were third party dial painting operations, though, I’d be surprised if they didn’t have some problems with the radiation too, because it’s friggin’ RADIATION.) The mysterious sickness was due in large part to the fact that the workers were instructed to put the paintbrushes in their mouths. I was SURE my husband had gotten part of the story wrong, because seriously. I don’t put paint in my mouth, let alone radioactive paint. I thought it had to be an urban legend.

It. Was. Not. An. Urban. Legend. The Radium Girls by Kate Moore is a fascinating account of what went on in these radium dial factories, both in New Jersey and small town Illinois. Women in the 1910s-1930s were employed in factories painting radium infused glow-in-the-dark material on watch dials and other clock faces. Toward the beginning of this time period, radium, in small amounts, was considered to be safe, and possibly even healthy. Workers were instructed to put those radioactive paint brushes into their mouths in order to get a precise point for the fine detail work. Yes. This is a real thing that happened. I’m still trying to process it.

Of course, a few years into this practice, it became clear that all was not safe and healthy where radium ingestion is concerned. The girls (and I say “girls” because some were as young as 14 and they usually left the company by their early 20s) began coming down with mysterious tooth and jaw ailments, muscle pains, and scores of other symptoms. And, as corporations are wont to do when they’re in jeopardy of losing a crap load of money, they tried to blame anything else (STDs, bad luck, other diseases) for the girls’ ailments rather than take responsibility.

The book covers the processes used in the factories, some rather gruesome details about the effects the women with radium poisoning suffered, and the legal battles that followed in order to get the women some compensation for having bits of jawbone fall out all over the place. It all just hit SO close to home considering that I’ve spent a decent amount of time in Ottawa. I’ve driven past Saint Columba, the church many of the girls attended, oodles of times. In later years, Argonne National Laboratory began doing followup studies on the remains of the women who perished and survivors of Radium Dial. The cancer rate for survivors was something like 80%, and they were cancers so rare that they couldn’t have been caused by anything but the radium poisoning. The remains of early victims have been studied as well and are, to this day, highly radioactive. It’s estimated they will be for another 1500-3000 years.

For the love, you guys, READ THIS BOOK. It was amazing and informative and it never dragged or got too bogged down in the science the way some non-fiction does. The human stories abound. It’ll break your heart. You’ll learn things. It’s amazing. The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. All the stars.

Kate Moore’s Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women turned out to be a timely book for me, for two reasons. First, I read it the weekend before I had a dentist appointment. (This turned out to be a bad idea.) Second, and more seriously, Radium Girls tells a story that demonstrates in no uncertain terms that American workers need government regulations and agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Before these agencies existed, several companies poisoned hundreds of women with radioactive paint and fought them hard in court to keep from paying their medical bills and funeral expenses.

Between World War I and World War II, companies like the US Radium Company and Radium Dials filled millions of orders for luminescent clock and watch dials. At the time, the ingredient that made the paint used on these dials glow was radium. We know now that radium, if swallowed, is used by the body like calcium. Radium heads straight for the bones, where it bombards the body with radioactivity. Before World War I, scientists knew that that radium could cause burns if it came in contact with skin for a few hours. The men who were hired to mix the paint had rules in place to prevent them from overexposure. The women who actually painted with this stuff, however, did not.

Women were hired and paid by the dial. They were taught to use small brushes to carefully paint the tiny numbers on the dials. To make the best point on the brush, they would use their lips. For every dial, the women would ingest small amounts of radium multiple times. When the women went home, they often found that their clothes, shoes, and skin would glow in the dark. When they started to get sick with horrific tooth, jaw, and bone problems, doctors and dentists had no idea what was wrong with these women. Some suspected phossy jaw, an old occupational disease that caused bone necrosis in the jaw due to exposure to phosphorus because the teeth and jaws of the Radium Girls seemed to rot faster the more they tried to remove necrotic material. (Seriously, these women died terrible, terrible deaths. Readers who don’t have strong stomachs may have to skip sections.)

New Jersey (where the biggest radium dial companies were located) had a law that recognized that employers were liable for compensation for occupational diseases. Unfortunately for these women, radium poisoning wasn’t one of the listed diseases. Worse, the statute of limitations was ridiculously short. On top of that, the radium companies were so wealthy, few lawyers were willing to help the Radium Girls once they started fighting for compensation.

Most of Radium Girls follows the ins and outs of their legal battles in the 1920s and 30s. Because Moore spent the opening chapters of this book introducing readers to individual women and their husbands and families, reading about their legal struggles and deaths becomes especially infuriating and poignant, all at the same time. Seeing doors (literal and figurative) slammed in their faces filled me with outrage on their behalf. And because we now know what radium does to the body (Moore explains the effects for readers who don’t), we know that most of these women are doomed and their struggles are races against time.

Radium Girls should be required reading in a time when the White House and Congress are working on rolling back funding for and regulations from OSHA and the EPA. Those regulations are in place for very good reasons. Anyone who argues that companies won’t pollute or harm their workers are kidding themselves. As US Radium and Radium Dials show us, profits are king to big business—even when their products cause their employees to glow in the dark and slowly poison those employees from the inside out.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

4.5 Stars

Imagine you have your first job. Imagine how proud you are. Or maybe it is not your first job, but it is a fun job where you get to socialize as long as you get your job done. A job that allows you to do something important for your country. Imagine you are helping your friends and sisters obtain a job as well. Imagine you work with a super cool substance which glows in the dark. A substance you believe is safe - your employer tells you is safe. A substance that one young woman painted on her own teeth before a date. A substance that Thomas Edison deemed dangerous. A substance you paint on. A substance that some women were know to eat the paint because they enjoyed it.

Now, Imagine how painful it must be to have your teeth fall out, to have your jaw come out, to have the bones in your face disintegrate. Imagine your bones begin to hurt so bad you can barely move. Imagine one leg suddenly becoming 4 inches shorter than the other. Imagine bleeding to death. Imagine giving birth to a stillborn baby. Imagine going from being young and healthy to being dead in less than a week.

The poor women in this book did not have to imagine any of these things because they lived this. This book is about the young women who wanted to do their part to help the war effort during World War I. These women worked in radium factories painting the faces on clocks. They were working with a luminous material and were come to be called as the "shining girls" They took a tremendous amount of pride in their jobs and many liked that they could "glow" in the dark. But then one by one they began having dental problems. The dental problems were only the beginning.

The women began to die horribly painful deaths. Their loved ones left with questions unanswered. Most of the women were misdiagnosed in the beginning. Eventually their deaths became connected and the dangers of radium and radium poisoning were known. Thus began a huge scandal and a fight for workers rights.

The writing of this book was captivating. I found myself absorbed in these women's stories. Even as they were dying, these women tried hard to complete their doctors tests in order to determine if radium was to blame for their impending death. The Author did a wonderful job in bringing these women's stories to life. To show how they and their families had to battle for their rights. How a company can deny accountability and turn their back on these women. How their loved ones and lawyers fought for them and their rights.

Wowza. What a wonderfully informative, sad, hopeful and interesting book. I learned a lot.I love when a book makes me think, feel, and learn. I had all of these things going on when I read this book. I highly recommend this book.

I would like to thank Kate Moore and Net Galley for allowing me to read this book.
I could not put this book down, it is a must read. I kept hoping and praying for relief for these beautiful young women. What a tragedy! All the suffering they endured to be pushed aside and ignored by the government while a company keeps lying and is deceitful to those who helped it grow just so they can continue making money. Thank you again Kate Moore for taking the time to tell their story and breathe life into the ghost girls and kudos to all who helped them in their plight.

This is one of those books that will stick with you long after you read it. It is also a book that was impossible to read for long stretches at a time. Not because the content wasn’t interesting and engrossing, but because it was so heart-wrenching and actually made me mad as hell at points.

Radium Girls tells the story of the radium dial painters at the beginning of the 20th century. Not much was known about radium, this new product that offered so many different things. People thought it was a miracle cure and a beauty product and so much more. Radium paint was used on clocks and military instruments to make them glow and was a growing industry. Radium was touted for its beneficial properties because no one believed it was harmful.

The girls hired to be radium dial painters believed themselves lucky. They had good paying jobs in an industry that seemed to be going somewhere. They were young, beautiful and carefree and now had spending money of their own. Every day they came to work and dipped their brushes into the radium paint, lipped them to create a point and painted their dials. Dip, lip, point over and over again day after day never knowing that what they were putting in their mouths was a poison that would destroy their bodies and lives. They were told radium would make them glow which it did. They glowed in the dark from all the radium dust that settled on them during the day. They were told it was safe which it was not.

The radium girls found that they started developing tooth aches and pains in their limbs or backs. When they went to the dentist to have a tooth pulled it would not heal. Plaster casts on limbs did nothing to stop the pain and the degeneration. Doctors were stumped by what was going on with them. Multiple doctors and dentists tried to help the girls, but no one really suspected the radium for years. The companies making radium dials definitely didn’t inform doctors or their staff that radium was a poison even though many of them knew it was. It took years of medical appointments, doctor investigations, horrible deaths and numerous lawsuits before any real progress was made to help the girls debilitated by the radium poisoning.

What galled me the most about this story was the reaction from the companies who employed the girls. These companies blatantly lied about radium poisoning, dismissed the girls even though they clearly had horrible medical issues, and did everything in their power to make sure they had no legal responsibility for their actions. It was a bit fascinating to see the lengths they would go to cover up and deny the information on the harmful effects of radium. Clearly they only had the company’s bottom line as a concern and not the health of their employees or the moral responsibility they should have had. It was actually satisfying to read that they were finally found responsible for the radium poisoning and that laws were eventually changed so that things like this couldn’t happen again.

This was a fascinating and deeply disturbing look at a part of history I was not aware of. I highly recommend it. Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book.

I don't even know where to begin with reviewing this book! It was fascinating, yet upsetting at the same time. The Radium Girls tells the story of the dial painters who, after initially enjoying the work, found their health dramatically failing. The book tells the story of a number of the dial painters, and their work, family life and declining health. It tells the story of the company they were working for and the benefits and pitfalls that came with the job. Doctors and dentists who treated the women, and their fight to get the illness linked to the radium they were ingesting through the technique of lip, dip, paint as they did the intricate job of painting the dials. If you don't read another non fiction book this year, you'd certainly be missing out if you pass this one by. Highly recommended. With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.

Kate Moore's non-fiction book, The Radium Girls, is a compelling read. She explores the true story about how women were poisoned with radium and how corporations tried to cover it up. Reading about all of their ailments was very difficult. This book is well researched and reads like a narrative. I do think the book is rather long. However, I am glad to have read it.

I have never once heard about the Radium Girls tragedy, which is strange because I am an avid reader of history. Therefore, I was intrigued by the premise of this book. I did a quick internet search on this topic and was aghast upon learning that this really happened...that such a horrific death sentence was meted out to these innocent young women in the early 1900s simply for the glory of a buck. True, the owners of the Radium Dial Company might not have known the severity of the radioactive properties of the glow paint used to apply the numbers on watches and clocks. However, once the girls started getting sick, the bosses tried their level best to hide the fact of the radium poisoning since business was booming. It's said that if you stand over the graves of these radium poisoning victims with a geiger counter, to this day it will react wildly. This is not surprising since it's said that the radioactivity will last for roughly 1,600 years!

The author succeeded in writing a beautiful story about a horrid subject, as she so humanized the affected women. I was swept away by her atmospheric description of the 1920s, a much simpler time. To hear about the close knit families, their love of the Parish Church and the girls' excitement at working in the "watch studio" was a glorious read. The thought of these lovely young women with the whole of their lives ahead of them taught to put their paint brushes in their mouths to make the thin bristles more pointy...thinking of the poisonous radium unknowingly destroying their bodies...it's such a poignant and heart-wrenching story to read. Yet, the author somehow writes of it majestically with beauty and compassion. Ironically, it made this book one of the most delightful I have read in some time.

Intermittently while reading this book, I was compelled to perform internet searches of these "Radium Girls," as they mounted a very hard fought court battle for money damages against Radium Dial Company. It made for splashy newspaper articles at the time, so there are pictures available online that will put a face on these unfortunate victims. There is also a documentary on YouTube about them that was quite fascinating. I cannot believe that I never heard about these women who helped change safety standards on the job. Many of their bodies were exhumed for testing decades after their deaths, and lucky survivors continued to submit themselves for testing twice a year as well. This experience in history served to provide information on how the human body withstands radioactivity.

This is a very important book in our history, and it should be made into a major motion picture film. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already!

I first heard about these women when I read The Poisoner's Handbook. And it stuck with me, hard. These poor women had no idea what they were getting themselves into, and how hard they had to fight is awful, and heart breaking.

This book is really well put together, and in depth. Upsettingly so. It's not an easy read. But it's such an important moment in history, a time when getting hurt on the job was just par for the course, and suck it up, buttercup. These women were dying from the inside out, and had to fight for even the smallest bit of justice.

Such a worthwhile read. Such a difficult read.

Wow! I had never learned about "radium" paint having been used in US workshops. A bit of history left untaught during my time in school. A very horrifyingly sad piece of history too. Kate Moore brings these women's lives and trials to the forefront. The book starts off more like a documentary of facts, but around the second half of the book the story grows and envelops a saga of sorrow, spirit, strength, hope and ultimately death. The book could have been improved upon, it became somewhat repetitive in trying to convey just how awful things were. A look at history that I for one will never forget. I found myself needing to put it down on several occasions, it's very difficult to read while crying. Haunting.

I first heard of the radium girls after reading my usual crime fiction fare with a book set in 1920’s New York. They weren’t a large part of the book, but the covering up of what the radium was doing to them was a key part of the plot. So, when I saw The Radium Girls, a work of non-fiction that told the story of these women, I jumped at the chance to read it.

I am really glad I did because it shone a light on the lives of a group of incredibly brave women, some of whom literally shone thanks to the radium that stuck to their skin and made its way into their bodies and bones. Nowadays, of course, we think how could it happen but, in the 20’s radium was seen as a cure-all and nothing to be afraid of.  And when people in authority told people without it things, they tended to believe what they were told.

Radium was used in so many products, including luminous paint – which is what the women used to paint watch dials and instrument panels, pointing the tip of the brush with their tounges and consuming radium each time. It is no wonder they got ill. The fact that it took so long to link their illnesses to radium is perhaps more surprising – but no one considered it for a long time because of the variety of symptoms they suffered through.
Perhaps if the companies the women worked for had been honest about what they knew about the dangers of radium, it might have been clearer sooner, but they weren’t – resulting in the deaths of hundred (thousands possibly) of women. Reading about it is tragic but also left me shocked and angry by the behaviour of their employers.  I know it was a long time ago, but it doesn’t make what they did any more understandable or forgivable.

Most of the women were young, teenagers even, with their lives ahead of them. Many were dead before they reached 30, their bodies eaten away from the inside and in excruciating pain.  How any of them managed to fight back against the companies that had condemned them to death is amazing. But fight they did, changing the law and paving the way for better workers rights along the way.

The Radium Girls takes you on their journey, focusing on specific women who were key in the fight. This made it real and it made it personal. If I’m honest,  I read on, hoping for the same miracle the women were waiting for – a cure.  It made compelling reading.  I have to say I wish the writing was a little better – at times it felt a little repetitive and at others that my heart strings were being tugged at when they didn’t need to be because I was already emotionally involved.

Whilst this didn’t take away from the story itself, which was powerful and still has lessons for us I think about corporate greed and how little workers are sometime respected, it does mean that I liked vs. loved this one. Still, a recommended read.

In this dystopian novel by Kate Moore, women are becoming disabled and dying horrible deaths from the effects of radiation while the companies employing them lie about test results and continue to make excuses for why they are not responsible for what is happening to their workers. Meanwhile, government agencies trip over themselves denying their ability to do anything about the issue.

“Under state law, it (Department of Labor) had no authority to stop an industrial process even if it was harmful. As a result of these factors, the department now gave the plant a clean bill of health – and completely stopped looking into the dial-painters’ illnesses.”

Oh wait! This isn’t fiction! This actually happened! And Ms. Moore gives us a bittersweetly detailed look at how these women went from lively young ladies to old crones losing parts of their jaws, growing tumors, and eventually dying. Following their stories is heartbreaking and a startling reminder that a person cannot expect their employer or government to look out for the individual’s best interests. While taking place almost 100 years ago, this story feels very relevant and timely.