Wow. My jaw literally dropped at least ten times as I read through this unbelievable true story. On the one hand, it was heartbreaking and horrifying to read about not only what the women went through but the callousness of their employers who wouldn't even acknowledge their role in it. But on the other hand, reading about their strength and courage was so beautiful. The section on Tom and Catherine left me sobbing, it was just heart wrenching to see their love shine through in such a dark time. A tough book to read but I am so glad that I read it.

Try doing an internet search of the radium girls. Check out you-tube trailers for the play. Information is out there, but not like this. Kate Moore invested thousands of hours of her life, interviewing people who knew the "radium girls" while they were alive. She read letters, journals, court transcripts, and more.

It's a painful, difficult read because it REALLY HAPPENED. Science fiction novels and thrillers often spring from this premise. A great new product is invented or discovered. The medical community is as excited as the technology gurus - look at this! How awesome, how cool! It's very very expensive, though, and thank heaven for small miracles, or more people might have drank water from glass containers lined with radium.

At first, radium increases red blood cells, giving people the illusion of increased good health. Later, the necrosis sets in.

For many exposed to radium, the consequences are delayed. Years might pass before the horror sets in.

The scary/horrible antics of the corporations just set my teeth on edge. When their employees got sick and started dying, they'd say it was syphilis (!) and try to get out of paying the medical bills. Today, the lawsuits would be expected. I guess this is a sign that working conditions have improved, thanks in part to the court cases and publicity surrounding the radium girls.

Just discovered, via goodreads, a 1997 book on this, which I'd overlooked: "Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935" by Claudia Clark - "In the early 20th century, a group of women workers hired to apply luminous paint to watch faces and instrument dials found themselves among the first victims of radium poisoning. Claudia Clark's book tells the compelling story of these women, who at first had no idea that the tedious task of dial painting was any different from the other factory jobs available to them. But after repeated exposure to the radium-laced paint, they began to develop mysterious, often fatal illnesses that they traced to conditions in the workplace. Their fight to have their symptoms recognized as an industrial disease represents an important chapter in the history of modern health and labor policy. Clark's account emphasizes the social and political factors that influenced the responses of the workers, managers, government officials, medical specialists, and legal authorities involved in the case. She enriches the story by exploring contemporary disputes over workplace control, government intervention, and industry-backed medical research. Finally, in appraising the dial painters' campaign to secure compensation and prevention of further incidents--efforts launched with the help of the reform-minded, middle-class women of the Consumers' League--Clark is able to evaluate the achievements and shortcomings of the industrial health movement as a whole."

I want to come back to this and write a much more detailed commentary. Right now I have house guests and no time to think.

Kudos to Kate Moore for this exhaustive and informative look at an important part of our history.

This nonfiction book follows the lives (and deaths) of many young women that worked for radium companies in the 1910s and 1920s. It is well-written and informative. If you’re interested in learning how companies have been putting profits over people for centuries AND how people genuinely thought radiation was good for you AND how women are never taken seriously even when they are literally dying, then this book is for you. I just can(not) believe the extent to which these companies went to hide how terrible radium is for you and how difficult it was for people to realize that radiation (even AFTER the atomic bombs) can kill people and further, to not accept liability but demand the profits.

What I liked:
-It reads like a narrative. We learn about the young girls and women as if they were characters in a story. We learn about their hopes and dreams and they each have their own voice, usually achieved by interspersing quotes from themselves or friends and family during the scenes. Although it jumps from two different radium companies in different locations, the scenes are sequential and reference each other so you always have a good idea of where in time you are. There is also the same ominous repetition of “Lip... Dip... Paint..” that sent chills down my spine every time I read it.
-Moore rides the balance between patronizing and empowering these women. It’s extremely difficult to write a well-balanced story when everything is stacked towards patronizing the women: they are surrounded by men (doctors, bosses, lawyers), they develop disabilities from radiation, and they exist in a time when white women (and they are white women) were barely granted the right to vote. I was worried that their narrative would turn into inspirational disability triumph, but the women retained their right to self. Moore addressed how some of their family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers looked down on them and perhaps saw them only for the radium ravaging the bodies, without doing it herself.
-Inclusion of historical and social narratives. Moore adds just enough detail about the daily lives of these women to place them within the general history (especially of WWI, WWII, the 20′s and 30′s). It’s the exact amount of detail to understand the social context they would have faced without detracting and becoming an American history text book. Also, their socioeconomic standing is detailed in the background as a compounding factor without patronizing or idealizing their position.
-Although I personally (as a medically and scientifically inclined person) would have liked to see more than the basic explanation of how radium reacts in the body, I understand this is not the place for it. I think the descriptions are wonderfully explained so that anyone can understand them. At the very least, we are forced to see the women as themselves, not a list of signs and symptoms.


What I didn’t like:
-No pictures. I had the ebook ARC so perhaps the printed version and later ebook versions will have pictures but I feel as if I sorely missed out. There were many times when Moore described a certain picture so well as if I could see it right in front of me, and then it wasn’t included. It’s not actually a big deal, just a little sad.
-As a character-driven reader, I wanted to hear more about the characters. I loved the short snippets where Moore focused on one person’s journey, but just wanted more of it. A great portion of the book felt like a list of names and a short description. While these were good at showing the magnitude, I think we definitely needed more specific narratives. As I say this, I am also careful that this should not have been a character study as the purpose of the book is to tell the journey of The Radium Girls as a whole.

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"I wanted to showcase their shining spirits in a book that would tell their story – not just the story of the famous professionals who had helped them."

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore is a powerful and heart-breaking story about young girls who worked in radium-dial painting factories in the early 1900's where they painted luminous dials on watches and clocks. At that time everyone was told radium was healthy, some would say a miracle, and they were encouraged to drink it to cure many illnesses - it was dubbed "Liquid Sunshine". Soon it would be discovered by many of the scientists working with radium that it could indeed be very dangerous.

"What radium means to us today is a great romance in itself. but what it may mean to us tomorrow, no man can foretell." -- Dr. Sabin von Sochocky, founder of the Radium Luminous Material Corporation.

The book is very well-written and the background of each girl is described in great detail, highlighting the stories of each individual "radium girl", and you get the sense reading this horrific story that most of them thought they had the best job in the world.

I found it very hard to read at times because of all the suffering these girls had to go through, but it's an important part of history and one story I will never forget!

Highly Recommend!!!

A big thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An understated quote from the book itself… “It made for uncomfortable reading”. This horrifying story of the effects of industrial greed and callousness on the lives of the girls working in the radium dial painting industry was far more than uncomfortable to read. It reminds me that the mission of the EPA, OSHA, and the Congressional Ethics committees are far more important than any passing political phase, and must be protected. Thank you, Kate Moore, for a powerful reminder!

What a fascinating read on a part of history many may not know about it have ever thought about! A really well written book!

This is a true story about the young women who were exposed to radium and their struggle for justice.

In the early 1900's, young women took jobs painting luminous dials on watches and clocks. They were paid handsomely for the opportunity to work with radium, a new method that was all the rage. The girls needed a steady hand and at times, to make the brush they were using even finer,the girls had to put them in their mouths. Radium was everywhere though. It was on their clothes, in the air and even in their food and drinks. The women started having health problems with their jaws, loose teeth and various bone abnormalities.

The manufactures withheld information about the dangers of radium. The subject has been meticulously researched. This is quite a heartbreaking read of the women's fight for justice. I do recommend this book.

I would like to thank NetGalley, SOURCEBOOKS (non-fiction) and the author Kate Moore for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was such an intense book, I can hardly put into words what these women went through all because someone wanted to make a buck. They were told it was safe, over and over again, but the whole time they knew it wasn't. These women were dying terribly gruesome deaths, and they were being brushed under the carpet like what was happening was the women's fault. They stood up for them selves and brought light to the terrible crimes committed against them. Radium Girls takes you through the stories of some of those women. Their life and death. How they glowed in the dark from the radium powder. How well to do women worked in the factories for a few days so they could know what it was like to be a "Ghost" girl. This read was intense but great. If you like a good historical book, this is the one.

Ms. Moore does an exemplary job telling a heartbreaking story of horrific tragedy, initial medical and scientific ignorance, deliberate medical malpractice when faced with knowledge, corporate malfeasance and lies, and romantic triumph despite such broad...tragedy... in an conversational form. Another story, not unlike and pre-dating Big Tobacco's deliberate deceptions, of horrific, excruciating deaths due directly to occupational exposure to something at first unknown and later deliberately - yes, I've used that word and its forms three times...deliberately - hidden to protect profits over people. Frak away the anthropogenic global warming, and the lessons of this story, lead, chlorofluorocarbons, asbestos, and more be damned.

A riveting account of the women who painted the luminous dials on watches and instruments during World War One and the 20s. They literally glowed and glimmered with the radium in the paint, but they weren't aware that it was getting into their bones and teeth, leading to radium poisoning which would cripple their bodies and ultimately kill them. The companies they worked for assured them they were in no danger, but as the girls fell ill one by one, they began to realize that the job they had found glamorous and fun had done them irreparable harm. Their struggle for justice would ultimately lead to our modern worker safety laws as well as a better scientific understanding of the harm radiation causes the human body. Highly recommended.

This book approached the story of the radium girls from an emotional, personal perspective. Rather than relying too heavily on the legal side of the story, Kate Moore has put the focus on the women involved - their stories, their suffering, the confusion of the doctors who first treated this, at the time, unknown affliction. The legal battle is thoroughly covered while maintaining an emotional connection to the people behind the story.

Lip… dip… paint.

We start the story in 1917, beginning with the story of Katherine Schaub, not quite fifteen years of age starting a new job at the watch dial factory of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in New Jersey. The first day of her apprenticeship she was to observe the other dial-painters and learn how to paint the many watch faces they did every day with the paint they mixed from a fine powder with the fine camel hair brushes that they put in their mouth (called lip-pointing) that would make the brushes sharp and perfect for painting the fine dial numbers on the watches that were all the craze in America. At its peak hundreds of women were employed in this occupation.

Lip… dip… paint.

The magic ingredient was radium, the most expensive element that sold for $120,000 (2.2 million in today’s money) for a single gram that made everything glow around it. Radium was seen as a miracle. It was touted as a cure from cancerous growths to mundane things such as hay-fever, gout and constipation. Radium was laced into bandages and pills and even put in water for people to drink as a health tonic. Dubbed liquid sunshine, it was marketed to people in every manner possible. There were radium lingerie, and food and toothpaste (to make your smile whiter,) cosmetics and it was even used as bug spray.

Sabin von Sochocky was the thirty-four year old doctor who originally invented the luminous paint used to paint the dials in 1913 after studying under the world’s greatest authorities on the subject of radium, the Curies themselves. It was Pierre Currie who said that impact with radium externally would easily kill a man in 1903. Von Sochocky was aware of the dangers of radium, having suffered burns and cutting off the tip of his finger when it came into contact with radium because he knew that it would eat away at healthy, as well as cancerous tissue on the body. But to the dial-painters, it was said to bring a rosy blush to their cheeks, that they would be healthy and that there was nothing to fear from their contact with radium.

From the benign beginning of the book we are taken into a story that beggars belief. The lives of hundreds of women would eventually be tragically affected by their close contact with the element called radium. What often began as terrible pain in the jaw and teeth coming loose, rotting or falling out altogether, the women would suffer terribly from the effects of radium poisoning. But it took years for their claims to be heard, much less taken heed to, and many women died not knowing what was causing their suffering.

Moore also takes up step by step over what the company (United States Radium Corporation) took to block and deny the claims the women made, from covering up medical proof by hiding test results to even stealing the affected jaw bone of a woman from her autopsy so that it couldn’t be investigated by other medically trained people. There is no depth to which the men of these companies wouldn’t sink to to avoid taking responsibility for poisoning the women.

Lip… dip… paint.

Woman by woman Moore takes us through the early stages of their illness and often gives harrowing details of the suffering the women endured. Pieces of jaw bone coming up through the soft skin under the tongue, legs shrivelling and becoming lame, foul smelling pus filling their mouths, bones breaking as if they were insubstantial, sarcoma’s growing all over their bodies and the never ceasing pain. The women were accused of all manner of coarseness, such as claiming they had sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis or that they had died of something as simple as diphtheria. The women’s reputations were dragged through the dirt and they were made to feel guilty for taking their former employer to task when it was seen as the backbone of the town it worked in, creating jobs in the middle of the Great Depression.

By February 18th, 1933, Katherine Schaub was dead at the age of thirty from the effects of radiation poisoning. Katherine and a number of the women she worked with became the first recorded American industrial poisoning incidents on modern safety records. The radioactive material eventually built up in the bodies of the women and nearly all died of radioactive poisoning.

Lip… dip… paint.

Kate Moore writes a horrific piece of modern industrial history with the ease of reading a well written novel. It is honest in its depictions of what happened, but never slides into the way of suffocating pity. She paints the women as courageous and determined and not in the least self-serving. It looks also at the feminist issue of women’s lives mattering less than men’s even in our recent history. This is a book to read to learn from, to never allow again and to pay tribute to the brave women who died needlessly for the sake of corporate wealth.

Compelling, wretched, courageous, exacting and concise, this is a book worthy of your time.

There are a few things I would like to start off with before I go into this book review. The first being is that this book really hit me hard. I had to set it down a few times because the emotional roller coaster it put me through. This book talks about not only extremely brave and courageous women, but also how they suffered. Secondly, I wanted to let you know that I received this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

In this book Kate Moore talks about workers rights and women’s rights as humans. She tells the story of those “lucky” women who were picked to paint clock faces 31409135with the shining element Radium. She writes this historical book with support from documentation, but presents it in a humanizing way. I have to say as someone who studied history, this is one of the few books that made me feel. Many history based texts are filled with facts to a point the reader is disconnected from the events. That is not the case for The Radium Girls, from almost the start I saw these people as humans, not a statistic. In the beginning of the book Moore states “no book existed that put the radium girls center stage and told the story from their perspective” (location 22, netgally PDF version), well I have to say she succeed, she gave them a voice and a spotlight.

I really liked how much thought was put into this book. Moore not just read about these women in the archives, but traveled and visited their families, their loved ones. She took the time to know them outside of the documents. This can be seen throughout the book. I also enjoyed that this book was written more as a narrative, like we were following these women, not just reading about them. I honestly found it refreshing. I also liked how raw it was, Moore not only wanted you to connect with these women and give them a voice, but to also showed everything they went through. Earlier I said that Moore discusses workers rights and women’s rights and that is true. These women were told that this element was not harmful in the slightest, to the point they put their used brushes into their mouths. They were lied to, as humans and as workers. Now I also said that this book discussed women’s rights, and it does. During this time period, women were seen as less, they were not valued. Regardless, they came together to fight for what was right. It really blew me away how brave these women were.

Over all I decided to give this book a 4/5 stars. It was a great read and I highly suggest it to anyone who is interested in learning about how Radium was used, its effects, workers rights, and those who are interesting in reading about strong women. But, as I stated earlier, this book can really affect you. It goes into detail how being exposed to Radium effected these women, which I think is important, but might not be for everyone. This book is expected to be published on May 2nd, 2017.

4 STARS!

If you are interested in finding out more about The Radium Girls by Kate Moore or reading more reviews click here to go over to the goodreads page.

Excellent story! Looking forward to reading more by this author! Highly recommend!

Another fascinating nonfiction story of women we never learned about in history books, but should have. In the early 20th century, these young women in their teen and twenties started working in the exciting new field of painting watch dials with radium so they would glow in the dark. The companies told them it was perfectly safe. Yet the women began to suffer mysterious pains and illnesses that no one could diagnose. When they finally learned the truth, the women decided to band together and fight back. A powerful and immersive story of friendship, love and courage in the face of nearly insurmountable odds. Highly recommended.

The information contained in this book is shocking and much of the detail contained within it heart-wrenching. It exposes a serious "cover up" by American businessmen who knowingly let young women use a poisonous substance to paint luminous clock dials, despite being informed early on of the dangers of doing so.When, when girl after girl began to show symptoms of radium poisoning, which led to crippling bone fractures and sarcomas-bone tumours- the company men continued not only to use the radium, but to fight tenaciously in the courts against claims by ex-employees for compensation. Kate Moore has described a large number of the young victims in great detail, taking them from their early days as dial-painters, delighting in being referred to as "shining girls", an adjective which describes not only the glowing effects of the radium traces left on their hair and bodies, and the air of good health, vitality and energy which they shared as they looked forward to marriage, children, and long lives. Moore then takes the reader through each girl's medical decline in close and often shocking detail, at the same time describing the various court proceedings and callous responses to their plight by the men who put profit and business success before morality. Though, at times, this can be a challenging read, the material the book contains is really significant, and so I would definitely recommend it to other readers.

A boo that demands to be read! Full review on Goodreads

It’s not very often that I hand out 5 stars, but this book deserves every single one. The Radium Girls are the young women exposed to radium while painting luminescent numbers on clock faces. Little did they know that they were being poisoned using their lip/dip/paint technique. Using their lips to create a fine point in the paint brush hairs, they were ingesting minute amounts of radium.

The author said “I wanted to showcase their shining spirits in a book that would tell their story – not just the story of the famous professionals who had helped them.” She did so by creating a powerful story told from the women’s perspective, and she did a wonderful job of researching, piecing together diaries, letters and interviews into a heartbreaking tale of inner strength, courage and friendship. Once the women began to become ill, they stood by each other and worried more about each other than themselves. What made it all the more poignant was that they were so young, just getting married and having children, when their radium poisoning symptoms started. I cannot imagine living with the immense pain these women endured.

Just as powerful is the injustice of the men who thought so little of these women. They encouraged the women to continue their dangerous work by lying to them and telling them it was safe work, even good for them. Even after their teeth started to fall out, their jawbones were removed, sarcomas appeared, brittle bones broke easily, and women were dying. How did they live with themselves? Their greed made them lie to these women and do everything in their power to ensure they wouldn’t be compensated a dime. Yet these women found strength in numbers and stood up to their previous employer and the company’s doctors and lawyers. They stood together to fight for justice, and did it for each other. These are women I would have loved to have known.

What a way to end Women's History Month. Saddest history lesson ever. If you've never heard of the The Radium Girls, you need to read this book. The Radium Girls tells the story of corporate greed and dishonesty, showcasing the injustice done when the businesses refused to protect these women hardworking women.

A fascinating, incredibly moving true story about the radium factories during WWII. It was hard to put down while at times it was hard to read the details about the work conditions, the medical problems, and how so many lives were ruined. Highly recommended.