I owe my friend Chelsi a great deal. After all, she introduced me to my husband! Over the last 17 years that I've been friends with her, she has also recommended some pretty stellar books. A while back, she said she was listening to a fascinating story about a group of women who were hired to paint dials for watches and airplanes with paint containing radium. Chelsi was pretty brief, explaining that these women didn't know why their teeth were falling out or why they were getting sick, but that was pretty much all I knew.
Fast-forward to this Fall, I saw that a friend's daughter was involved in a play about these Radium Girls. I decided to finally go and pick up the book and quickly became obsessed! The story really is fascinating, but maybe not in the way you would suspect.
This book is longer - 400+ pages. It's got a lot of medical and scientific information, but you don't have to understand most of it to follow the story. And if you have trouble keeping people straight, that's really okay too - you'll still be able to follow fairly well. If you have trouble reading about pus, teeth falling out, bones protruding from skin, or hemorrhaging, you might want to pass on this book. While those things do come up often, they aren't the crux of the book, so I suggest you at least take a look if you think you can handle it or skim over some of it without trouble.
In all honesty, I don't think the writing itself is spectacularly engaging, but the story really is! These women were told lie after lie after lie. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. But with all the debates about medical laws, forced vaccination, and the recalling of so many "safe" drugs lately, this story is super important to understand.
Here's the gist of it.
This book follows the lives of a few groups of women, all of whom worked in a dial-painting factory at some point. They are in a couple specific places and work for various amounts of time. As more and more of them become ill, they band together to try and fight for the help they need in their expenses and facilitating better safety regulations for industrial workers. They also end up working toward making sure that medical information is available and not hidden, no matter what terrible results that research reveals.
These women were courageous. I cannot imagine enduring the suffering that so many of them had no choice but to live under, especially without access to the medical information we now have. When I put myself in their shoes, I wonder how I would have reacted to being diagnosed, poked and prodded, and led astray the way they were. Many of these women died without ever knowing the truth about how or why they got sick, and my heart aches for them and their families.
Over the course of the book, they are involved in several litigations; some successful and some not. In the end, it's shocking what these companies get away with or at least try to get away with. And it's appalling how long this information was hidden. You'll also get to hear about the long-term affects that radium had on the community, which is crazy, fascinating, and scary.
Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in medicine, disease, or the legalities surrounding worker's compensation and the discoveries of harmful chemicals/elements. You will definitely be shocked by what people said was safe! Despite the writing not being flowery or fancy, the story was truly compelling and I had trouble putting the book down - I just needed to know what would happen.
I haven't read any other books like this (though I have had a couple more recommended to me), so I can't really compare it to anything very fairly. Maybe you can tell me! Have you read The Radium Girls? Does it remind you of other books you have read?
If you like The Radium Girls, Chelsi also recommends The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond. My mom and older sister have read that first one and have the same type of comments about the fascinating and scary vibe of the book. Give them a shot and tell me what you think!
Come visit here again next week as we dive into some "Get to Know You" posts. We hope this review helps guide your decisions of what to read and helps you glean the most you can from you time spent in your books!
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