This is so good and so important. Thank you for such a terrible, lovely, hopeful story.

Please see my review on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1974418947

The Radium Girls is one of the most enthralling and heartbreaking books I've read in years. Excellently written & meticulously researched, it tells the true story of young women in the early 1900's who painted luminous watch/clock dial faces with radium so that they would glow in the dark. Radium was fairly new, and, at the time, much touted as a health boon. The girls considered themselves lucky to work in the factory earning high wages, and laughed at the fact that they, too, glowed in the dark due to the radium dust they carried home with them on their skin, hair and clothes.

The laughter soon ceased however, as one by one, they came down with horrific, agonizing ailments caused by radiation poisoning. The medical community was at a loss as such ailments had never been seen before. When the cases were tied together and deemed to be a result of radiation poisoning, the company denied all responsibility saying that the amount of radium used was minute, and refused to recognize the dangerous work atmosphere they provided. They told the workers to continue as they always had, doing nothing to protect them. Lawsuits were filed by some of the women in an attempt to protect the other workers and to cover their own medical expenses. Delay after delay, trial after trial, these courageous women held the course and eventually brought about major and massive changes to the American work environment. Thanks to them, medical and science communities gained vast amounts of knowledge about the impacts of radiation, and laws were put into place to protect workers. It's because of them that America now has federal health standards and occupational safety standards.

Kate Moore does an excellent job of bringing several of these courageous young women to life. We see them when they are young and vibrant, and as they fall victims to the radiation poisoning. Many of the passages are quite difficult to read as the author describes the agony that each of them suffered before their deaths. We feel their pain, their hope, their disgust at the corporation that denied any responsibility for their suffering, their anxiety of waiting for justice and we grieve as one by one, they die.

Making it all even more poignant is the fact stated "Radium has been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary."

An excellent, eye-opening book! Many thanks to Netgalley, the author, and SourceBooks for providing me with an e-ARC of this fabulous book!!

I hadn't heard much about these girls, so it was great to find out about the lives of the Radium girls. I am very into reading thing about historical happenings, especially more indepth writing about the lives of the people living it and not just about the event itself. Thankyou for a very well written and interesting book. Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this wonderful book

Meticulously researched and skillfully written, this book opened my eyes to an industry and occupation I never knew existed. It also opened my heart to the grief and misery suffered by its workers. I will never see these three words the same again; lip...dip...paint.

This was so interesting, but also devastating. The radium girls changed the face of American industry and health and safety law, but to do so, many of them had to die terrible deaths. This non fiction retelling reads like fiction, as you draw near to so many of these girls and follow them to their doom. Their fight is inspiring.

The email I received asked me not to review the book. If this changes, please let me know as it was outstanding.

A heartbreaking account of the Radium Girls, young women afflicted by radiation exposure during the early 20th century. The book takes us into their workplaces, where they laughed and gossiped while painting watch dials with luminous, radium-based paint. At the time, radium was already known to be dangerous, at least in scientific circles. Somewhat paradoxically it was also touted as miracle cure-all, sold in tonics and expensive spa treatments.

Of course the radium in the paint would eventually work its way into the women's bones, destroying their bodies from within. The havoc it wreaked is truly horrifying, made that much worse by the protracted legal battles they endured in an effort to obtain compensation from the companies that had employed them.

The author's focus is on the women themselves: their personalities, their experiences, their suffering and long battle for justice. The style is deliberately biographical, rather than scientific (I personally would have appreciated a little chemistry refresher, just for some context, but that can easily be found elsewhere).

Moore has done mountains of research, and in order to do justice to each one of these individual women, she pours details on to the page with great empathy. At times the sheer volume of biographical detail makes it hard to keep track, the many victims begin to blur together and the writing becomes repetitive. The court room scenes come alive, rife with emotion and lawyerly dramatics.

My favourite sections were the epilogue and post-script, where the scope widened to include the women's legacy to science and to occupational safety. I wished these sections had been expanded and formed a larger part of the book. Because this story is tragic and moving at the level of personal struggle, and momentous in its historical context.

For the dial painters in Newark and Orange, New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois, life seemed pretty fantastic when they lucked out and gained employment with the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation and the U.S. Radium Corporation, respectively. They got to work a good job, painting clock faces with luminous paint made with the miracle chemical radium. Their employers reassured them that the radium wasn’t dangerous – in fact, it had health benefits! Paid for the quantity of dials they painted, they were instructed to form the tips of their paintbrushes with their lips, thus ensuring the brush points remained fine enough to do such detail work. The girls left work each day, literally glowing in the dark from the paint dust that settled on their clothes and skin. The women were young and vibrant, excited to be taking part in such an exciting operation. It seemed like life couldn’t get any better.

Until some of the workers started developing pains in their mouths. Until their teeth started to fall out. Until pieces of their <i>jawbones</i> started to fall out. Something was desperately wrong, but no doctor could offer a diagnoses. After all, these women shouldn’t be getting sick; they weren’t working with anything dangerous, right?

In today's world of corporations having the same rights as individuals, <i>The Radium Girls</i> is a vital, brutal reminder of what happens when corporations value the profit margin over the lives of their employees. Kate Moore delivers an honest and appalling account of what happened to these women, many of whose lives were destroyed due to the dangerous work they were doing without ever being informed of the danger. These women are no passive wallflowers; Moore also delves into the legal battles these women fought repeatedly, often at great financial cost to themselves and their families, to achieve justice for themselves and the ones who died before them. She also examines the duplicitousness and culpability of the corporations themselves and the tactics they used to discredit the girls. This all leads to a compelling and heart-wrenching story that should also serve as a warning for what happens when businesses are not held accountable for their actions.

For the record, though, the social history recounted in <i>The Radium Girls</i> is what garners the four star rating; the writing is a 2.5-3 star at best. Moore’s research is to be commended as detailed and in-depth in its coverage of the deteriorating conditions of the dials painters, their struggles to gain compensation and the toll the radium took on their lives. And her writing is very easy to read even if the subject matter is horrific. Unfortunately, Moore’s fervent desire to tell the Radium Girls’ story colors her writing at times with an emotional bias that for me detracted from the book. What happened to these women is awful enough without the occasional emotional tug-on-the-heartstrings; most readers really won’t need to be coerced into feeling more outraged on the women’s behalf. Also, personal beef - she occasionally peppered the narrative, outside of direct quotes, with slang and phrasing I'm assuming from the time period, which I guess was supposed to function as setting the tone or some kind of narrative flavoring but (for me anyway) just came across as anachronistic and threw me out of the narrative.

That said, I still will heartily recommend this book to everyone, because this is a story that needs to be remembered. I found Moore’s postscript even more chilling. While most of the book focuses on the dial painters who were working, (and then suffering and dying) in the early to mid-1900’s, her postscript covers a third company, Luminous Processes, and the dial painters who up until 1978 (only 39 years ago) were still working with luminous paint made with radium but without the proper safety standards. They were told, like the other dial painters before them, that they would be safe. When the plant was eventually shut down, the radiation levels were 1,666 times higher than was safe; sixty-five out of a hundred workers had died. That this is still occurring, even after everything the original dial painters went through, is infuriating and frightening.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free e-ARC for a review.

First, I want to thank Sourcebooks for even giving me an ARC of this book. I had no experience with reviewing nonfiction books and they still approved me on Netgalley. Second, I want to thank someone (I don’t remember who now) for writing an article about the Radium Girls sometime last year. Without that article, I would never have looked twice at this book. Third, I want to thank Kate Moore for writing this book.

The book is amazing. I knew nothing about this and got quite an education. It might not have been the education Moore meant me to get, but it is an education nonetheless. This story should be required reading: for history, for law, for science. It’s a complex series of interlocking networks that radiate out into the world and tell of failures and learning and redemption.

The central figures of this book are the dial painters themselves, young women who earned far more money than compatriots but were killed by their work. It’s a difficult story, at times horribly gruesome (and some of the descriptions are not for the weak of stomach), and yet filled with love. They were doing their patriotic duty for their country, a country at war with soldiers who needed the luminescent watches. They were horribly betrayed by their bosses. They were abandoned to die by the companies they made millions for and fought at every step of the way when they sought relief for what had been done to them. They were martyrs and mothers, sisters and wives, gay young girls of the 20s. And they were sick and dying from radium poisoning.

Moore’s narrative is pretty close to a straight history of two groups of women: one in Orange, New Jersey and one in Ottawa, Illinois. Both groups fight back against what is being done. Both sets of women have their stories told. The story is built on the idea of giving voices to the dial painters. Moore does an excellent job of using primary sources to paint the picture: letters, diaries, remembered conversations, first person accounts, and newspaper articles of the day. Moore has meticulously researched this book and it shows. There is an intimacy in this telling that is both terribly painful and defiantly uplifting.

There were two flaws in the book. For the most part, Moore keeps herself out of the narrative. But a few times, she indulges in speaking directly to the readers, putting herself as a filter between the reader and the dial painters. It wasn’t necessary. The story alone gets the message across. In the ARC copy, the only photo is the one of Peg Looney at age 8. Other photos are referenced and I assume are in the hardback edition coming out. I would have liked to have seen the photos.

There are two overwhelming facts in this case. First, the radium was killing the dial painters. Second, the executives of USRC and most especially the executives of Radium Dial knew, did not care, and actively hid it. But the facts are small potatoes. It’s the emotions this book engenders that really hit you. I was by turns angry, furious, appalled, horrified, disgusted, shocked, and eventually, just heartbroken.

It’s easy to look back knowing what we do now about radium, about radioactivity, about science, about so many things. In the early 1900s news traveled slowly if it traveled at all. Most of what was known about radium did not come from pure science; it came from the people who were using it in commercial ventures. Obviously, they were biased and had a vested interest in hiding any issues. Additionally, radioactivity was considered far more beneficial than it is and both radium and thorium were used extensively in health and beauty aids in Europe as well as the U.S. Tonics, makeup, spa treatments, mud baths, wraps: radium and thorium were everywhere. Radioactivity itself was still fairly “new” and little understood. It’s easy to see how people would jump onto this craze. Though some people knew it was dangerous, they were drowned out of the marketplace in many respects.

In that sense, it’s easy to understand the initial disbelief on the part of the executives at USRC. It’s even possible to understand how they could decide it was something else that was the issue. Nor, in the beginning stages could you fault small town doctors and dentists for being stumped. There was little to no literature on radium and small town dentists were not likely to be hearing about or reading about applied physics. But, once it became clear, as it did in Orange, that there was a pattern, it was incumbent upon the executives to figure out what was going on.instead of trying to pass the blame.

But, it is in Ottawa that, for me, the horror truly manifested itself. How the executives of Radium Dial and then Luminous Processes were capable of sleeping at night eludes me. They knew about Orange, NJ. They knew about the deaths there and the dangers of radium. They knew enough to get their dial painters tested. They saw those test results and kept them hidden. They lied without compunction to the dial painters and their families. They stole bodies. And when things got difficult and they skipped town, they started a whole new radium painting location. And all the while, they knew they were killing their employees. They knew. The betrayal of the dial painters is simply unfathomable to me. No one should have to write a law that says it is illegal to knowingly kill your employees.

But this is their story: each woman, each day, each battle won or lost, each joy and sorrow. It’s the story of jawbones falling out and hair going white, of hips locked, of sarcomas, of hemorrhages. It’s a story of loves won and marriages, of children and families. It’s a story of sisters and of friends united. It’s a story of fear and pain but also of courage and strength. It’s a story of those left behind and a story of those to come. It's a story about the doctors and dentists and lawyers and government types who took up their cause. Moore did a fantastic job keeping the focus on the women and their families.

This will prove, I believe, to be a seminal work. Other books have been written about the Radium Girls, but I believe this one with it’s breathtakingly painful and human story of ordinary people will capture the imagination and likely be translated to the silver screen as we’ve seen with Hidden Figures and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It isn’t just the injustice done to the dial painters; it is the essential human spirit of the brave ladies who stood up, screamed in the face of Death itself, and transformed the worker’s landscape forever.

What a sad, somber, horrific and mesmerizing read. Teenage girls, some even younger, were told by their employers that radium could not hurt you. So, yes, dip that brush into the radium paint, put the brush in your mouth, get a tip and paint the dials. Paint carefully now, we don't want to waste the paint.

One company even did medical tests on their employees, but never allowed the girls to see the results. The executives saw the results, they knew what was going on and that their employees were being poisoned.

This was all happening around WWI. Years later when these women started having "problems" the radium companies refused to own up to anything. This book tells some of their stories. The good days when they were happy little girls and the bad days when their bodies were full of poison. Most of the women started having problems with their teeth. The radium would insert itself right into the bones of their mouths losing teeth and jaw bones. It affected others in their legs or backs.

This book is a true story and not for the faint of heart. It is also a great book in that the author lets you see these girls/women before and after. While they were sharing each other's misery and tears, I was right there with them doing the same. Well, the tears part anyway. I couldn't imagine the pain or misery.

Definitely one of the best books I've read this year.

Thanks to Sourcebooks for approving my request and to Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley for an honest, unbiased review.

Fantastic read that reminds us how far we've come.

Okay, so here's the thing. I didn't think I would love this book as much as I did. I thought it would be your typical history book and I would think it was alright. BUT NO. This book, you guys. I adore this book. I learned so much and feel so much for these girls. I found the story to be kind of haunting. I didn't want to put it down. I would recommend this book. 5 out of 5 stars.

This remarkable book tells the story of women who were the cornerstone of legislation and regulations protecting people in the workplace. Radium Girls is the heart-wrenching yet uplifting account of several young women who succumbed to radiation poisoning after working in watch factories painting luminous dials with radium-infused paint. Using a technique that required that they put their paintbrushes in their mouths to make a fine point after dipping them into the paint, they ingested huge amounts of radium during their careers. At the time, radium was touted as safe and was used in a variety of readily available tonics and other allegedly curative potions.

Of course we know now that radium, with its half-life of 1,600 years, is deadly. As these young women fell ill with a variety of peculiar ailments that eventually caused horrific pain and led to death, they began to wonder why their teeth were abscessing, and, along with chunks of their jaws, falling out of their mouths. They wondered why their previously youthful and flexible joints literally froze, and they wondered why they developed massive, crippling, sarcomas. The medical and dental professionals they consulted were baffled, and their employers denied that radium could be the cause of these debilitating conditions. Finally, one doctor figured it out, and with his efforts and the efforts of some brilliant and persistent attorneys, the case was made and proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that radium had penetrated the bones and organs of these women, resulting in many long and drawn- out painful wasting diseases that were almost always fatal.

We learn about these young women, their families and their communities in a way that makes them truly come alive. While the writing is somewhat stilted at times (hence the four-star review of a five-star story), I learned to overlook that as I became engrossed in this tale of human suffering and corporate denial. A must read - highly recommended.

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.

https://jorammiireads.tumblr.com/post/159449221009/the-radium-girls-the-dark-story-of-americas

"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.

Eye opening and enlightening book. I know so much more about our history and the hardships these young ladies had to endure. I would recommend this book to anyone.

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!