“The Radium Girls” is … long. The book tells the saga of the young women and girls (even 13 year olds) who worked in the radium factories during the 1910’s through 1930’s painting luminescent equipment including dials and clocks with fluorescent radium powder. In those days, radium was touted as a medical cure-all (because it was found to eat away cancer cells), and so the girls were given no protection against the radium and were taught to LICK their paint brushes to ensure the tip was appropriately pointed. When girls started falling ill with numerous ailments (broken jaws, hips, boils, skin lesions, arthritis, and more), the doctors were stumped. Of course, the story continues to document the deaths of numerous girls and the legal battles of numerous more girls to receive compensation from the companies that failed to prevent them from becoming ill due to radium poisoning. As I expected, this book does not have a happy ending because the big companies do what big companies do and denied, denied, denied any fault. They paid out doctors and lawyers to say the girls were not suffering from radium poisoning and on and on. This book was rich with history of these forgotten women and girls, but it did tend to slog on at points. The legal battles and the medical ailments of the girls started to feel repetitive, which I suppose could have been part of the point – it certainly reinforced how many girls had to suffer through the same horrible demise and/or legal battle, so in that case the repetition served a purpose. If you read this, I’d recommend keeping better track of the names of the girls mentioned in the book because I found myself losing track and then ending up confused – which girls were dead? Which received compensation? Which were still fighting in court? Overall, a painfully sad and haunting story.

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Created Oct 17, 2020 at 11:36am • Submit your own review...