Category: Book Review

What I’m Reading: The Radium Girls

My favorite types of books are nonfiction, specifically the history of science. It’s the nature of science that so many discoveries and innovations throughout history shaped not only the eras in which they originated, but continue to shape the society of their futures. I also find it so compelling to discover the story of someone who lived and died, contributing to a scientific advance that has had an impact on us all, but whose name has been outlived by their deeds. With this in mind, it is probably not surprising that The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore fits squarely into my literary comfort zone, and that I loved it.

Starting right after World War I, The Radium Girls chronicles the rise of radium as a wonder element, incorporated into untold numbers of beauty and household products, as well as used industrially for its ability to glow in the dark. This was an era in which a glow-in-the-dark wrist watch was an extremely sought-after item, and companies like the United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company sprung up to cash in on the radium craze.

My copy of The Radium Girls. Photo by Erin Podolak.
My copy of The Radium Girls. Photo by Erin Podolak.

Hundreds of young women, some barely into their teens, came to work at these companies because they offered well-paying jobs at a time when families were struggling. Young women who could work would do so to help support their families in the years before they established families of their own or to provide themselves with spending money. At the time, while some scientists were just discovering that radium could be extremely dangerous, the public image of the substance was that it was beneficial and couldn’t possibly be harmful.

A well-paying job with other young women in a joyful and convivial atmosphere, working with a healthful wonder substance that had the added bonus of making your clothes and hair glow-in-the-dark? It was an opportunity few women could pass up. So women flocked to the factories, spending every day sitting in a studio painting watch dials with luminescent radium paint. To paint the small numbers on the dials, the women used a technique called “lip pointing” –twirling their paint brush in their mouth between highlighting each number to make a fine point, ingesting traces of the radium paint each time they did so.

Within a few years, the “dream job” bubble would burst as women started suffering from mystery illnesses: tooth decay, mouth sores that wouldn’t heal, pain in their feet, their backs, their hips, low blood cell counts, sarcomas, and even bones that simply crumbled at the touch. Ultimately, scores of women would die of these illnesses, many long before the women and their doctors were able to figure out that it was exposure to the radium that was harming them.

Radium was still new enough that its negative effects were poorly understood, and  illnesses like the dial-painters had never been seen before. Companies profiting from radium and the girls’ work had every interest in preserving radium’s healthful image and their own finances. The companies would go to excessive lengths to avoid taking responsibility for any of the women harmed by the radium in their studios. Moore’s book tells the story of these women, as they struggled to make sense of what could have harmed them, never dreaming it could be their employers. She notes their dramatic turns from victims to advocates as they discovered their own poisoning, fighting until the end to make sure that the companies were forced to do the right thing for their workers.

One of the things about the Radium Girls that I loved was the connection to the women that Moore clearly feels. She cares about their stories, protecting them, preserving them, and telling it right. Moore writes beautifully, with sentences that lingered in my mind, hammering home the point that she is trying to make. For example, Moore describes the exhumation of a radium worker years after her death, while seeking evidence to bolster the evidence that radium could kill:

“When they checked the x-ray film, days later, there was Mollie’s message from beyond the grave. She had been trying to speak for so long-now, at last, there was someone listening. Her bones made white pictures on the ebony film. Her vertebrae glowed in the vertical white lights, like a regiment of matches slowing burning into black. They looked like rows of shining dial painters walking home from work. The pictures of her skull, meanwhile, with her jawbone missing, make her mouth stretch unnaturally wide, as though she was screaming-screaming for justice through all these years.” The Radium Girls, page 194.

It’s a passage that I read and re-read, and I think it showcases how Moore writes. It is captivating and hard-hitting, playing up the facts and their resonance at the same time.

The book shines a light on the misdeeds at the dial painting plants in Newark and Orange, New Jersey and in Ottowa, Illinois. Having grown up in New Jersey, the story of the dial painters struck a chord with me. But the plight of the women in these cities is a story that is altogether engaging and compelling. At the time, radium sickness wasn’t even defined, but the women fought to make their illnesses recognized by the government. They went on to challenge the companies, even forcing changes to worker’s compensation rules, and saving countless lives by exposing radium for the dangerous substance we all now know it to be.

The amount of deceit on the part of the companies made my blood boil with the injustice of it all. I think being a young woman, I could relate to the idea that young women would simply believe their bosses when they said they had their best interest at heart. I think that was a lesson that I learned the hard way early on in my career, that if something seems too good to be true, you have to wonder where the good fortune is coming from and question the motivations behind it. The women never considered the possibility that they were being lied to, that their very lives were worth nothing to the companies compared to their bottom line.

It also gives a new (to me) perspective on corporate misdeeds, how far some people might go to earn a buck, the lies that might be told, and the people that might be harmed. The timeline of events in the book is perhaps the most damning part of the story, because it shows without a doubt how, if the companies and individuals who knew that radium was harmful had owned up to it as soon as they knew, so many lives could have been spared, so much suffering avoided.

In the end, the idea that it was all only for the money, only about profits, just leaves the whole story tinged with sadness, because it does not provide a satisfying answer to the question of why, why would anyone knowingly do this to another human being. “For money” is an answer that is shockingly inadequate in the context of all that these women suffered, all that they were deprived of by these companies.

The Radium Girls is a story that will stay with me for a long time. This story is a piece of science history, as the mystery of radium and what it could do was untangled. It is a piece of American history as the workers compensation laws were rewritten and laws put in place to protect workers. And it is a piece of women’s history as these girls banded together to take on powerful companies in a David and Goliath struggle to do what was right. It’s a fascinating and sobering story, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

What I’m Reading: The Firebrand and the First Lady & Hidden Figures

The more I learn about and bear witness to the world, the more I’ve realized that my classroom education left out some aspects of history that give context to world and national events, and shape how I understand and interpret them. Reading is one of the best ways I’ve found to introduce missing perspectives and fill in gaps in my education.

Growing up I certainly had an awareness about the civil rights era–we learned about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X in school. But, even though I learned about these important people, there are so many others whose names I should also know, that I don’t. Pauli Murray and Katherine Johnson are just two of those names. Luckily, reading brought their stories into my world, and helped add depth to my knowledge about the various contributions of people of color to the United States during the civil rights era.

The Firebrand and The First Lady by Patricia Bell Scott
The Firebrand and The First Lady by Patricia Bell Scott

I learned about these two women by reading books that I think offered a lot of good information about US history and the role that women of color played in it: The Firebrand and the First Lady by Patricia Bell-Scott and Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.  Science writing and science history tend to comprise more of my reading list so Hidden Figures was in my conventional wheelhouse more so than the Firebrand and the First Lady, but both books were still quite different choices for me, being written by and about women of color. While I’m embarrassed by how little of my bookshelf came from or is about women and people of color, it is something that I can and am consciously fixing.

The Firebrand and the First Lady tells the story of the friendship between Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt. Murray was a lawyer, a civil rights and women’s rights activist, and the first black women to be ordained as an episcopal priest. Eleanor Roosevelt was the first lady of the United States from 1933-1945, US representative to the United Nations 1946-1953, and an important political figures in the women’s rights and civil rights movements. With neither woman alive to speak for themselves, the author draws heavily on the letters they wrote to each other.

Being able to see the letters they wrote to each other, especially when they disagreed, was amazing. It really was a snapshot from another time, where people with opposing views could find common ground and unite around a shared respect, treating each other with civility and thoughtfulness. It just struck me as sweet and sad that there was once a time when a young woman could reach out to a political figure and not just get a reply, but get true buy-in and a relationship that lasted the rest of their lives. I don’t think we currently live in such times, although this lovely piece by Jeanne Marie Laskas about how President Obama handled his mail, reading 10 letters a day from the public was a nice reminder about how important it is to have elected officials who hear you.

In telling the story of Murray and Roosevelt’s extraordinary friendship, the author gave an overview of the civil rights movement and the role that women played in it. But it was also an extremely American story, about how regular people built themselves up through education and hard work to leave an imprint on the world through the changes in policy and law that they helped bring about. The book left me not only knowing Murray’s name, but also with a profound respect for her.

I felt sympathy for Roosevelt, being a power broker but with limitations, and needing to figure out what she could do, what she should do, and how to pick which battles were the ones worth seeing through. She wasn’t able to do all that she wanted to, and yet she did so much more than most. But I was glad to see that Murray always held Roosevelt’s feet to the fire. In some ways, seeing Roosevelt’s responses felt like a master class in how to deal with criticism, and how there is always more that we can all do to help improve life for those around us. Being pushed to be better is a gift in many ways, but it’s also an endorsement of your own worth– that you’re worth improving.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.

Hidden Figures is quite a bit more well known, now that it has been made into a box office-topping film. Despite there being a movie version, the book is certainly worth your time. It tells the story of the black women “computers” (in the literal sense of “people who do computations,” but really mathematicians and engineers) who worked at NASA during its formation and at the dawn of the space race. It’s been written and said by others that the fact that this story hasn’t been told before is amazing. I certainly am not the first person to notice that this is a trend, the contributions of women of color being erased from the history that gets handed down. I’m glad that this book is as popular as it is because it is bringing this bit of history to the forefront and giving the amazing women whose story the book tells the place in history that they deserve.

One of the important things about Hidden Figures that has been said in this article and elsewhere is that, while it might be about events that took place from the 1940-1960s, there are still trends and themes from then that echo through research institutions today. Certainly for women of color working in physics today there are still numerous barriers to success and discrimination that white women and women in other fields don’t encounter.

Ultimately, I recommend both of these books, they are beautifully written and offer a point of view that I found incredibly valuable for expanding my understanding of the role that women of color played in US history. That context is important for understanding the tumultuous political climate of the world today, and I’m grateful to the authors for telling the stories of these women.

What I’m Reading: Two Years’ Worth

It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed any books on this blog, but that doesn’t mean I stopped reading. I have devoured quite a bit of non-fiction in the past two years with occasional forays into fiction. I want to share with you a list of the things I’ve been reading lately. Even though I read them all in the last two years, some of these books have been out for a long time, while some are more recently published. I don’t really have a set way of figuring out what I’m going to read; it really comes down to whatever attracts my attention. If it’s listed here, I enjoyed it in some capacity, but I certainly have my favorites that stood out to me more than others.

A sample of books from the past two years.  Photo by Erin Podolak.
A sample of books from the past two years. Photo by Erin Podolak.

In non-fiction, I don’t think I could possibly say enough flattering things about Rust by Jonathan Waldman. I absolutely loved this book, but I was surprised by how much there is to say about a topic like rust. It’s an incredibly compelling story, and I learned a lot not only about the science of rust and it’s history but also about the problems rust poses in the United States today in terms of infrastructure. Having gone to college just steps away from the abandoned Bethlehem Steel mill, I also got a kick out of his adventures exploring the hulking ruins I’m so familiar with. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and completely recommend it for anyone who likes non-fiction and just learning about a new topic. I was also very impressed by The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell. It chronicles an interesting exercise in which the author watches and records what happens in a single patch of land for an entire year. I thought it was unique and beautifully written.

I read a lot of science history books; it’s probably the genre I find myself pulled toward the most. In this realm, I absolutely loved The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan; it certainly tells a side of the development of the atomic bomb that you don’t often see. I also read three books by Sam Kean, and enjoyed them all.  He does an amazing job of putting scientific topics into current and historical context. I find his books consistently entertaining. They’re full of fun narrative bits that bring the topics to life.  I also have to specifically mention The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl by Arthur Allen.  I was completely fascinated by this account of research using body lice during World War II, it was an aspect of the war that I’d never heard anything about. I was sharing fun facts about body lice with friends, family, and acquaintances for some time after I finished it. I think people probably got tired of hearing me say, “did you know….” and having the second half have to do with lice.

More books from my collection. Photo by Erin Podolak
More books from my collection. Photo by Erin Podolak

I haven’t listed below all of the fiction books I read, but one highlight was discovering Michael Crichton for books aside from Jurassic Park. I really enjoyed Sphere in particular. I also spent the better part of the two years listening to every Harry Potter audiobook. Somehow I managed to get to my mid-twenties never having read a single Harry Potter book– better late than never. It probably goes without saying that I loved them. I really enjoyed having them read to me by listening to the audiobooks; hearing everything pronounced in a British accent really puts the books over the top. I also read a collection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft, and the Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I was also a big fan of The Circle by Dave Eggers, although I have to admit I found the ideas it presents for our future quite frightening (like, haul up in a shack in the woods frightening). Which is the point, I think it’s supposed to do that.  Or at least make us think more critically about how much we share online, why we share it, and which entities we allow to own our information.

I go back and forth between reading paper books and using a Nook. In general, I tend to buy my non-fiction books as books because I truly wouldn’t mind living in a library (which seems possible in a small apartment sometimes). I usually don’t buy paper books for fiction, but I’ve read some that were borrowed. For fiction I typically rely on my e-reader, especially for collections and murder mysteries, which I’d say are my main guilty pleasure.

So, if you’re interesting in checking out some of the books that I’ve enjoyed here’s my list:

The Billion-Dollar Molecule – Barry Werth
Bossypants – Tina Fey
The Case of the Dueling Neuroscientists – Sam Kean
The Disappearing Spoon – Sam Kean
Driving Mr. Albert – Michael Paterniti
Empires of Light – Jill Jonnes
The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl – Arthur Allen
The Forest Unseen – David George Haskell
The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson
The Girls of Atomic City – Denise Kiernan
The Half Life of Facts – Samuel Arbesman
The Hunt for Vulcan – Thomas Levenson
I Was Told There’d Be Cake – Sloane Crosley
Infinitesimal – Amir Alexander
Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer
Longitude – Dava Sorbel
The Map Thief – Michael Blanding
Merchants of Doubt – Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway
On the Move – Oliver Sacks
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember – Annalee Newitz
The Science of Harry Potter – Roger Highfield
The Secret History of Wonder Woman – Jill Lepore
The Skeleton Crew – Deborah Halber
Soul Made Flesh – Carl Zimmer
Thunderstruck – Erik Larson
Rust – Jonathan Waldman
The Violinist’s Thumb – Sam Kean
The Water Book – Alok Jha
Wild Ones – Jon Mooallem
Yes Please – Amy Poehler
10% Happier – Dan Harris

I also just want to mention that I wasn’t asked by any of the authors or publishers of the books listed above to review them or say nice things. No compensation, I just liked them and you might too.

What I’m Reading: Toms River

It’s been a long time since I’ve shared thoughts about anything that I’ve read. Not that I’ve stopped reading of course, in the past year I’ve made my way through many non-fiction science books that I’ve enjoyed but haven’t written about. I was on a blogging hiatus, but now that I have free time courtesy of the things detailed in this post, I want to rebrand my book review series. I’m not sure book review is accurate to describe the type of posts I write.  While I share my opinions, I almost never write about books I didn’t enjoy and try to avoid negative comments. I do this because if I’m going to write a post I want it to be about something I’m excited about and enjoyed rather than something I disliked. Thus, I feel calling these posts What I’m Reading is better than Book Reviews. As always, if I’ve been asked to read a book by the author or publisher I’ll let you know, though nearly all the books I write about are chosen because they peaked my interest. Even with a new name, I hope people will still be encouraged to check out the books featured in this series.

When I’m reading non-fiction I gauge the success of the story by how quickly I finish reading it. Are the things on my to-do list falling by the wayside because I need to know what happens next? Am I so engaged that nearly 500 pages can be consumed within a few days, or are the pages trickling by as they lull me to sleep each night? Is the book so compelling that even the most technical details are devoured alongside the more narrative elements of the story? To cross the line from “I liked it” to “I loved it” a book needs to meet these criteria. I loved Toms River by Dan Fagin.

toms-river-250x300In addition to being the name of Fagin’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Toms River is the name of a town in New Jersey. I grew up in New Jersey in the 1990s and 2000s – just young enough to know that Toms River had a stigma attached to it, but not old enough to read the papers or understand why. When I found out Fagin was writing a book about the New Jersey town and it’s epic pollution problem, I was intrigued and quite frankly a little shocked by how little I knew about the environmental disaster that had taken place in my own home state.

As far as states go, New Jersey doesn’t exactly have a glimmering reputation. Since it’s not enough to have to contend with pop culture stereotypes like Jersey Shore or the Sopranos, we also have our fair share of government corruption and industrial pollution. Yet I feel protective of the “Garden State” (when you think of the pollution problems, the jokes just write themselves don’t they?) Where I grew up, on the boarder of Union and Morris counties, was the very picture of the idyllic New York City suburb. It was hard to imagine the state had a pollution problem when surrounded by the manicured perfection of sprawling lawns, parks, and golf courses. Yet, even as a kid, while I don’t remember any specific media coverage I remember the negativity, the impression that Toms River had problems. Until I picked up Fagin’s book, that was really all I knew about it.

While the details of the environmental disaster that played out in Toms River over the course of 50 years may have eluded me growing up I was aware of New Jersey’s distinction as the state with most Superfund sites. On their website the Environmental Protection Agency describes Superfund sites as:

“An uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people.”

The government started designating Superfund sites after the Love Canal case in which toxic chemicals located beneath homes and an elementary school in Nigara Falls, NY started causing health problems in 1978. Toms River made it onto the list in 1983 thanks to the Ciba-Geigy factory, a 1,400 acre site where the chemical company manufactured primarily dyes, but also resins and epoxy. The company dumped waste products from the manufacturing process contaminated with toxic chemicals on the factory property, into the nearby river, and into the Atlantic Ocean from the time the factory was established in the 1950s. Toms River is a beach community, and the toxic waste easily seeped through the porous sandy soil to contaminate the ground water in the area. The groundwater cleanup started in 1996, when I was eight which is why I missed out on the majority of the drama.

Fagin’s book starts out by getting into the history of dye manufacturing. It doesn’t really sound like a topic that would be captivating, but I was fascinated by the backstory behind major chemical companies and how dye became a big business. Tracing the various companies through their founding, expansions, closures, consolidations, and mergers with clarity is a difficult task, and Toms River does it skillfully. I was hooked from the very beginning and as the story developed from the discovery of the chemical compounds used in dye manufacturing through the events that led Ciba-Geigy to open their plant in Toms River I found myself more and more impressed at how sucked into the story I became.

There is a turning point in the middle of the book where the story starts to shift from explaining how the pollution got into the water in Toms River, to explaining the affects of that pollution on the town’s residents namely the rise of a pediatric cancer cluster. I may be slightly biased in how interesting I find cancer epidemiology since I do write about cancer research for a living but I feel like Toms River handles an incredibly complex science with a perfect amount of nuance and explanation. The book even gets into the nitty gritty of experimental design without making me want to skip ahead to just find out the results. The intricacies of the studies needed to prove an environmentally caused cancer cluster became the drama for a big section of the book.

Woven throughout the book are the stories of the people involved from the first dye discovery through the operation of the factory all the way to the legal battle that sprung up once the cancer cluster was discovered. Generally I’d call the human element the narrative aspect of the story, the thing that drives the story forward, but that doesn’t really feel appropriate in this case. The entire thing is a compelling narrative. Still, Fagin does a wonderful job of injecting the story with the personal experiences of the people who lived it. The book culminates with settlement of the legal case regarding the Toms River pollution, and the scientific findings from the studies undertaken to prove that the cancer cluster had an environmental cause. These parts of the story are explained through the impact they had on the families of children with cancer and thus resonate deeply.

I really loved Toms River from start to finish, and recommend it for anyone regardless of your background knowledge or interest in science or environmental issues. It is just a fascinating story, told extremely well.

Book Review: Best American Science & Nature Writing 2013

Lately I’ve really enjoy reading collections of stories, I love being exposed to different writers and most importantly I can typically get through at least one story before falling asleep. I say typically because a few nights ago as I was reading  a Sherlock Holmes story on my Nook I actually did doze off, and my device slipped from my hands smacking me in the face – a fun night to be sure. But I digress, in general, collections make solid pre-bedtime reading.

For the last week or so I’ve been reading The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013 (on honest to goodness paper, so no technology induced injuries here. ) I was given the opportunity to review the book, which is available today, in advance and encouraged to share my thoughts. Well, my thoughts are mixed – there are good and bad things about this particular collection, and despite my enthusiasm for collections for me it highlghted a general downside.

science-medium-2013[1]One of the most valuable things about collections is that they presumably do a lot of work for you. The BEST implies that some authoratative figure has done the druggery of sorting through the entire body of work in a field, in this case science writing, for you. For this collection these authoratative figures are series editor Tim Folger and edition editor Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee is author of the pulitzer prize winning The Emperor of All Maladies – A Biography of Cancer, which I read and think is deserving of all the praise it has garnered.

I was so optimistic about this collection upon seeing that the edition editor was Mukherjee because I admire his work quite a bit. His own writing certainly doesn’t disappoint – I honestly think checking out the collection is worth your time just to read his introduction. It is a lovely description of science writing painted against the background of the “father of genetics” Gregor Mendel. The book includes writing that I think is terrific, and I have no problem with it being held up as exemplary of the best science writers among us – I was happy to see names like Michael Moyer, John Pavlus, Michelle Nijhuis, David Quammen and Katherine Harmon. As it seems with all good things though, there is always a “but” and I do have an issue with this collection.

You enter into a bit of a contract with the authority figures who determine what is featured in a collection when you purchase a book like this. The relationship brings with it the promise that the stories have all been vetted and are the BESTof what is out there. You trust that you are in for a good show, a quality show. However, the collection of what is the best is merely an opinion. We all have opinions, and my opinion isn’t always going to match your opinion, or Mukherjee’s opinion, or anyone else’s opinion.

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