The knowledge from the radium girls should mean that those weapons should never have been thought possible, because it shows they aren’t just going to affect the people you intend to bomb, but also those around them, and anyone in the area post-bombing. It felt like Moore agreed with nuclear weapons from the ways she said they helped in ending the war. However, I became somewhat, possibly irrationally, annoyed at Moore for pointing out that it meant those involved with creating nuclear weapons were kept safe. The knowledge gained from their illnesses and the bodies of those who had died meant that working with radium and radiation could be made safer. Moore points out that the suffering of the radium girls was not completely in vain. To imagine the injuries to teeth and jaws was sort of disgusting and sounded like it would be humiliating if you were suffering, They suffered, greatly, with no possible cure, and all the time they weren’t listened to. The girl’s illnesses were not easy to read about. I was also angry at how long it took for something to be done about it, and at how even those not immediately related to the radium industry wanted to deny what was happening.
Even as the girls were getting sick they continued to deny that the radium was the cause. They were determined to show the world that radium wasn’t dangerous, despite the evidence they had seen from elsewhere. The radium companies were painted like the Mr Burns type company that only care about profit. The story itself made me angry and upset, with maybe a little hope. It had been on my wishlist for quite some time, but I ended up buying it because it was a kindle deal. I saw a lot of buzz around this book a year or so ago, and it won a goodreads choice award in 2017. It is a story of their fight to find justice in a system determined that radium was safe. Just be warned your nightmares might suddenly feature your teeth and jaws rotting out of your head for the next several months.The Radium Girls is the story of the dial painters who worked with radioactive plaint with no knowledge of how dangerous it was, until they found they were starting to get ill. So, if you have the stomach and emotional stability for it, I highly recommend this one. Moore takes sides, and she is firmly on the side of these women. This is not an objective journalistic take.
A British narrator would have been better, to give us more a taste of the voice of the author, who is not entirely absent from these pages. Narrator Angela Brazil was a bit robotic. I did the audio, and while it wasn’t great, it wasn’t awful, either. Even as the stories of these girls were horrifyingly monotonous and grim, the same awful things playing out again and again, the book remains engaging. Moore, who is British, is a great writer, and she shepherds this story with apparent ease. The dial-painting factories started up in the early 1920s and continued, as a horrifying post-script informs us, through the 1970s, even after not one but two well-publicized trials resulted in the knowledge that radium was a gruesome, wrenching killer. It was known since 1901 that radium was harmful, if not exactly how. The beyond good wages these companies paid these women are nothing in comparison to what their careless capitalism, greed, and willful ignorance cost the women in return. This is some body horror shit, let’s be frank. The result is that you get a clear picture of just exactly how far these literal shining girls (they glowed from all the radium) fell as their health began to fail, and the radium that was slowly poisoning them wreaked its havoc on their bodies. Moore extensively researched the women this story is about, and she pulled not only from scholarly books and articles about them, but from their own personal correspondence, journals, and memories from friends and family. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will find this one a tough go. Jackson moment in cinema:Īnd I truly mean that. What I have to say about this book can be whittled down to one classic Samuel L.
0 kommentar(er)
