The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
Ratings117
Average rating4.2
This is a real hum dinger of a book and one of the most compelling non-fiction books I've read in some time. I gobbled down this book in less than three days and hated putting it down.
Not only have I been to Ottawa, IL, previous home of Radium Dial Corporation and later Luminous Processes, but my fiancée's grandmother and/or great-grandmother was a Radium Girl at one of those very plants. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any surviving written records about their stories. Also, one of the surviving relatives of an Ottawan Radium Girl featured in the book is related to my fiancée.
The tale of each Radium Girl is both beautiful and heartbreaking. At first, their jobs as radium dial painters is lit by glamour; Radium Girls' clothes and bodies glowed when they went out on the town at night. The author does a fantastic job of humanizing each of the girls so that you can better understand the tragedy and a personal way, although the handful of photos and descriptions of what happened to these young women's bodies is heartbreaking enough.
The following article does a nice job summarizing some of the the Ottawan Radium Girls' stories and their ultimate impact on state workers compensation coverage, as well as eventually establishing OSHA:
https://www.nprillinois.org/equity-justice/2018-01-25/the-radium-girls-an-illinois-tragedy
3.75. a little long- but an important story. I'll think of the radium girls at every OSHA inspection for the rest of my life.