The Radium Girls

By: Kate Moore

Narrated by: Kate Moore

Length: 15 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf book club choice

New York Times bestseller

All they wanted was the chance to shine.

Be careful what you wish for…

‘The first thing we asked was, “Does this stuff hurt you?” And they said, “No.” The company said that it wasn’t dangerous, that we didn’t need to be afraid.’

As the First World War spread across the world, young American women flocked to work in factories, painting clocks, watches and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous – the girls shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in dust from the paint.

However, as the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses. It turned out that the very thing that had made them feel alive – their work – was slowly killing them: the radium paint was poisonous.

Their employers denied all responsibility, but these courageous women – in the face of unimaginable suffering – refused to accept their fate quietly, and instead became determined to fight for justice.

Drawing on previously unpublished diaries, letters and interviews, The Radium Girls is an intimate narrative of an unforgettable true story. It is the powerful tale of a group of ordinary women from the Roaring Twenties, who themselves learned how to roar.

©2016 Kate Moore (P)2016 Simon & Schuster

Critic reviews

‘Fascinating.’ Sunday Times

‘Thrilling.’ Mail on Sunday

exceptionally well narrated

the story is repetitive but the narrator, also the author was so passionate about subject matter, I couldn't stop listening to this even if the stories are so dire, depressing. there's no happy ending, a lot of injustices, a lot of cruel fate and unfairness but this was in 1920s to 1930s, all of them if alive then are long dead. but their legacies survived, and that insidious radium glow. it is a frightening story, especially in the beginning when everyone was so jolly but you and I know in retrospect what radium is and I felt such dread. the companies were inhumane and frankly none of them had any real justice. kudos to the author for how she narrated her own book, complete with her own quirky pronunciation. she was the reason I follow this story intently and finished it. if not, I would have stopped because the stories are so depressing. and Google the pictures. all these brave women forced into the position of championing workers rights when all they wanted was a steady income, a family, children and ripe old age. the companies robbed them of these basic right, even the most precious commodity, time. such a cruel fate. highly recommended, especially audible version.

A wonderful, horrible history

This is a truly fascinating story of human courage. I had never heard of The Radium Girls before I read this book. During listening, I went and checked all of my antique clocks. I needed to make sure none of them had radium dials.

You need to hear this story.
You need to face the horrors of workers from a different era.

Loved it.

The radium girls deserve a better book

This book could have been cut by two thirds. Overly sentimental and repetitive. There are podcasts that to the story much better justice than this book and in 1/10th of the time. I feel sorry for the narrator who had to go through it in its entirety. I give it two stars because it's a story people should know, but it really only deserves one.

While this is a story that needed to be told…

…it needed to be told in half the time. One problem is that the author follows too many characters who she tries to flesh out.

Therein lies the second problem. While I love narrative nonfiction, with this book I think she used too many fictional techniques in trying to bring the characters to life. I thought over and over that there was no way the author could know X. She’s in a person’s head describing thoughts and feelings she couldn’t know. She’s in a closed room, describing actions nobody saw. For example (this isn’t direct from the book, but it is representative of a scene in the book): Dr so-and-so stood in his empty office. He was grumbling as he dug through his messy desk drawer looking for an X-ray. Once again, he wished he were more organized and felt like a failure in the organization department. He ran his hand through his black hair, slicked back with hair pomade, scowled at the greas on the palm of his hand, wiped it off on his brown tie, and said, “Now where did I put that x-ray?” and continued to dig.

While I understand the author used original source material, examples like the above run rampant throughout the book. Are we to believe that material exists from the 1920s where we know what the doctor, alone in his office, was doing, thinking, feeling, wearing? I think not. She does this with about every single character--and like I said, there are a ton of people in the book.

Also, many repetitive gruesome descriptions of what happened to “the girls.” Had I been reading, I would have skimmed. Just a ton of repetition in general.

The author (English) narrates her own book and did a very nice job. It’s usually a disaster when novelists read their own fiction, but it seems nonfiction writers are much better at reading their memoir or nonfiction.