Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2010: Lauren Redniss s brilliant biography-in-collage is an astounding portrait of Marie and Pierre Curie, the husband-and-wife team who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. Broken into seven chapters (introduced with scientific terms that hint at the stories to come), Radioactive fuses quotes from the scientists themselves with ones from the Curies own granddaughter, engineering and weapons experts, and even atomic bomb survivors that form a most interesting and informative narrative. Redniss s styling doesn t end with the way she tells the story: Radioactive is as visually stunning as it is factually rich. She jumps from black-and-white sketches to vibrantly colored depictions of the young couple s courtship, collaborations, and eventually Pierre s unexpected death. Within the stark pages of the chapter titled Isolation, the reader feels Marie s loss; then in Exposure we watch as she falls in love again--this time under more controversial circumstances. Despite personal challenges, Marie continued to be ambitious and eventually became the first female professor at the Sorbonne, winning a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In Radioactive, Redniss shows a similar determination. Through her moody, evocative collages, she captures the drama of the Curies lives and their contributions to science and medicine, sending the reader on a one-of-a-kind historical and biographical journey that any curious mind will appreciate. --Jessica Schein

A Look Inside Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout
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Despite the tight quarters in his lab, Pierre Curie managed to find room for the delicate and grave foreign student.Marie Sklodowska and Pierre Curie wed on July 26, 1895. In 1900 Pierre strapped a tube of radium against his arm for ten hours. To his joy, a lesion appeared, reported his daughter Eve.