The Radium Girls---Devastating and True

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book that will stay with you long after the last page. Did your Dad have a wristwatch with a face that glowed in the dark? Mine did. Did your family have an alarm clock with glow in the dark hands--we had two. I wonder where they are now. I remember my fascination with those hands that had such a pretty green glow when everything else in the house was dark and were such a nice light turquoise in the light of day. I remember my Dad telling me about radium that made them glow and how a few years before I was born it was discovered that the young women who used to paint those hands got sick from the paint. Westclox was still making the clocks and the watches were still available so apparently it was safe now for them to be made.
I forgot all about those things until I noticed a book called The Radium Girls had just been published and, further, Book Browse, to which I belong, was making it available to read for discussion. I applied and received the copy I just finished. It seems that, though the products were still being made and sold by the hundreds or more, back in the '50's when we owned them and Dad spoke of the findings, there was a lot more to the story of what was happening to those girls.
The story aroused so many feelings as I read, disbelief at the callousness of the companies and the legal system. Wait, first disbelief at the illnesses that befell the dial painters, then disbelief at the companies and their executives and the lack of legal recourse for the victims. As time went on the disbelief turned to anger and heartbreak and tears of frustration.
Two places saw the manufacture of dials--Orange, New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois. Imagine the further disbelief when the girls in Orange won some sort of legal justice, with incredible strings attached and the girls in Ottawa were assured by THEIR employer that what happened there could not occur in Illinois. Yet, fourteen years later, another group of women found themselves in the same legal quagmire. Eventually, a triumph of sorts came and has had an effect on the present legal recourse of workers against employers.
Still, the reader is left with sorrow, sadness, frustration but an abiding admiration for two groups of women and their spouses, children and other relatives and friends, who, though horribly ill, crippled and living with an unavoidable death sentence , fought, sometimes to their last breath for themselves and those who would follow them to the grave.
Wait til you read the epilog--the story isn't over yet. And the tale just won't go away as you close the book and put it on a shelf. Just devastating. Especially, since this sort of thing continues--think asbestos, tobacco, opioids. And, I wonder, marijuana?

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