Moore chronicles the lives, illnesses, legal fights, and tragic deaths of the ‘radium girls,’ young women who painted dials using luminescent paint in the early 20th century. 

When radium was discovered by the Curies at the turn of the century, it became something of a global phenomenon, used for countless purposes and much-sought after. Due to its luminescent quality, it was used to make watch faces and aircraft dials glow in the dark. Enter: the radium girls. They used a technique called lip-pointing to make their brush tips as narrow as possible. This meant putting the paint in their mouths, repeatedly, for the duration of their employment. At first, the dangers of radium were unknown (by the general public), then minimized, then outright denied. Unfortunately, these women would come to carry the truth in their bodies, over time dying gruesomely in alarming numbers from a previously-unstudied type of poisoning. 

The book moves at a steady clip, imbuing with humanity the girls whose lives were treated as disposable. We learn of their families and dreams before radium wrecked their bodies. Bravely, a number of them stood up to the industry and fought for new worker protections and updated workers comp approved conditions, even with terminal diagnoses. 

What made this story particularly gripping was how relatively recently this took place as well as the eerie arguments used to discredit science, echoing a lot of present-day rhetoric. And, as is always true with these types of book, these women embodied resilience even though, had everyone acted compassionately and humanely from the get-go, they wouldn’t have been called to such bravery. Frustratingly, it took loud male allies and a few male deaths to get their plight taken seriously. 

If you enjoy nonfiction and underdog stories, I recommend you pick this one up!