![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading Wednesday
Aug. 21st, 2019 05:41 amFinished reading: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore.
This book was excelent.
It's about women who worked in watch factories in the first few decades of the 20th century, painting luminous numbers onto watch dials with paint that contained radium. In order to make the tip of the brush fine enough to paint on the dials, they used their lips to make it into a point.
This is the story of what this did to them, and how they spent years fighting back against the radium dial companies for compensation.
The author was inspired to research and write about these women after directing Melanie Marnich's play These Shining Lives, which was about one of the groups of dial-painters. While working on the performance, Kate Moore looked for more, but most of the information that was available was about the scientific and legal aspects of the dial-painters' cases, not the women themselves. Radium Girls is very much about the women as individuals - their lives, their struggles, the paths they took toward fighting for compensation.
If you've heard about this book and have been thinking about reading it, do.
Reading next: Haven't started anything new yet. Here's what I currently have out from the library:
+ The Bootlegger's Confession by Allan Levine. Mystery novel set in 1922 Winnipeg.
+ The Death of Bernadette Lefthand by Ron Queery. Novel. Choctaw author. Reviews compared it favourably to Leslie Silko's Ceremony, which I liked, so I'm curious.
+ Queers Were Here: Heroes and Icons of Queer Canada. Edited by Robin Ganev & RJ Gilmour. A slim volume, not expecting anything in-depth, but should be interesting. My library had an entire display of LGBTQ-centric stuff, since it's Pride week here; that made me happy.
+ For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War by Timothy C. Winegard. I recently recced this to somebody, but then remembered that I've never actually read it, only flipped through it in the bookstore - had wanted to buy it, but then remembered the library has it. If any of you have read other books dealing with this topic, please drop the titles my way. (Except McInnis's biography of Francis Pegahmagabow - I've already read that one.)
+ The Man Who Lived With A Giant: Stories from Johnny Neyelle, Dene Elder. Edited by Alana Fletcher and Morris Neyelle. This collection is of both traditional and personal stories. Blurb on the back says it's reminiscent of George Blondin's stories, which I've read.
This book was excelent.
It's about women who worked in watch factories in the first few decades of the 20th century, painting luminous numbers onto watch dials with paint that contained radium. In order to make the tip of the brush fine enough to paint on the dials, they used their lips to make it into a point.
This is the story of what this did to them, and how they spent years fighting back against the radium dial companies for compensation.
The author was inspired to research and write about these women after directing Melanie Marnich's play These Shining Lives, which was about one of the groups of dial-painters. While working on the performance, Kate Moore looked for more, but most of the information that was available was about the scientific and legal aspects of the dial-painters' cases, not the women themselves. Radium Girls is very much about the women as individuals - their lives, their struggles, the paths they took toward fighting for compensation.
If you've heard about this book and have been thinking about reading it, do.
Reading next: Haven't started anything new yet. Here's what I currently have out from the library:
+ The Bootlegger's Confession by Allan Levine. Mystery novel set in 1922 Winnipeg.
+ The Death of Bernadette Lefthand by Ron Queery. Novel. Choctaw author. Reviews compared it favourably to Leslie Silko's Ceremony, which I liked, so I'm curious.
+ Queers Were Here: Heroes and Icons of Queer Canada. Edited by Robin Ganev & RJ Gilmour. A slim volume, not expecting anything in-depth, but should be interesting. My library had an entire display of LGBTQ-centric stuff, since it's Pride week here; that made me happy.
+ For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War by Timothy C. Winegard. I recently recced this to somebody, but then remembered that I've never actually read it, only flipped through it in the bookstore - had wanted to buy it, but then remembered the library has it. If any of you have read other books dealing with this topic, please drop the titles my way. (Except McInnis's biography of Francis Pegahmagabow - I've already read that one.)
+ The Man Who Lived With A Giant: Stories from Johnny Neyelle, Dene Elder. Edited by Alana Fletcher and Morris Neyelle. This collection is of both traditional and personal stories. Blurb on the back says it's reminiscent of George Blondin's stories, which I've read.
Yuu. Fic writer & book lover. M/Canada.