Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout

By Lauren Redniss

This is a fantastic and artfully done book about the husband and wife team of Marie and Pierre Curie.  Together, they discovered radium and polonium.  After four years of steady labor, four hundred tons of water, and forty tons of corrosive chemicals, on March 28, 1902, they managed to extract one tenth of a gram of radium.

Marie achieved many other notable firsts:

• First female to earn a PhD in France
• First female to win a Nobel prize. (She was born the year Alfred Nobel discovered dynamite)
• After Pierre's death, the Sorbonne offered her his professorship - first time in its 650 year history a woman was professor
• First person to win two Nobel prizes first in Physics, second in Chemistry.  Her daughter, Irene and her husband would win another Prize for their discovery of artificial radiation.

Goal Planning

Every year, my husband and I sit down in mid-January to plan our goals for the year.  Each year, it is a little bit easier and more fun.  We focus on things we want to do - travel plans, fitness goals, classes and family goals.  After making the goals for 2012, we hit the library for some resources:

• Computer books to make a lesson plan for my grandpa to learn about his new laptop
• Photography books for my new digital SLR
• A career improvement book to help me figure out my "leadership style"
• A personal finance book for my husband and me to figure out what "money type" we are

Catherine the Great: Portrait of A Woman

By Robert Massie

While on a kick of reading non-fiction, I added my name to the library waiting list for a recently written biography of Catherine the Great, Empress of All Russia.  Albeit a bit gun shy after a disappointing experience with Cleopatra, A Life; I gave Catherine my full attention.  At close to 600 pages, this was not a light read.  

It was a fascinating read!  I remember hearing about her in western civilization history courses, but before this book I could not have put her into context of a timeline or named any significant achievements (why was she "The Great"?)  If you are looking for a great biography with interesting world history, check this one out.  There are a few maps in the front of the book, but I found myself consulting world atlases to track her territorial expansion of Russia through various occupations and negotiations.

In addition to the expansion of her empire's boundaries, she had the personal goal of bringing the Enlightenment to Russia.  With regular correspondence with Voltaire and Diderot, she experimented with their ideas as she formed her government.  As the descriptions of the architecture and artwork left much to be imagined, I found it helpful to see these for myself (online, of course.  Thanks Google).  This book is worthwhile to get to know this empress, as well as to place her story on the timeline of western Europe and the American Revolution.  As I'm writing this blog post, I discovered Massie has also written a biography of Peter the Great.  That is being added to my list as well...

Thunderstruck

I spent the New Year's holiday weekend engrossed by Erik Larson's Thunderstruck. It renewed my delight in historical nonfiction, persisted in its tediousness at times, and told the story of an awful murder in the wake of Jack the Ripper's assault.

Thunderstruck intertwines the history of the invention of wireless communication with a story of murder most foul in Edwardian London. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, the prime players include an obsessive and scientifically haphazard Italian in his pursuit of trans-Atlantic wireless communication, a bodacious and outrageous babe who manhandles her husband to a tipping point, a mild-mannered and timid doctor with the capacity to astonish, and his lover: Ethel.

If one can find their way through technical descriptions of discovering something the inventor simply has a hunch is there, the story of the relationship that leads to murder is quite compelling. It was clear to me that the book was written by a gentleman due to its focus on the detail of methods and technologies used. A female writer might have spent more time on exploring the characters in the various relationships, but the lack of sensationalism is refreshing. The distilled view is direct, complete, and quite gripping.

Thunderstruck would be a very frustrating read for someone looking for just a good story. A good story it certainly is, but there is some effort involved. A "beach read" this is not. It would suit the fancy of those interested in the pursuit of progress and the development of communication. They would find themselves engrossed in the weird and very gruesome deception of Dr Crippen.