This week's book
Apr. 21st, 2005 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI haven't been reading as much as usual lately. Partly the dearth of finished books is related to the fact that I'm wading through a 1000+ page Erikson tome for bedtime reading, but partly I just haven't been in a reading mood. However, my carrying-around book for the last couple of weeks has been Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie, by Barbara Goldsmith, and I finished that this evening.
I grew up with the Life of Madame Curie; it was one of my mother's childhood books that was on the living-room shelves, always available when I'd run out of library books. I must have been reading it, or at the very least looking at the pictures, before I turned nine. I know this because there were some illustrations labeled 'Vanity Fair Cartoons', and on the strength of that I ploughed through Thackeray's Vanity Fair, not understanding a sentence of it, when I was in J2 (Year 4/3rd Grade in modern/American terms, I think). It wasn't the main reason I went into Physics -- I have my father to thank for that -- but it probably helped.
I wouldn't call this slim modern volume a substitute for Eve Curie's definitive biography of her mother, but it makes an interesting supplement, giving a more modern perspective and adding information from papers that have only recently been unsealed and decontaminated. I hadn't realized the extent to which radiation exposure may have contributed to Pierre's early death, or that the elder daughter, Irene, also died young of radiation-induced illness. The only trouble is, now I want to read the original again. Perhaps when I'm home this summer ...
I grew up with the Life of Madame Curie; it was one of my mother's childhood books that was on the living-room shelves, always available when I'd run out of library books. I must have been reading it, or at the very least looking at the pictures, before I turned nine. I know this because there were some illustrations labeled 'Vanity Fair Cartoons', and on the strength of that I ploughed through Thackeray's Vanity Fair, not understanding a sentence of it, when I was in J2 (Year 4/3rd Grade in modern/American terms, I think). It wasn't the main reason I went into Physics -- I have my father to thank for that -- but it probably helped.
I wouldn't call this slim modern volume a substitute for Eve Curie's definitive biography of her mother, but it makes an interesting supplement, giving a more modern perspective and adding information from papers that have only recently been unsealed and decontaminated. I hadn't realized the extent to which radiation exposure may have contributed to Pierre's early death, or that the elder daughter, Irene, also died young of radiation-induced illness. The only trouble is, now I want to read the original again. Perhaps when I'm home this summer ...