Though National Book Award nominee Radioactive
is ostensibly a biography of Madame Curie, its real allure is romance. Twenty-four-year-old
Marie Sklodowska travels to Paris from Warsaw and finds work in the laboratory
of Pierre Curie, studying the relationship between heat and magnetism. The
attraction is not just between molecules, however, and soon the scientists fall
in love and marry. They go on, of course, to make incredible leaps and bounds
in the world of science, discovering the elements polonium and radium. In this
poignant tale of discovery and passion, Lauren Redniss also examines the greater
question of nuclear proliferation through the lens of the couple's work,
proving that their research is more than relevant today. A collage of different
media, the artwork in the book includes drawings, as well as an electric blue
background wash created by a process called cyanotype printing, in which
light-sensitive chemicals soaked into paper become intensely bright when
subjected to UV rays from the sun. Redniss feels the technique "captured
on the page what Marie Curie called radium's 'spontaneous luminosity.'"
