October 2018 Book Group Selection

October's Book Choice was the Haunting: Radium Girls by Kate Moore

Here is a brief bit of the NPR Book Review April 2017:

The book, infuriating for necessary reasons, traces the women at two dial-making factories — the USRC in New Jersey, and Radiant Dial in Illinois. And Radium Girls spares us nothing of their suffering; though at times the foreshadowing reads more like a true-crime story, Moore is intent on making the reader viscerally understand the pain in which these young women were living, and through which they had to fight in order to get their problems recognized.

The history of business is a history of violence. The worst descriptions of disease (and I'll be surprised if you don't run your tongue across your teeth at least once) can't match the fatal callousness of the companies that knew the dangers of radium long before they ever admitted them. There's a reason Moore repeatedly notes the girls' phosphorescence as ghostly; the companies knew they were doomed. (Radiant Dial tested its girls and never gave them their results, even as internal correspondence was sorting them by radiation levels to see who'd be first to die.)

Radium Girls is frighteningly easily to set in a wider context. The story of real women at the mercy of businesses who see them only as a potential risk to the bottom line is haunting precisely because of how little has changed; the glowing ghosts of the radium girls haunt us still.

Kitty hosted our get together at her sweet cottage, powerful discussion and glowing treats!