Radioactive

Product Description A visual journey into the life of Marie Curie and the history of radioactivity, as told through the dazzling artwork and writing of acclaimed author and artist Lauren Redniss In 1891, twenty-four-year-old Marie moved from Warsaw to Paris, where she found work in the laboratory of Pierre Curie, a scientist engaged in research on heat and magnetism. They fell in love. They took their honeymoon on bicycles. They expanded the periodic table, discovering two new elements with startling properties: radium and polonium. They won the Nobel Prize. In the century since the Curies began their work, we’ve struggled with nuclear weapons proliferation, debated the role of radiation in medical treatment, and pondered nuclear energy as a solution to climate change. In Radioactive, Lauren Redniss links these contentious questions to a love story in 19th Century Paris. Radioactive draws on Redniss’s original reporting in Asia, Europe and the United States, her interviews with scientists, engineers, weapons specialists, atomic bomb survivors, and Marie and Pierre Curie’s own granddaughter. Whether young or old, scientific novice or expert, no one will fail to be moved by Lauren Redniss’s eerie and wondrous evocation of one of history’s most intriguing figures. Review "Radioactive offers innumerable wonders. Colors suddenly bloom into tremendous feeling, history contracts into a pair of elongated figures locked in an embrace, then expands again in an explosive rush of words. In this wholly original book about passion and discovery, Lauren Redniss has invented her own unique form."-- "Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love" "[Radioactive is] a deeply unusual and forceful thing to have in your hands. Ms. Redniss's text is long, literate and supple...Her drawings are both vivid and ethereal...Radioactive is serious science and brisk storytelling. The word 'luminous' is a critic's cliché, to be avoided at all costs, but it fits."-- "New York Times" "[A] sumptuously illustrated visual biography...Radioactive is an incisive look at science's greatest partnership."-- "Vogue" "One of the most beautiful books-as-object that I've ever seen."-- "Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love" About the Author Lauren Redniss is the author of three works of visual nonfiction. Her most recent book, Thunder & Lightning, won the 2016 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her previous book, Radioactive, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. She is also the author of Century Girl. Her writing and drawing has appeared in numerous publications and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow the NYPL's Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, and artist-in-residence at the American Museum of Natural History. Redniss was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2016. She is a 2017 New America Foundation fellow and teaches at Parsons School of Design.