The Elements of Marie Curie is a biography of the famous two time Nobel prize winner. It's a thorough, event by event description of her life. What's clear to me is that she overcame a lot of obstacles and prejudices to become who she was, but the price was her health. Of course, nobody studying radiation at that time didn't know it was dangerous. In fact, one of the first applications was in medicine, using both X-rays and for radiation therapy.
What I didn't like about the book was the lack of information about how Curie approached the deaths of her lab employees --- by the time they started dying she should have realized that radition was dangerous. We never get any insight in the book about what she thought of it. Similarly, while we see how she crossed paths with many famous scientists, the book is very light on the details of what they discussed.
What Curie did during world war one was well documented in this book, but very little about the second world war. I kept reading in the hopes of getting more out of the book than I eventually did but got to the end with precious little additional insight.
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