John

wow

i loved loved loved this book.

very well written & readable history of a period that's often reduced to a much simpler one or two sentences.

gripping & very re-readable

this holds up way better than i expected. good thriller/noir/airplane manual.

beautiful/creepy

this book reads like it was written pretty fast (the lack of copyediting actually interferes w/ readability at some points). it is as much elliott smith biography as i (a decently-familiar listener) needed to read, but i imagine its ambiguity, haste, lack of key interviewees, and tendency to hand over entire chapters to a single ‘friend''s verbatim recollections would enrage a more devoted fan.

i don't think i'm the target audience for this book. i did not like it.

joshua ferris's best yet. i loved this book and can't stop thinking about it in the days since.

goes excellently with Andrea Ripley's high conflict - highly recommend for anyone who feels hopeless reading the news.

everyone read.

this story and world are gorgeous in their construction but i found it difficult to care about any of the characters.

the interludes featuring the authors really get in the way of what is otherwise a really fascinating tale.

this book is a lot of fun and extremely well-researched

short, beautiful read

wow.

this was difficult to read (particularly if you're squeamish) and there is a lot more editorializing and gratuitous (/occasionally speculative) detailing of the radium girls' personal lives, but ultimately this felt like a really important story about our collective short memory and the degree to which we associate “healthy corporation” with “healthy society”.

five stars if you read it aloud

wonderful; dense.

this book is not what it looks like on the cover & everyone should read it.

this is a weird one.

this was a very good ghost story.

a really interesting encapsulation of scientific / medical progress from medieval times to the 1930s

This was beautifully written but has a few moments / conclusions that just depressed me. It is perhaps not a book to read in quarantine.

the gigantic, confrontational appendix turns the entire thing into a bizarre libertarian polemic.