[gmw]

I imagine Marie Curie didn't suffer as badly as the girls because she wasn't constantly ingesting it, or painting against the thin protection inside her mouth. While she may not have imagined any urgent health issues (and why should she when none appeared for her that might not have been as easily explained by one of the myriad other weird and wonderful things she had handled in her life), a degree of care is habitual in laboratories - of the sort you rarely find in factory workspaces.

Context is one of the things that makes it easy to misinterpret the situation presented in the book. In her defence, the author does make some of this apparent, but she also seems to have a tendency to be foreshadowing an inherent evilness in the attitudes of those she is drawing in the black hats. For example:

"From their point of view, Irene was an orphan, anyway, whose parents had died young; with a genetic inheritance like that, she was probably never long for this world."

Where did that come from? Is there some real paperwork to suggest this is really what the unnamed owners of "their point of view" were thinking, or is this just priming us to be ready to hate them?

I'm not going to be surprised that some of these people turn out to be a@#@#$@#s, the world has enough that we expect to see a fair smattering of them around, but many of them - I suspect - might be people that got painted into a corner by the circumstances, and having no good way out, fought on the ugly side rather than admit error or defeat. It would not be the first time.

I'd also add that a capitalist society encourages such results; the people in charge of business not only need a certain sort of predisposition to have attained their positions, in many situations they are under legal obligations to shareholders and so on. (We saw a sample of this with mention of an executive handling out $5 in compensation for stained laundry; quickly squashed because of the potential total cost.) And what exactly is a company supposed to do if admitting the worst means they face extinction? It's sort of prick-by-nature merges with prick-by-law (apologies to my fellow business owners out there).

I shouldn't really write more (or even what I have) until I've read more of the book, but I seriously doubt if this book is going to give me a good look at things from the other side - it seems to have made very little attempt so far. We get told of "Sabin von Sochocky’s one-off warning to Grace Fryer", which I envisage will be held up as proof that the authorities knew radium was a health hazard, but are we seriously trying to suggest that Sabin von Sochocky understood the real risks? And all these people described as loyal to the company I can envisage are going to try and defend what seems indefensible. But it's harder for the reader to put a book read over a few days in the real context of events spanning many years. What seems so obvious with 20-20 hindsight would not have seemed so clear at the time, and by the time the reality hit many had already taken their stand and would be reluctant to move from that.

From our safe distance in time, with our excellent education and communication systems that have let us know about so many examples of such situations, it is easy to say: they should have looked harder sooner. But back then? So far (page 90) the events seem to be playing out pretty much as we might expect given the times.