Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
It seems to me that by focusing on the length of time it took for symptoms to manifest and the lack of concrete knowledge about the effects of working with and ingesting radium, one is not giving enough weight to willful ignorance, the unwillingness to examine the situation in light of new evidence, the stonewalling and the outright lies, especially in a situation of human life v. corporate good.
[...]
As a practical matter, as has been suggested, I think there's a lot of value in popular history as an introduction, as a gateway, as something to pique one's interest. I like academic history myself, but I'm not necessarily going to want to dive into one as my introduction to a subject. And sometimes, the "popular" version is enough. One can't be an expert on everything.
|
I do think there is great value in popular history. If something can make a subject more accessible to a wider audience then I think that is a good thing. But I still want the history to be as balanced and true as the author can manage, and I want to be able to trust those elements that are presented as fact.
For example, with what we've just read the statistics were apparently 1-in-20, or thereabout. That's not all that helpful when it comes to understanding the true depth of suffering that the women who did get ill went through. So putting a sense of reality to those faces is a good thing (although going over top has, for me, the effect of making it seem like bad-fiction rather than reality). But dropping the statistic altogether, and writing in a way that gives the strong impression that all or most got ill, is simply wrong. The fact that it was only 1-in-20 (or even less at the start) is actually part of what these women went through, one of the difficulties they faced.
I agree that the lengthy discussion looking for why it took so long to identify the problem (of which I am the particularly guilty party) did not give enough weight to what came later. Part of that was in reaction to the book, because I think Moore goes far too far the other way. But it's also an example of argument/discussion taking on a life of its own, and this is one of the realities that the women ran into.
If you are prepared to accept that, at the start, the companies could not reasonably have predicted what would happen to the women, then you can begin to follow the path/logic for how they got further and further into such messy situations. This is not intended to excuse the outright lies and appalling behaviour that came later, but in understanding the progression it may become possible - in the future - to identify when this progression starts and to avoid it spiralling out of control as it did here (and in so many cases since, because no one has yet learned this lesson from history).
What went particularly wrong for me in this book was that I lost trust in the author. By the time we got to the examples of the companies doing overtly appalling things, Moore had given me such a strong impression of bias that I no longer trusted that she was presenting the situation appropriately (and I am still not convinced she did). I wondered if I was reading "fake news" and so started to look for alternate explanations in everything she presented.