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I was not bothered by what some of you have seen as "embellishments"; frankly, I'm not sure I would have consciously noticed any on my own. I did think the author sometimes tended toward purple prose, but that may have been exacerbated by the narration of the audiobook.
The book seemed to me to be firmly in the tradition of the nonfiction novel, and I don't have any significant problem with that subgenre. I didn't read The Radium Girls to understand the specific scientific, medical, or legal issues about radium and workplace safety; I read it to learn about people and how they were affected, what they endured and how they coped.
My main takeaway is that women in the workplace have been and continue to be exploited. The men in their laboratories had protective gear; the women, nothing--they didn't matter. Management lied and denied and put profit above all else. (Beyond the safety issues, I was outraged that the women were being paid for piecework, not a regular hourly wage.)
Last year I read a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (Triangle, by David Von Drehle). The bosses ignored basic safety regulations, even keeping doors locked (to prevent possible pilfering), and when fire broke out, more than a hundred women--mostly young immigrants--perished because of those locks. In court proceedings, the bosses attacked the credibility of the survivors, lied and obfuscated, avoided criminal conviction but ended up paying minimal damages in a civil suit. The specific circumstances were very different, but as I was reading about the dial painters, I kept thinking about the Triangle victims and how cheaply held were the lives of the women workers in both situations.
It makes me very angry.
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