Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie (Great Discoveries)

Barbara Goldsmith's biography of Marie Curie is a wonderful portrait of the scientist and the woman. Her work is placed in the context of the science in Europe in the early 1900s, so that you can truly understand its groundbreaking nature. You learn about other scientists whose work intersected

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with and competed against the Curies, such as Roentgen, Becquerel and many others. Goldsmith also addresses Marie Curie's struggle for recognition, for simple acceptance, as a woman in a male-dominated world: how she would have been passed over for the Nobel Prize if her husband, Pierre Curie, had not stood up for her, how she was rejected from scientific academies, how she had to beg for money even after winning the Nobel Prize. Her personal struggles with depression as well as her relationships with her loving husband, children and others in her world are also finely depicted. Altogether a very worthwhile read.

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I enjoyed this. It was readable & interesting. I'm not sure of all of the author's conclusions; she told us that when Pierre died Marie closed herself off from the world...but then she quoted from the passionate letters that Marie wrote to Paul Langevin. I had a little trouble following the meaning

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of the science.

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Starts off well, but author Barbara Goldsmith quickly gets in over her head. This is one of a series on great scientific discoveries; the editors made an idiosyncratic choice of Goldsmith, a best-selling and well regarded biographer but with no discernible scientific background to do a life of

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Marie Curie. The result tells a lot about Marie Curie as a person, but it could have just as easily been about a great artist or a great writer overcoming adversity rather than a great scientist doing the same. Goldsmith spends a lot of time telling us how rough Curie’s early life was – and it was – and how much prejudice there was against her as woman – and there was – but not enough about what see did. Thus we get the trials of growing up in Russian-dominated Poland, living in a garret in Paris while attending the Sorbonne, working in a laboratory not much better than a cow barn, grudgingly bestowed awards, loss of the love of her life, difficulties with the establishment, alienation from her children, and unpleasant death from the side of effects of her work. And, oh yeah, that radium stuff.


Even when there is some scientific detail, it’s not all that appropriate. There’s a discussion – including a line drawing – of a Curie electrometer, but the main emphasis is on how difficult it was to operate, as if Marie Curie’s principal genius was manual dexterity. (I will mention one thing that really impressed me – Marie Curie may be the only person who ever saw, or who ever will see, radium. Not a radium compound or a radium spectroscopic line, but actual radium metal – she prepared a miniscule sample apparently just to show that she could. Magnificent).


Don’t get me wrong; Marie Curie wins the race for greatest scientist with the roughest life in a walk. But I fear the message here is wrong – it’s if you want to be a scientist you’ll have to overcome prejudice against you race or gender or ethnicity, you’ll have to deal with disrespect from the public and your peers and the Establishment, and you’ll risk alienating your family and friends. What the message should be is that if you want to be a scientist it will be so fascinating you won’t even notice the other stuff.

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Just what I wanted to know about Curie, this is a quick and clear study of the woman at the heart of her own mythology. Worth it for the description of her daughters alone.

Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith purports to tell the real story behind the mythical woman. Goldsmith was able to access new materials including Curie's letters and other papers, many of which had been sequestered because they were radioactive. She also

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interviewed family members and friends. The portrait she paints is not at all flattering but perhaps not surprising. In a world where women were not welcome in the scientific world, she created a space for herself that she managed to keep even after Pierre died. But she did so, Goldsmith suggests, at the expense of her children, especially her youngest, Eve, who did not have the scientific inclinations of her older sister Irene.

I read a few Amazon reviews and agree with one reviewer: Goldsmith seems sympathetic to her subject at the beginning as she describes her childhood and her battle with depression. But, as the biography unfolds, she seems to like her subject less and less and that attitude may color the later stages of the book as she delves into Curie's private life beyond the laboratory.

I read this for the CATWoman July book: women in science. It had been sitting on the shelf for awhile and for someone who had little or no knowledge about Curie beyond what Goldsmith would call the myth, it was an introduction and an easy read. I don't think I need to explore Curie any further and can only half-heartedly recommend the book.

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