BookOwl

  4/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* “As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.”   I listened to All Systems Red on audiobook and absolutely fell in love with the “ Murderbot Diaries” science fiction series!   Our fearless protagonist is Murderbot , a generic corporate security unit, until one day, he hacks his own programming to have some measure of free will. (He does this after he is forced to carry out a massacre and does not want to be coerced into doing something like that again. The name he chooses for himself also helps him not to forget where he came from.)   But, his latest clients, a survey team from a non-corporate political entity, cannot know. Another thing that they cannot know is his addiction to the corporate entertainment feed, which he watches obsessively, on and off the job.   “I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carrie...

  4/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* “‘It is an offense against Morals and Humanity,’” he concluded, “‘and, just incidentally, against the law. ’”   The Radium Girls by Kate Moore tells a harrowing story about the early days after the discovery of radium by the Curies and its lasting reverberations to the present. Radium, “dubbed “liquid sunshine,” could be described as critical to national security in the days of WWI in addition to a booming industry. The companies that sprang to meet the war demand advertised high pay and attracted women workers to paint dials in their factories, to paint those dials with a radium-containing paint so they glowed in the dark.   Radium Girls gives voice to the many workers who answered the call of the radium industry to become dial painters and the deadly aftermath of their occupations. While wartime demanded peak production, radium was seen as a miracle material for civilians as well—in applications such as radium tonic cures to giving style to ...