BookOwl

  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 ...

  3/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* Children of Dune , the third entry in the “Dune” series, gets three out of five conflicted stars from me.  “Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class—whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.” Never let it be said by me that this science fiction epic does not explore lofty ideas about human civilization, governance, and political and religious philosophy. That is not where my quibbles with Children of Dune lie. The worldbuilding is extensive and lovingly cultivated by the author. Another point in the series’ favor. No, my quibbles are mostly characterization-based.   “They who learn the lesson of self-deception too well shall perish by that deception.”   First...