Harsh Light

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
Naperville, Ill. : Sourcebooks, [2018]
xviii, 477 p. : ill. ; 214 cm.

This is a fantastic book that ties several important periods of US history together - WWI, The Roaring Twenties and The Great Depression.  It also has a local interest in that half the drama of the story is in Ottawa, IL about an hour and forty-five minute drive from here in Urbana.

But it's a tough book, too.  It's the story of literally murderous corporate exploitation and dishonesty that shortened the lives of hundreds of women who worked in the factories where the luminous (and dangerously radioactive) radium was painted on wartime instrument panels and on civilian-use watch dials.  The deaths of several of the women featured in the book are slow, agonizing, and terrible to read about.  What makes the book inspiring, though, is the courage, grit and determination of the victimized women as they take on the companies that used and abused them - and eventually win significant victories.

This book has a lot of heart. The author succeeds in putting the reader into the lives of the women who worked in the radium-dial industry - capturing the initial excitement of well-paid employment for young women of the twenties and the freedom it gave them, and humanizing the gruesome and tragic illnesses that stalked these young women several years after they started the work.

The book is a great lesson about the dangers of unregulated corporate behavior, the power of unified resistance, and the importance of family, friends, community and the media in taking on powerful foes. It's a long, but very worthy read for anyone interested in US history.



    

Harsh Life - Lush Art

Black Boy by Richard Wright
New York : HarperPerennial ModernClassics, 2006.
xiv, 419, 14 p. : ill. ; 21 cm.

One of the joys of being a librarian is walking the stacks and seeing a book that keeps calling out to you, "Read me." It must have been about 8 or 9 years ago that I finally read Wright's stunning 1940 novel, Native Son.  Since then his autobiography has been sitting on the shelf demanding to be read, and so I finally have done it.  It is amazing!

What I loved about Wright's book is the way it puts you completely in the mind and heart of a young African American male growing up in the Jim Crow south in the early twentieth century.  It's especially interesting in that Wright is never able to learn to hide his thoughts from white people - even when he tries, and he realizes that - in the racist South - could easily cost him his life.

It is also a wonderful book for anyone who is an artist or loves art, but really has no idea why.  There are times as a boy, where he writes just for the sheer delight of using language.  It is something that almost none of his peers understands or appreciates.  The book is also tribute to the stubborn grace of someone clinging to his integrity while being threatened by the larger society with its violent racism, and his more intimate social circle where his assertion of his right to think independently is ridiculed and punished by teachers, guardians, religious people, and family.

The book breaks down into two major sections - his life in the Jim Crow south (Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee) and his move to Chicago where he gets involved in the heavily Stalinist, intellectually repressive Communist Party.  Both sections are very interesting, but my guess is that many students would especially like the first half.

I would definitely recommend this book to students.  It is a fascinating, well written book.

Yum

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
New York : Scribner, 2010.
xvi, 240 p., [14] p. of plates : ill., ports., facsimiles ; 23 cm

I've wanted to read this book for a while, especially since I added this new "restored edition" to the collection about five years ago, to replace our very old edition that was first published posthumously in 1964.

It is not a single narrative (or meal) but more like a buffet of Hemingway's Paris between the wars with interesting sections touching on writers such as Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Stein; living conditions for expats, early marriage, fatherhood, and the work of a struggling writer moving from journalism to fiction.

Some might find the discontinuous nature of the sections off-putting, but I found it quite wonderful.  Each section is interesting in its own right, and the collection as a whole leaves you satisfied, but curious for more Hemingway.

I would definitely recommend this book for any student interested in Hemingway, or in literary Paris in the 1920s.