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The Curies, Seen Through an Artist’s Eyes
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: December 21, 2010
Negative reviews of poetry books are famously rare; takedowns of graphic novels and book-length comics are scarcer still.
The graphic-novel genre is no longer young, but it retains, like Drew Barrymore and certain indie bands, a quirky and semi-adorable glow. Its fragile vibe is Etsy, not Best Buy. Attacking a pile of graphic novels is not unlike chucking a sackful of baby pandas into a river. If many graphic novels are, as Barack Obama put it about Hillary Rodham Clinton, likable enough, few are knotty works of art, things you’d eagerly give to both the sulky teenager in your life and your grandmother who reads serious nonfiction and thinks comics are infra-dig. Few zigzag toward the earth like mid-August lightning. The tail end of 2010 has delivered such a keeper, however, in Lauren Redniss’s graphic biography, “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout.” Here’s to hoping it doesn’t get lost amid the grog and tinsel and pay-per-view screenings of “Elf.”
Described simply, “Radioactive” is an illustrated biography of Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist famous for her work on radioactivity — she was the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice — and her equally accomplished husband, Pierre. It lays bare their childhoods, their headlong love story, their scientific collaboration and the way their toxic discoveries, which included radium and polonium, poisoned them in slow motion.
Described less simply, it’s a deeply unusual and forceful thing to have in your hands. Ms. Redniss’s text is long, literate and supple. She catches Marie Curie’s “delicate and grave” manner as a young student, new to Paris; she notes the “luminous goulash” of radium and zinc that one chemist prepares; she observes with pleasure another man’s “thriving mustache.” She has a firm command of, but an easy way with, the written word.
The electricity in “Radioactive,” however, derives from the friction between Ms. Redniss’s text and her ambitious and spooky art. Her text runs across and over these freewheeling pages, the boundaries between word and image constantly blurring. Her drawings are both vivid and ethereal. Her people have elongated faces and pale forms; they’re etiolated Modiglianis. They populate a Paris that’s become a dream city.
Ms. Redniss is the author of a previous book called “Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfield Follies” (2006), and as an artist she has contributed to the New York Times Op-Ed page. She made many of the images in “Radioactive” using a process called cyanotype printing, in which a drawing is, through a chemical process that involves sunlight, turned into a kind of glowing negative of the original.
She employed cyanotype printing because she wanted to capture, she writes, “what Marie Curie called radium’s ‘spontaneous luminosity.’ ” (Ms. Redniss also invented a typeface for her book, based on title pages of manuscripts in the New York Public Library.)
In addition to her own drawings, “Radioactive” is filled with archival images. One page is a copy of the first X-ray image ever made; another is a copy of a declassified F.B.I. document; another is a series of photographs taken after the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown, described as showing mutant roses that have become sterile. All this material is woven seamlessly into the wider narrative.
Woven in seamlessly, too, are interpolatory sections that leap forward to explore the modern ramifications of the Curies’ research. For example, Pierre pressed crystals along their axes to produce an electric charge called piezoelectricity. About this, Ms. Redniss writes: “Mechanisms that depend on piezoelectricity are found today propelling the droplets in inkjet printers, regulating time in quartz watches, controlling the shrill wail of smoke detectors, turning the adjustable lenses of autofocus cameras” and “acting as the pickups in electric guitars.”
“Radioactive” finds its soul in the Curies’ love story. They met at the Sorbonne, where he was a teacher, and she a student. After their marriage, life and work blended together. “They co-signed their published findings,” Ms. Redniss writes. “Their handwritings intermingle in their notebooks.”
The book is awash with curious details. At a dinner party Pierre unveiled a small, glowing cylinder of radium for their guests. Marie took to sleeping with a jar of it by her pillow. “Radioactivity had made the Curies immortal,” Ms. Redniss writes. “Now it was killing them.”
Ms. Redniss writes well about how, a few years after Pierre died in 1906 after being run over by a horse-drawn carriage, Marie began an affair with a married scientist. One newspaper called the ensuing scandal “the greatest sensation in Paris since the theft of the Mona Lisa.”
When Marie Curie won her second Nobel Prize, this affair was still fresh, and the Nobel committee suggested that it might be best if she skipped the ceremony. Albert Einstein was among those who supported her.
“The steps that you advise seem to me a grave error,” she replied to the Swedes. “There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.” The book is also quite good on Marie Curie’s career nursing France’s wounded during World War I. Her mobile X-ray labs were called “petites Curies.” Ms. Redniss writes, “No longer were doctors performing blind exploratory surgeries on already damaged bodies.”
Ms. Redniss’s good taste fails her exactly once, when she writes that Marie Curie “passed away,” rather than merely died, in 1934. The official cause of death was “aplastic pernicious anemia.” She had been ill for a long time. She chronicled her own deterioration, noting the “crisis and pus.”
“Radioactive” is serious science and brisk storytelling. The word “luminous” is a critic’s cliché, to be avoided at all costs, but it fits Ms. Redniss’s book pretty snugly. This is a story with a hefty half-life. As Ms. Redniss notes about the Curies’ laboratory notebooks, held in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, they are “still radioactive, setting the Geiger counters clicking 100 years on.”
RADIOACTIVE
Marie and Pierre Curie:
A Tale of Love and Fallout
By Lauren Redniss
Illustrated. 205 pages. It Books/HarperCollins. $29.99.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/bo...html?ref=books
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: December 21, 2010
Negative reviews of poetry books are famously rare; takedowns of graphic novels and book-length comics are scarcer still.
The graphic-novel genre is no longer young, but it retains, like Drew Barrymore and certain indie bands, a quirky and semi-adorable glow. Its fragile vibe is Etsy, not Best Buy. Attacking a pile of graphic novels is not unlike chucking a sackful of baby pandas into a river. If many graphic novels are, as Barack Obama put it about Hillary Rodham Clinton, likable enough, few are knotty works of art, things you’d eagerly give to both the sulky teenager in your life and your grandmother who reads serious nonfiction and thinks comics are infra-dig. Few zigzag toward the earth like mid-August lightning. The tail end of 2010 has delivered such a keeper, however, in Lauren Redniss’s graphic biography, “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout.” Here’s to hoping it doesn’t get lost amid the grog and tinsel and pay-per-view screenings of “Elf.”
Described simply, “Radioactive” is an illustrated biography of Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist famous for her work on radioactivity — she was the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice — and her equally accomplished husband, Pierre. It lays bare their childhoods, their headlong love story, their scientific collaboration and the way their toxic discoveries, which included radium and polonium, poisoned them in slow motion.
Described less simply, it’s a deeply unusual and forceful thing to have in your hands. Ms. Redniss’s text is long, literate and supple. She catches Marie Curie’s “delicate and grave” manner as a young student, new to Paris; she notes the “luminous goulash” of radium and zinc that one chemist prepares; she observes with pleasure another man’s “thriving mustache.” She has a firm command of, but an easy way with, the written word.
The electricity in “Radioactive,” however, derives from the friction between Ms. Redniss’s text and her ambitious and spooky art. Her text runs across and over these freewheeling pages, the boundaries between word and image constantly blurring. Her drawings are both vivid and ethereal. Her people have elongated faces and pale forms; they’re etiolated Modiglianis. They populate a Paris that’s become a dream city.
Ms. Redniss is the author of a previous book called “Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfield Follies” (2006), and as an artist she has contributed to the New York Times Op-Ed page. She made many of the images in “Radioactive” using a process called cyanotype printing, in which a drawing is, through a chemical process that involves sunlight, turned into a kind of glowing negative of the original.
She employed cyanotype printing because she wanted to capture, she writes, “what Marie Curie called radium’s ‘spontaneous luminosity.’ ” (Ms. Redniss also invented a typeface for her book, based on title pages of manuscripts in the New York Public Library.)
In addition to her own drawings, “Radioactive” is filled with archival images. One page is a copy of the first X-ray image ever made; another is a copy of a declassified F.B.I. document; another is a series of photographs taken after the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown, described as showing mutant roses that have become sterile. All this material is woven seamlessly into the wider narrative.
Woven in seamlessly, too, are interpolatory sections that leap forward to explore the modern ramifications of the Curies’ research. For example, Pierre pressed crystals along their axes to produce an electric charge called piezoelectricity. About this, Ms. Redniss writes: “Mechanisms that depend on piezoelectricity are found today propelling the droplets in inkjet printers, regulating time in quartz watches, controlling the shrill wail of smoke detectors, turning the adjustable lenses of autofocus cameras” and “acting as the pickups in electric guitars.”
“Radioactive” finds its soul in the Curies’ love story. They met at the Sorbonne, where he was a teacher, and she a student. After their marriage, life and work blended together. “They co-signed their published findings,” Ms. Redniss writes. “Their handwritings intermingle in their notebooks.”
The book is awash with curious details. At a dinner party Pierre unveiled a small, glowing cylinder of radium for their guests. Marie took to sleeping with a jar of it by her pillow. “Radioactivity had made the Curies immortal,” Ms. Redniss writes. “Now it was killing them.”
Ms. Redniss writes well about how, a few years after Pierre died in 1906 after being run over by a horse-drawn carriage, Marie began an affair with a married scientist. One newspaper called the ensuing scandal “the greatest sensation in Paris since the theft of the Mona Lisa.”
When Marie Curie won her second Nobel Prize, this affair was still fresh, and the Nobel committee suggested that it might be best if she skipped the ceremony. Albert Einstein was among those who supported her.
“The steps that you advise seem to me a grave error,” she replied to the Swedes. “There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.” The book is also quite good on Marie Curie’s career nursing France’s wounded during World War I. Her mobile X-ray labs were called “petites Curies.” Ms. Redniss writes, “No longer were doctors performing blind exploratory surgeries on already damaged bodies.”
Ms. Redniss’s good taste fails her exactly once, when she writes that Marie Curie “passed away,” rather than merely died, in 1934. The official cause of death was “aplastic pernicious anemia.” She had been ill for a long time. She chronicled her own deterioration, noting the “crisis and pus.”
“Radioactive” is serious science and brisk storytelling. The word “luminous” is a critic’s cliché, to be avoided at all costs, but it fits Ms. Redniss’s book pretty snugly. This is a story with a hefty half-life. As Ms. Redniss notes about the Curies’ laboratory notebooks, held in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, they are “still radioactive, setting the Geiger counters clicking 100 years on.”
RADIOACTIVE
Marie and Pierre Curie:
A Tale of Love and Fallout
By Lauren Redniss
Illustrated. 205 pages. It Books/HarperCollins. $29.99.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/bo...html?ref=books