Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie by Leslie Redniss

This book is an imaginative mix of drawings, photo collages and text; the result is a tender and haunting tribute to the scientists who fell in love while conducting research that led to their discovery of radium and polonium. The exposure to radiation eventually killed Marie, in 1934; Pierre preceded her when he was struck by a horse-drawn carriage, in 1906. They had two daughters together, and the eldest of the two, Irene, worked with Marie Curie after the death of her father, and then worked with her husband and the two of them won a Nobel prize, which given the two Marie Curie herself won, must be some kind of record for a nuclear family (pun intended).

There are several things that make this book unusual in it's story-telling technique. The book defies classification: it’s not quite a novel, because Redniss draws on letters, interviews, and existing biographies for the plot; but it’s not quite a biography, because the book also talks about the “fallout” from Curie’s work – fallout that includes, of course, the atom bomb. The book is also “graphic,” in that the prose narrative is wound through and around haunting line drawings and pages saturated in color -- the images Redniss creates echo images from the x-rays the Curies discovered. Even the word “radioactive” is a Curie invention.
Secondly is the mixing of international events that occurred as a result of the work that the Curies did, and both the good and the problematic things that resulted.
Finally, it’s a compelling story about a love affair — a love affair between two people whose feelings for each other deepened as they worked together.
Pierre and Marie were one another’s “collaborator, muse, and guide” through all their research, until Pierre’s death in 1906. Ironically, Pierre wasn’t killed by radium poisoning (which made him terribly ill and eventually killed Marie) but by a horse-drawn carriage in the middle of a Paris street. After his death, the Sorbonne offered Marie his professorship — the first woman to be named a professor in the history of the institution. Curie went on with her research after Pierre died; her second Nobel came from the individual work she did after his death.