* Introduction * A Family with Convictions * A Double Life * Some Very Hard Days * A Precious Sense of Liberty * A Beautiful Thing * Everything Hoped For * Discovery * A Theory of Matter * The Prize * Turning Toward Home * Desolation and Despair * A New Alchemy * Rejection * Scandal * Recovery * Serving France * America * A Thousand Bonds * Legacies
Susan Quinn is the author of two highly praised biographies: A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney and Marie Curie: A Life. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Quinn (A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney) presents here a carefully researched, well-rounded study of Curie (1867-1934), the physicist credited with isolating radium. Born Marie Sklodowska in Poland, she left her home to study in Paris, where she met and married physics professor Pierre Curie. Agreeing with earlier accounts, Quinn depicts their marriage as a devoted partnership. The Curies together made an investigation of radioactivity, for which they shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for physics. But Quinn breaks ground in her detailed description, drawn from newly available papers, of Marie's life after Pierre's accidental death in 1906. At first so grief-stricken she neglected her two daughters, Irene and Eva, Marie later had a love affair with French scientist Paul Langevin. Because Langevin was married, Marie was vilified by the French press and was almost denied the 1911 Nobel Prize for chemistry. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC, History Book Club and QPB alternates. (Mar.)
This new biography of Marie Curie by the author of A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney (LJ 10/15/87) includes information drawn from previously unavailable letters that Curie wrote to Pierre, her husband, after his accidental death. It also draws on correspondence between Curie and Paul Langevin, with whom she had an affair several years after becoming a widow. The affair, sensationalized in the French press, nearly caused the revocation of her second Nobel Prize. Only the arrival of World War I and Curie's valiant efforts to bring X-ray technology to French army hospitals and even to the front lines succeeded in removing the tainted image from the French public's memory. This is a rigorously researched book with extensive notes and bibliography. It provides much more detailed and balanced coverage of Curie's life than has previously been available. For biography and science collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/94.]‘Hilary D. Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Livermore, Cal.
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
