Radioactive romance

摘要

Writer and artist Lauren Redniss's Radioactive is no ordinary biog-raphy of Marie and Pierre Curie. The story of radioactivity, one of the most exciting discoveries of the past 100 or so years, is brightly visualized through Redniss's imagination in her illustrated book. Ideas, scientific choices, motivations and insatia-ble passions unfurl in her elegant cyanotype drawings and are enacted by ethereal figures set into motion by the author's eloquence. The tale begins with a taste of Pierre and Maries lives before their magnetic meeting, charting Maries arrival in Paris from Poland in 1891 and her integration into the French academic structure. It proceeds with their early studies on radiation, their joint Nobel Prize in Physics (with Henri Becquerel) in 1903, and Pierre's death in a street accident in 1906. The pages tell of Marie's affair with her late husband's brilliant former student, Paul Langevin, and of the ensuing scandal, which broke out at the time Marie was awarded her second Nobel prize in 1911 for the isolation of polonium and radium (the 100th anniver-sary of which we celebrate this year).