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Title: Mediocre
Review: I'm working on a project about Curie, so I've read several biographies about her thus far. This book isn't absolutely terrible, but I think it handles Curie poorly. It underexplains much about her life and motivations, gives little due to the science behind her work, and goes out of its way to make her "inner world" excessively dramatic. Curie's story is amazing and fascinating, but this book sacrifices explanatory detail and historical context in favor of an emotionally simplified (and thus more boring) version of the person. Even the title is misleading -- Curie was dedicated to her work and slightly reclusive, but she was hardly an obsessive personality.I encourage you to please check out the longer but much more engrossing biography by Susan Quinn (titledMarie Curie: A Life (Radcliffe Biography Series)), which provides the historical and scientific context necesssary to make Curie's story really come alive.
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