Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie
by Barbara Goldsmith
Phoenix, $144
Marie Curie was no feminist, however much Barbara Goldsmith might wish her to have been in this short, accessible biography. True, Curie faced considerable obstacles as a woman, but those didn't prevent her winning the Nobel Prize for physics and for chemistry, an unmatched feat in science. Obsessive Genius is about Curie's single-minded devotion to her work, encouraged by her soul-mate, Pierre, a marriage of minds that earned them the physics prize in 1903. She was barred from delivering the traditional lecture because she was a woman. She went on to win the prize for chemistry in 1911, which the committee tried to rescind after it learnt that the now-widowed Curie was involved in an adulterous affair. Goldsmith coolly chronicles the depths of male pettiness Curie had to endure until US journalist Marie Meloney championed her genius in the 1920s. Curie died in 1934 at the age of 66 from aplastic pernicious anaemia, brought on by prolonged exposure to radium radiation. 'Nothing in life is to be feared,' she said. 'It is only to be understood.'