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Lauren Redniss<\/a>'s \"Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout<\/a>\" is atypical in its plethora of both the only relatively recently possible: it's a history of science about a woman; it's a biography of scientists in which romance is an important element of the story; it's an erudite treatment of an historical subject written by a woman -- and the supposedly still-impossible: it's a rigorously researched and thoroughly annotated work in which almost every page is a handcrafted watercolor; one of its appendices contains a \"radioactive bestiary and garden\" listing, in addition to deinococcus radiodurans<\/em><\/a> (a radiation-resistant bacterium found alive in heavily irradiated canned meat) and albino barn swallows<\/a> adapted to Chernobyl's \"Zone of Alienation<\/a>\" (which would make a great band or spy novel name), Godzilla and Bert the Turtle<\/a> (animated fictional star of the\u00a0Duck and Cover<\/em> Civil Defense PSA's); it's a National Book Award Finalist in Nonfiction while, again (this bears repeating), nearly all its pages are paintings made by the author.<\/p>\n

It's something of the\u00a0generic<\/em> radiation-mutated love-child of a non-fiction novel, a graphic novel, a scholarly biography, and a Caldecott award winner . . . more impossibilities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lauren Redniss’s “Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout” is atypical in its plethora of both the only relatively recently possible: it’s a history of science … Continue readingintro<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radioactive.paulkelleyvieth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radioactive.paulkelleyvieth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radioactive.paulkelleyvieth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radioactive.paulkelleyvieth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radioactive.paulkelleyvieth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/radioactive.paulkelleyvieth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272,"href":"https:\/\/radioactive.paulkelleyvieth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21\/revisions\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radioactive.paulkelleyvieth.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}