Obsessive Genius (Goldsmith) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Feminism is one of the most distorting of lenses. To see Marie Curie forced to sit among the audience in Stockholm while her husband, Pierre, gave the lecture following their joint receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1903 is infuriating. What a way to treat a woman! One of the strengths of Obsessive Genius, Barbara Goldsmith's excellent short biography of Marie Curie, is its suppression of anger.... [A] poignant—and scientifically lucid—portrait.
Brenda Maddox - New York Times


Goldsmith leads the reader through a wonderland of facts with just the right blend of science and story.
San Francisco Chronicle


Goldsmith's straightforward biography illuminates both the public Curie, a tireless scientist obsessed with work, and the private one, a woman who suffered bouts of severe depression, was distant from her children and scarred deeply by the accidental death of her scientist husband, Pierre.... [Goldsmith] is weakest at explaining the theoretical basis for Curie's scientific breakthroughs.
Publishers Weekly


Goldsmith has produced a finely detailed and well-researched biography.... [She] focuses on the social and economic hurdles that Curie had to overcome to manage the roles of scientist, wife, mother, and staunch French wartime ally. She also provides an excellent portrait of the age in which Marie Curie was to do so much for the world. —Hilary Burton, formerly with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, CA
Library Journal


Best-selling historian Goldsmith incisively chronicles the intensely dramatic life of the first woman scientist to win the Nobel Prize, neatly explicating both scientific breakthroughs and complex personal and societal conflicts.... Marie Curie's life, Goldsmith concludes, was "tragic and glorious." Her powerful portrait reveals a woman of great passion, genius, and pain who changed the world in ways she would have deplored. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


[A] sharp, sprightly, refreshing portrait of the brilliant, melancholic scientist, affording a sensible look into her head and into the body of her work..... In a world of vicious, institutionalized sexism, Curie was as "rare as a unicorn." Nothing came easy, notes Goldsmith.... Opens the door on Curie as she opened the door on atomic science (15 photos).
Kirkus Reviews