Barbara Goldsmith

Obsessive Genius

Best-selling author Barbara Goldsmith on the myth and reality behind the extraordinary "Madame Curie."

The myth of Marie Curie—the penniless Polish immigrant who, through genius and obsessive persistence, endured years of toil and deprivation to produce radium, a luminous panacea for all the world's ills including cancer—has obscured the remarkable truth behind her discoveries. Curie's shrewd though controversial insight was that radioactivity was an atomic property that could be used to discover new elements. While her work won her two Nobel Prizes and transformed our world, it did not liberate her from the prejudices of either the male-dominated scientific community or society. Here is an all-too-human woman trying to balance science, love, and the family values that constitute her legacy.

Using original research (diaries, letters, and family interviews) to peel away the layers of myth and reveal the woman behind the icon, the acclaimed author and historian Barbara Goldsmith offers a dazzling portrait of Curie, her amazing discoveries, and the price she paid for fame. 15 photographs.

About the series:Great Discoveries brings together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs—the great discoveries that have gone on to transform our view of the world.

"An uncommonly heartfelt and empathic profile of a scientific hero."—Tim Ferris, author of Coming of Age in the Milky Way and Seeing in the Dark

"History has treated Marie Curie as a mysterious genius, as if she sprang full-blown from the head of Zeus—or perhaps her husband. Barbara Goldsmith gives us a flesh-and-blood woman whose life and work will inspire our own. Marie Curie was the brilliant discoverer of radium and the radioactivity crucial to modern science. Barbara Goldsmith is the brilliant discoverer of Marie Curie."—Gloria Steinem

"Barbara Goldsmith has done the near impossible in Obsessive Genius, her remarkably moving and surprising biography of Madame Curie. She never loses the Luddite reader like me in a hopeless morass of scientific details. Instead, she makes the scientific information sparkle with the same clarity that matches her telling the accomplishments and strange celebrity of the woman who founded the modern science of radioactivity. This is a book to buy for yourself and then buy ten more copies to give as presents to grateful friends."—John Guare

"Barbara Goldsmith has written a superb study of a fascinating and historically important woman whose life is a great deal more interesting than the myth it inspired. Obsessive Genius is an obsessive read."—Gay Talese

"Great lives in science are all about passion and curiosity. Marie Curie, the Polish-born discoverer of radium, had both in grand measure. But down the road that she helped open lay nuclear energy, which meant atomic bombs, which put Curie center stage during one of the great turning points in human history. Barbara Goldsmith has uniquely captured the woman and her science."—Thomas Powers, author of Heisenberg's War

"Obsessive Genius vividly portrays the powerful personal story of privation, sacrifice, triumph and reward of one of the greatest scientists of the Twentieth Century, Marie Curie. It is a fast-paced exciting tale of scientific adventure that I read in one sitting. Barbara Goldsmith makes an important addition to her growing body of work on the life and accomplishments of women who have shaped our history and our lives."—William A. Haseltine, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO, Human Genome Sciences, Inc.

"In this fascinating life of Madame Curie, Barbara Goldsmith powerfully conveys both the magic of science and the struggle of being a woman in a man's universe." —Walter Isaacson