Riveting Stories, Amazing Research, and Passionate Authors

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Do you read non-fiction?  There's really nothing as fabulous as a well-written, well-researched true story that simply comes to life on the page.

I recently had the complete joy to interview Kate Moore, who wrote The Radium Girls. It's the story of the young women--some as young as 11--who were hired to paint the radium on the little numbers on watches and aeronautics dials. 

My mother, even, used to tell me stories about them. That they licked their little brushes, dipped them into the radium (which most people had no idea was deadly, and many even thought was beneficial) and then painted. Kate Moore describes the practice in heartbreaking detail...lip, dip, paint. Lip, dip, paint. And of course, each time, they were slowly poisoning themselves. We know most of the girls died horrible deaths. And even now are radioactive in their graves.

Kate writes this story as a suspense thriller, a medical mystery, a workplace horror story, a cautionary tale about greed, and even a romance. It's terrific. It's a complete page-turner. It's haunting. 

It's enraging.

Kate told me she feels as if she knows each girl as a friend. (And makes us feel that, too.) She travelled from London  (where she lives) to Orange, New Jersey and Ottowa, Illinois where two of the companies were, to walk in the girls footsteps, and see where they lived and worked.  She talked to their families. She read court documents. She devoured the transcripts of the girls' court testimony, sometimes, given from their deathbeds.

Sourcebooks says: "And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of Americas early 20th century and in a groundbreaking battle for workers rights that will echo for centuries." 

She posted their photos in her study as she wrote, sometimes with tears streaming down her face. Now, she sees herself as the person keeping the girls alive. And I can absolutely see them in heaven, too, giving her a standing ovation. 

And then Jonathan and I went to a reading by Laurie Gwen Shapiro (no relation, mores the pity) who wrote an other terrific non-fiction saga--called  The Stowaway. It's the story of a New York teenager who stowed away on Admiral Byrd's expedition to Antarctica in the late 1920's. Can you even imagine the--audacity? And of course he was discovered, and then...well, you have to read it.

And again, the connection of the author with her subject is what's so especially poignant.  Laurie traveled to Antarctica--she said: how could I do a book about Antarctica without going there? So she took most of her advance (her husband was not completely thrilled, as she tells the story) and left on a six-week expedition.  

She shared the ship with--among others--the penguin expert who was the consultant for  the movie Happy Feet.  She said it was so cold she can't even describe the cold. And that the whole place smells like penguin feces.

Simon and Schuster says:  "The spectacular, true story of a scrappy teenager from New York’s Lower East Side who stowed away on the Roaring Twenties’ most remarkable feat of science and daring: an expedition to Antarctica.

It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over and American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet’s final frontier? There wouldn’t be another encounter with an unknown this magnificent until Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon."

But she, too, feels a deep connection with her subject. She said she needed to go to touch the huge ice barrier Billy touched. She had to travel in a zooming little Zodiac, in super-frigid temperatures to get there. And when she finally, freezingly, got there, when she put her big multi-layered be-gloved be-mittened hand flat on the same place Billy had so many years ago, she, also, started to cry.  (Kind of dangerous in Antarctic weather.) 

Both authors talked about discovering the real story of history. And making sure the stories are never lost. And when we read them, we help them in that quest.  I am proud to be part of it.

How about you, Reds and readers? Are you non-fiction fans? What can you recommend?