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In 1891, 24 year old Marie, nÉe Marya Sklodowska, moved from Warsaw to Paris, where she found work in the laboratory of Pierre Curie, a scientist engaged in research on heat and magnetism. They fell in love. They took their honeymoon on bicycles. They expanded the periodic table, discovering two new elements with startling properties, radium and polonium. They recognized radioactivity as an atomic property, heralding the dawn of a new scientific era. They won the Nobel Prize. Newspapers mythologized the couple's romance, beginning articles on the Curies with "Once upon a time . . . " Then, in 1906, Pierre was killed in a freak accident. Marie continued their work alone. She won a second Nobel Prize in 1911, and fell in love again, this time with the married physicist Paul Langevin. Scandal ensued. Duels were fought.

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Marie and Pierre Curie remain two of the most important scientists of the 20th century. Their pioneering work in the study of radioactivity led to the discovery of the elements radium and polonium. Later, they identified how atoms give off, or radiate, energy which would be the foundation for modern nuclear physics.

But for as successful as they were as scientific partners, theirs was also a love story. Coming from vastly different backgrounds, Marie grew up in politically repressed Poland and suffered the loss of a sister and her mother as a young girl. Pierre enjoyed an idyllic childhood and was educated at home by his brother and father. Although their friendship was initially based on their shared passion for science and research, it soon grew into a romantic love that would lead them to a personal relationship and professional partnership that would literally change the world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

From the dawn of electricity to the nuclear age
This book is not a standard-issue biography of Marie Curie because it goes beyond her life to encompass that of her husband, her daughters, and her famed son-in-law. The book's title actually undestates the case: It should be Madame Curie and the World She Helped to Create.

Marie Curie's story is remarkable. From modest origins as the daughter of a Polish educator who was forced out of one job after another by Russians, Curie finally got her chance at age 26 to attend college in Paris. Within 10 years, she had won the Nobel Prize (with her husband) for discovering new elements and for discovering the radioactivity that they produced. She did this while enduring poverty, hunger, national and gender prejudice, and many more hardships. Then, she won an unprecedented second Nobel a few years later for extending her findings.

The breakneck pace of her life and her husband's life is well-chronicled in this book. The intellectual capabilities and work ethic Marie and Pierre are incomprehensible. They were literally moving the frontiers of science forwards, while working with toxic chemicals in crude conditions. They wrote scores of scientific papers and managed the careers of hundreds of promising scientists. And yet, they'd hold intellectual salons every Sunday, and find time for mountain hikes each summer.Oh, and they raised a Nobel Prize-winning daughter who married someone who also won a Nobel in physics.

The book does a good job of explaining the challenges that the Curies faced and the determination that was the source of their triumphs. It wonderfully evokes an era of all-in-this-together spirit that was science at the start of the 20th century. And it gives a moving description of Marie's work with her daughter Eve to bring Xray technology to use at the front in World War I.

But the book changes course and falters to some degree when it strays from Marie and Pierre. Indeed, Marie dies about two-thirds of the way through the book, and her son in law takes over as the primary figure. His story is fascinating, but it doesn't belong in this book, and his tale is not told nearly as well as the Madame Curie material.

Two other nitpicks with the book. First, the author uses the [sic] symbol in many of the quotes of people's letters, as if to imply they were making mistakes. But I don't see mistakes in the letters, and yet I found several typos in the book. If you're gonna criticize others, you should get it right yourself.Second, the writing is awkward at times. I think the author is a native French speaker, and some of the awkwardness in the book comes from her lack of complete fluency with American-style English.

Overall, I would not recommend starting one's reading about Marie Curie with this biography. It covers too much other ground, and yet its coverage of the science behind the Curies' work lacks sufficient detail. And while the information about the politics of science is interesting, the author assumes that the reader will have a working knowledge of WWI and, especially, of WWII and the politics of the Occupation, Resistance, and post-war period. Frankly, the author should remove the non-Marie material and use it as a jumping off point for a better book about science in Europe during and after WWII.

A Workmanlike Biography
This is a good basic biography of Marie Curie. The writing is generally a little flat, punctuated with outcroppings of some rather odd word usages. For example, Pflaum consistently refers to Marie Curie being "enceinte," instead of simply saying she was pregnant. And we read about things like "the flairing of the wind." Not wrong - but something a little off about the phraseology here and there. It's as if Pflaum spent too much time in France researching her subjects and became distanced from the English language in the process.

However this book will certainly add to your knowledge of Marie Curie's amazing career. I found the chapter on her activities during World War I to be especially interesting. Curie and her daughter went out into the battlefields with the first mobile X-ray machines. They saved untold lives by being able to locate bullets and shrapnel in soldiers, and the exact site of breakages and other internal damage. I'd never realized Curie's brave contribution to that War effort.

Then you will find some unexpected insights into world politics here. In the course of discussing the Curies' contribution to the World War II effort, Pflaum explains how the Communists became an increasingly popular political alternative during the 1940s and 50s. They were so active in the wartime resistance, they gained the respect of a large percentage of the French and Italian peoples. Their heroism in defeating Fascism/Nazism no doubt played a part in establishing the Communist Party as a viable political faction in a number of European countries. Again, this was a larger back-story to the Cold War and succeeding geopolitical dynamics than I expected to find in a book simply about Marie Curie.

I wish though that Pflaum had supplied more scientific detail. You won't find much about the nature of radioactivity here so it's difficult for the reader to fully appreciate the Curies' achievement. You will probably want to check out some book of popular explanation of the atom to accompany your reading of Grand Obsession.

This book does convey Marie Curie's dedication to her work. She kept an unfailing schedule in her laboratory - through difficult personal times, through her own failing health. Because Pflaum's writing is not very inspired, this book will probably not inspire any young readers to similar heights of dedication to scientific pursuit. Grand Obsession may not have a very long half-life in your memory. But it radiates some of the spirit of Marie Curie.

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The Nobel-Prize winning pioneers in the study of radioactivity. ... Read more

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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Le Cercle Historia: L'operation Jericho Par Remy - Les Croises Par Regine Pernoud - Marie Curie Par Eve Curie - Frederic Ii Par Pierre Gaxotte. Authors are: Remy, Regine Pernoud, Eve Curie, and Pierre Gaxotte. 1960 hardcover published by Le Cercle Historia. Four works in one volume. Text in French. Black and white illustrations/photographs. ... Read more

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Chapters: Irène Joliot-Curie, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Henri Barbusse, François-Noël Babeuf, Alain Badiou, Gustave Courbet, Michel Onfray, Michel Rocard, Charles Fourier, Olivier Besancenot, Marcel Mauss, Louise Michel, Édith Cresson, Laurent Fabius, Pierre Mauroy, Louis Blanc, Louis Auguste Blanqui, René Viviani, Daniel Guérin, Gustave Hervé, Boris Souvarine, Georges Valois, Jean Maitron, Jules Guesde, Flora Tristan, Charles Péguy, Joseph Paul-Boncour, François-Vincent Raspail, Sylvain Maréchal, Marceau Pivert, Pierre Biétry, Sébastien Faure, Albert L'ouvrier, Félix Pyat, Emmanuel D'astier de La Vigerie, Maurice Sarrail, Étienne Cabet, Morelly, Victor Prosper Considerant, Gilbert Achcar, Pierre Juquin, Gisèle Halimi, Marc Augier, Vincent Peillon, Ilan Halevi, Caroline Rémy de Guebhard, Rodolphe Prager, Benoît Jules Mure, Jean Grave, Lucien Herr, Eugène Edine Pottier, Jules François Alexandre Joffrin, René Lefeuvre, Jean Longuet, Colette Audry, Antoine Karam, Robert Louzon, Hubert Lagardelle, Jacques Gillot, Édouard Berth. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 265. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (15 January 1809 in Besançon 19 January 1865 in Passy) was a French politician, mutualist philosopher and socialist. He was a member of the French Parliament, and he was the first person to call himself an "anarchist". He is considered among the most influential theorists and organisers of anarchism. After the events of 1848 he began to call himself a federalist. Proudhon was a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language. His best-known assertion is that Property is Theft!, contained in his first major work, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=49944 ... Read more

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Chapters: Marie Curie, Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Guy de Maupassant, Pierre Curie, Maurice Ravel, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Prévert, Gustave Courbet, Georges Brassens, Émile Littré, John Vianney, Honoré Daumier, Philippe Séguin, Marcel Aymé, Georges Bernanos, Léo Ferré, Bernard Clavel. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 182. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 December 28, 1937) was a French composer of Impressionist music known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects. Much of his piano music, chamber music, vocal music and orchestral music has entered the standard concert repertoire. Ravel's piano compositions, such as Jeux d'eau, Miroirs, Le tombeau de Couperin and Gaspard de la nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, uses a variety of sound and instrumentation very effectively. Ravel is perhaps known best for his orchestral work, Boléro (1928), which he considered trivial and once described as "a piece for orchestra without music." According to SACEM, Ravel's estate earns more royalties than that of any other French musician. According to international copyright law, Ravel's works are public domain since January 1, 2008 in most countries. In France, due to anomalous copyright law extensions to account for the two world wars, they will not enter the public domain until 2015. Birthplace of Maurice Ravel in CiboureRavel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure, France, near Biarritz, close to the border with Spain, during 1875. His mother, Marie Delouart, was of Basque descent and grew up in Madrid, Spain, while his father, Joseph Ravel, was a Swiss invent...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=48068 ... Read more

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Chapters: Marie Curie, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie, Louis de Broglie, Henri Bergson, Albert Schweitzer, André Gide, Irène Joliot-Curie, Anatole France, Alexis Carrel, Sully Prudhomme, François Mauriac, Romain Rolland, J. M. G. le Clézio, Saint-John Perse, Aristide Briand, Gao Xingjian, Jean Dausset, Luc Montagnier, François Jacob, Frédéric Mistral, Henri Moissan, Gérard Debreu, Maurice Allais, Léon Bourgeois, Claude Simon, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Gabriel Lippmann, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Jacques Monod, Charles Nicolle, Jean-Marie Lehn, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Jean Baptiste Perrin, Albert Fert, Victor Grignard, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Paul-Henri-Benjamin D'estournelles de Constant, Louis Néel, Charles Richet, Georges Charpak, Paul Sabatier, Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, Alfred Kastler, René Cassin, André Frédéric Cournand, Yves Chauvin, André Michel Lwoff, Roger Guillemin, Roger Martin Du Gard, Frédéric Passy, Léon Jouhaux, Louis Renault, Ferdinand Buisson. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 328. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Henri-Louis Bergson (French pronunciation: 18 October 18594 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced people through his writing that immediate experience and intuition were as important as rational and scientific thinking for understanding reality. Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859 (the year in which France emerged as a victor in the Second Italian War of Independence and over a month before the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species). His father, the musician Micha Bergson had a Polish Jewish family background (originally bearing the name Be...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=13531 ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Mineralogical Record, published by The Mineralogical, Inc. on May 1, 2010. The length of the article is 896 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Mineraux remarquables de la collection UPMC-La Sorbonne.(Remarkable Minerals from the Collection of the University Pierre and Marie Curie: The Sorbonne)(Book review)
Author: Wendell Wilson
Publication: The Mineralogical Record (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 1, 2010
Publisher: The Mineralogical, Inc.
Volume: 41Issue: 3Page: 299(2)

Article Type: Book review

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