andrew stout

(Pages 56 and 57 from Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss.)

I have to interrupt my usual stream of self-promotion to talk about something.

Two weeks ago, I read Lauren Redniss’s new book, Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout, at a coffeeshop in downtown Portland. I was leisurely about it: chatting with the baristas; fatuously explaining the book’s intense colors (many of the pictures were produced using a printing process called cyanotype which, like traditional photography, uses light exposure to set the image); googling names and scientific terms I didn’t know. Eventually, two coffees and a peppermint tea later, I closed the book and walked out into the coldest day Portland’s had for several years. The world I stepped into was vastly more generous than the one I had ducked out of. This is what I think great art does: puts us in touch with a continuum, several millennia in length, of essential feelings. 

And that is what Lauren’s book did for me.

Today, an exhibition of Lauren’s art from Radioactive opens at the New York Public Library. And next Friday, January 21, Lauren will appear as part of the series Conversations from the Cullman Center to discuss the book. 

Radioactive is about Marie and Pierre Curie. Lauren says the challenge posed by rendering two invisible forces, love and radioactivity — the story’s two key elements — is why she wanted to make the book. For days after reading Radioactive, I walked around with a very sharp sense of how an experience as private as falling in love can let loose a chain of real world cause-and-effect defining a century. Though it doesn’t make perfect logical sense, it’s hard not to read Radioactive without feeling the ripples of some undoubtedly awkward moments in Pierre’s lab in 1891 — the hanky panky — stretch across the twentieth century to the present. On every page, the personal is the historical is the universal: proud vows of celibacy, The Belle Époque, smitten glances, the Great War, bicycle honeymoons, Chernobyl. Lauren has designed a book letting in the best and worst things about living in modern times. The breadth is beautiful.

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