Reviews for Marie Curie, a life

The average rating for Marie Curie, a life based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-26 00:00:00 arthur SHAVZIN I've had this book on my shelf for a while, bought around the time I read three other Curie biographies and when I thought I couldn't read the story again just then. In the years since then, I realized that Lydia Davis translated this bio, which is kind of an added reason to read it, though I don't think one feels Davis' imprint too strongly here-- the first couple chapters seemed kind of jumpy and with unnatural transitions between sections, and at first I thought that was Davis, but in later chapters, the writing mostly settles down to pretty normally competent, so now I think this disjunctions were just setting pieces in place. As biographies of Curie go, this one is pretty good. Giroud gives a decent bit of attention to the Langevin affair, and she does a really good job (no surprise, given that it was originally French) of presenting the particulars of the French culture of the time, and surprising to me, explaining how the French cultural approach to science impacted Curie's work-- this was really significant, if I can trust what is said here, and I don't remember this being even mentioned before this bio. On what feels like a more speculative level, Giroud goes places with personality that I don't think the other bios did. She's willing to say up front how the two Curie daughters are different from one another in terms that aren't always so flattering. Likewise, she is critical of Marie and Pierre's limitations. Giroud is additionally willing to characterize Marie's genius in specific terms: she is amazing at recognizing things, at making observations and building conclusions from a mass of facts collected with great effort; Marie is the ant that builds the mountain a grain at a time. Pierre, Giroud suggests, is of a different sort, the kind of leaping and then bored genius we usually think of as being associated with the term. All of these features of Giroud's text are harder to back up, but are by and large more interesting than the facts of the case, even the facts of French science. I felt like that added a lot to the story, the broad outlines of which I was already very familiar with. It's also good, I think, the Giroud chose moments and movements in Curie's life to emphasize, and didn't cover everything in the same depth.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-22 00:00:00 Jeff Safron Malheureusement, les excès stylistiques et les opinions de l'auteur auront trop masqué le sujet. On arrive mal à décerner ce qui relève de la biographie et ce qui relève de l'imagination ou des opinions de la biographe. Cela est d'ailleurs d'une certaine ironie : Marie Curie fût un exemple d'humilité et d'éthique professionnelle, valeurs qui manquent grandement à cette approche biographique.