Obsessive Genius (Goldsmith)

Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie
Barbara Goldsmith, 2004
W.W. Norton
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393327489


Summary
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.

Madame Curie's shrewd but 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.

In Obsessive Genius, the acclaimed author and historian Barbara Goldsmith has discovered the woman behind the icon we have come to believe in—an all too human woman trying to balance a spectacular scientific career with the obligations of family, the prejudice of society, the constant search for adequate funding, and the battle for recognition.

Using original research (diaries, letters, and family interviews) to peel away the layers of myth, Goldsmith offers a dazzling portrait of Marie Curie, her amazing discoveries, and the immense price she paid for fame. (Hardcover inside flap.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1937
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Wellesley College
• Currently—lives in New York City


Barbara Goldsmith is an American author, journalist, and philanthropist. She has received critical and popular acclaim for her best selling books, essays, articles and her philanthropic work. She was born in New York City and received a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College, after which she took art courses at Columbia University.

Her first assignments as a journalist were in the art field, where she simultaneously amassed an art collection comprising mostly contemporary American painting and sculpture. In her early twenties, she wrote a series of prize-winning profiles of such Hollywood luminaries as Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, and Audrey Hepburn.

In the late 1960s she initiated the "The Creative Environment" series of the creatie process, based on in-depth interviews with Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, George Balanchine and Pablo Picasso, among others. The series caught the eye of Clay Felker, editor of the Sunday magazine supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1967, after the Tribune failed, Goldsmith provided Felker with the money to purchase the name “New York.” In 1968 she became a founding editor and writer of New York magazine, where she wrote not only about art, but also about the colorful characters in the art world.

In 1968 Goldsmith wrote "Bacall and the Boys," a television special about Lauren Bacall in Paris with then young, unproven avant-garde designers—Yves St. Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Pierre Cardin, and Marc Bohan of Dior. This earned her an Emmy award.

In 1974 Goldsmith became Senior Editor of Harper’s Bazaar, attracting top writers to the publication. But somewhere along the way she declared that at magazines she "got tired of making other writers look good through my re-writing." Since the mid-1970s, she concentrated on writing books while still continuing to write for the New Yorker and the New York Times among other publications

Biography & Books
Goldsmith completed her first book in 1975, The Straw Man, a novel about the New York art world. The book reached #1 on the bestseller lists and was praised in New York magazine by reviewer John Kenneth Galbraith as “brilliant social criticism.”

Her second book Little Gloria...Happy At Last was published in 1980. The work tracks the 1930s custody battle for Gloria Vanderbilt (Little Gloria, then). The book reached the top of the New York Times and was adapated to both film and and an NBC mini-series of the same name. The TV version starred Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Plummer, and Maureen Stapleton.

Johnson v. Johnson, Goldsmith’s third book, issued in 1987, recounts the longest, most expensive will contest in United States history between Basia Johnson, the widow of pharmaceutical heir J. Seward Johnson, and his children from previous marriages.

Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, out in 1998, chronicles the women of the Gilded Age who fought for equality and the right to vote.

Her 2005 work Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie is based on the workbooks, letters, and diaries of Marie Curie, which had been sealed for sixty years because they were still radioactive. It won the prize for the Best Book of 2006 from the American Institute of Physics.

Recognition
In 2013, Goldsmith was awarded the Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award, the highest honor given by her alma mater. That same year, she also received the Erwin Piscator Honorary Award for her writing. She has been awarded four honoris causa doctorates; she has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, two Presidential Commissions, and the New York State Council on the Arts; she has been honored by the New York Public Library Literary Lions as well as the Literacy Volunteers, American Academy in Rome, Authors Guild, and Guild Hall Academy of Arts for Lifetime Achievement. In 2009, she received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal from the Republic of Poland.

Philanthropy
Goldsmith spearheaded a project to convert books and documents to permanent paper that wold lastng 300 years instead of disintegrating in 30. She secured $20 million from the Federal government for the work. Other literary preservation efforts include the donation of two preservation and conservation laboratories at The New York Public Library and at New York University. She also funded a state-of-the-art rare book library at the American Academy in Rome and a preservation and conservation treatment facility at Wellesley College. She served on the Presidential Commission on Preservation and Access during the Clinton administration and received the American Archival Association’s top award. Earlierin 1968, she helped found the Center for Learning Disabilities at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

In 1987 she founded and still funds the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom-to-Write Award in order to spotlight writers of conscience in 113 countries who have disappeared, were tortured, or in prison at the time of the awards. The award was instrumental in starting the campaign that led to the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Since the award's inception, 34 out of 37 imprisoned writers have been released, often within months of the award. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/2/2014.)

Book Reviews
Feminism is one of the most distorting of lenses. To see Marie Curie forced to sit among the audience in Stockholm while her husband, Pierre, gave the lecture following their joint receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1903 is infuriating. What a way to treat a woman! One of the strengths of Obsessive Genius, Barbara Goldsmith's excellent short biography of Marie Curie, is its suppression of anger.... [A] poignant—and scientifically lucid—portrait.
Brenda Maddox - New York Times


Goldsmith leads the reader through a wonderland of facts with just the right blend of science and story.
San Francisco Chronicle


Goldsmith's straightforward biography illuminates both the public Curie, a tireless scientist obsessed with work, and the private one, a woman who suffered bouts of severe depression, was distant from her children and scarred deeply by the accidental death of her scientist husband, Pierre.... [Goldsmith] is weakest at explaining the theoretical basis for Curie's scientific breakthroughs.
Publishers Weekly


Goldsmith has produced a finely detailed and well-researched biography.... [She] focuses on the social and economic hurdles that Curie had to overcome to manage the roles of scientist, wife, mother, and staunch French wartime ally. She also provides an excellent portrait of the age in which Marie Curie was to do so much for the world. —Hilary Burton, formerly with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, CA
Library Journal


Best-selling historian Goldsmith incisively chronicles the intensely dramatic life of the first woman scientist to win the Nobel Prize, neatly explicating both scientific breakthroughs and complex personal and societal conflicts.... Marie Curie's life, Goldsmith concludes, was "tragic and glorious." Her powerful portrait reveals a woman of great passion, genius, and pain who changed the world in ways she would have deplored. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


[A] sharp, sprightly, refreshing portrait of the brilliant, melancholic scientist, affording a sensible look into her head and into the body of her work..... In a world of vicious, institutionalized sexism, Curie was as "rare as a unicorn." Nothing came easy, notes Goldsmith.... Opens the door on Curie as she opened the door on atomic science (15 photos).
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Her own illness and those of her family defined Marie Curie's life. In what way can you point to her scientific drive as a way to cope with the repercussions of illness? How did Marie's own bipolar illness affect her career?

2. As the young Polish Manya, how did Marie's distant relationship with her mother shape her personality? To what extent did Marie, as a mother, pattern herself after her own mother?

3. How did the inherent contradiction of Marie Curie's childhood—growing up Polish under a repressive Russian tsar—play itself out throughout Marie's adult life? How, in some ways, did this early schism help her control her emotions?

4. Marie Curie's achievements are astonishing and her success as a female scientist in a sexist scientific climate is a further tribute to her character and conviction. How has the mythology of Marie's life, and the misattribution of her merits (she is better remembered for the discovery of radium than for the inroads she made into radioactivity and atomic science), eroded the impact of her work? How did Marie's partnership with her husband enable her to make a great discovery? How did this partnership affect her standing as a scientist? Reviewing Marie's insatiable desire for knowledge, would she, in your opinion, have succeeded in her discoveries, with or without Pierre?

5. Marie planned to return to Poland upon finishing her degree at the Sorbonne, but she remained in France for the rest of her life. Do you think she would have left Warsaw for Paris, knowing this? What effect did her decision to remain in France have on her patriotism?

6. A week before his death, Wladyslaw Sklodowski wrote to his daughter, then Marie Curie, about her success at isolating radium. "What a pity it is that this work has only theoretical interest." How do you understand his remark?

7. In contrast to her unwavering sensibility as a scientist, Marie Curie's ability to judge amorous relationships proved somewhat impaired: twice she suffered the debilitating effects of unrealistic love affairs. Discuss this fundamental lack in her understanding of the mores of society.

8. Marie Curie's relationship with her daughters was complex. Her relationship with her younger daughter, Eve, took years to fully develop. Was Marie's treatment of Eve understandable? In what ways do you think Marie was insensitive to Eve's differences? Was she helpful or hurtful to her older daughter, Irene?

9. What do you think of Eve Curie's description of her mother, after the death of Pierre Curie, as "a pitiful and incurably lonely woman"? How would you describe Marie's communication with Pierre even after his death? How did her loyalty to his memory influence her later work?

10. As the winner of two Nobel Prizes, did Marie Curie effectively secure the future of women in science?

11. Marie Curie seemed oblivious to the dangers of working with radium. Barbara Goldsmith attributes her denial of the dangers of the substance to "love." How else might you explain Marie's denial?

12. When the author visited Helene Langevin-Joliot, the granddaughter of Marie Curie, Helene, asked her, "Haven't we [Curies] all had wonderful lives?" Discuss this statement with regard to what we know of Marie, her daughters, and her granddaughter.

13. Did Marie realize the full implications of radioactivity (a word she coined)? When Irene said she was glad her mother died before the advent of the atomic bomb, what did she mean by this statement?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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