AUDIOBOOK
About
The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo's Daughter crafts a
luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold
story of the many young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of
their own
"Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can
name," writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two
separate fields of science-Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet,
Sobel makes clear, as brilliant and creative as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally passionate
outside it. Grieving Pierre's untimely death in 1906, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne;
devotedly raised two brilliant daughters; drove a van she outfitted with x-ray equipment to the front lines of
World War I; befriended Albert Einstein and other luminaries of twentieth-century physics; won support from
two U.S. presidents; and inspired generations of young women the world over to pursue science as a way of
life.
As Sobel did so memorably in her portrait of Galileo through the prism of his daughter, she approaches Marie
Curie from a unique angle, narrating her remarkable life of discovery and fame alongside the women who
became her legacy-from France's Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Norway's
Ellen Gleditsch, to Mme. Curie's elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades
the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior
of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide, despite constant illness, to share the secrets of radioactivity, a
term she coined. Her two triumphant tours of the United States won her admirers for her modesty even as she
was mobbed at every stop; her daughters, in Ève's later recollection, "discovered all at once what the retiring
woman with whom they had always lived meant to the world."
With the consummate skill that made bestsellers of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, and the appreciation
for women in science at the heart of her most recent The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel has crafted a radiant
biography and a masterpiece of storytelling, illuminating the life and enduring influence of one of the most
consequential figures of our time.
luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold
story of the many young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of
their own
"Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can
name," writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two
separate fields of science-Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet,
Sobel makes clear, as brilliant and creative as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally passionate
outside it. Grieving Pierre's untimely death in 1906, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne;
devotedly raised two brilliant daughters; drove a van she outfitted with x-ray equipment to the front lines of
World War I; befriended Albert Einstein and other luminaries of twentieth-century physics; won support from
two U.S. presidents; and inspired generations of young women the world over to pursue science as a way of
life.
As Sobel did so memorably in her portrait of Galileo through the prism of his daughter, she approaches Marie
Curie from a unique angle, narrating her remarkable life of discovery and fame alongside the women who
became her legacy-from France's Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Norway's
Ellen Gleditsch, to Mme. Curie's elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades
the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior
of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide, despite constant illness, to share the secrets of radioactivity, a
term she coined. Her two triumphant tours of the United States won her admirers for her modesty even as she
was mobbed at every stop; her daughters, in Ève's later recollection, "discovered all at once what the retiring
woman with whom they had always lived meant to the world."
With the consummate skill that made bestsellers of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, and the appreciation
for women in science at the heart of her most recent The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel has crafted a radiant
biography and a masterpiece of storytelling, illuminating the life and enduring influence of one of the most
consequential figures of our time.