There is one thing I would like to unfortunately admit: I don’t read much. It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading, but that I am slow at it. When it comes to lengthy, droning passages of text that don’t seem to be reaching any destination soon my mind wanders off, and trying to sticky myself back onto the page becomes an ever increasing challenge the more I look away. I’m even slower of someone able to comprehend what they just read. It can take me up to three or four times of rereading the same line over and over just to make sure I did not subconsciously skip over anything. Even with this, I still try my best to get in a daily half hour to keep my senses up. As I looked at the syllabus and saw we had to read 90 pages of the same book in 3 days,
I audibly groaned and prepared to spend most of my weekend trying to get through what I was thought was going to be clumps of research papers, anachronistic language and many more pieces of esoteric information crucial to my education. Lauren Redniss’ Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout completely defied my expectations by presenting as a highly eclectic graphic novel built for the showcase of a streamlined, stripped down biography of Marie and Pierre Curie’s work on radioactivity, and the impact their work made on the world. This way of presenting historical information no longer as physically dull as the works of standard documentations of life energized my enthusiasm and kept my attention span high throughout the duration of the book.
The vast landscape of pictures and illustrations not only provided a visual basis for the writing medium but gave it emotional context as well. One of the most moving parts of the book was during the telling of the construction of the Manhattan Project. The phrase “I coined the world radioactivity,” stated by Marie Curie herself burrows toward the bottom of the page, taking a back seat to the double page color photograph of the detonation of an atomic bomb, to me one of humanity’s greatest failures (Radioactive, 47). This is further exemplified in the book when a young girl, a victim of the nuclear attacks on Japan, laments that she is unable to give water to her father, whose skin is charred black from head to toe to the point the bare agitated muscle can be visibly revealed, because it would kill him.
Stories like the wounded daughter and father are made to connect us personally to the readings and make us empathize on the loss of loved ones. Such intimacy is shown throughout the book in a way aptly described by the conference on Art as a Way of Knowing: “…art is a fundamental part of being human, and that learning in and through the arts is a serious form of interacting with the world by engaging with its questions, formulating ideas, and deepening knowledge” (Art as a Way of Knowing, 6). The purpose of visually representing these stories adds a human context to the words we read, reminding us that these people actually existed and led real lives, whether long or woefully short, and that we must not forget them and their struggles by learning from their experiences.
As developmentally sound these books can be to the human mind, not every book can exist in a format like this. I paid $25 for this book, only for it to be 185 pages long. Turns out it is quite expensive to draw and fully colorize each page of your hardcover book! Most people simply do not have the funds and will not be able to make something like this for mass accessibility. Time is another constraint; one can take years to write their book, and then do it all again when painting each page. While the book was emotionally moving and quite beautiful in a bittersweet way, it was not common to run along a series of pages with only a few sentences on each one, letting the visual arts take the stage instead. These books are usually not meant to be full, contextual in-depth analyses of their character in question, but more similar to a Wikipedia article. Anyone looking for a more critical insight of Marie and Pierre’s life and accomplishments would be better off trying to find that info in one of the many word skyscrapers that exist. For the sake of professionalism, traditionally long form novels and research will try to exempt and eschew human connection for the purposes of trying to create as unbiased and emotionally clean as possible. Some may object to the humanity of Radioactive, opting for a more robotic text instead.
