The images conjure up the seductive nature of what Marie Curie called radium's 'spontaneous luminosity' while also conveying a ghostly sense of the uncorked, perilous threat that remains with us all. It's a process in which paper exposed to sunlight turns an alluring yet eerie dark blue. Most powerful, however, are the seemingly glowing images (the glow-in-the-dark cover is admittedly cool, too) that Redniss has created using cyanotype printing. Redniss shares remarkable details in her book - we learn how it took the Curies four years of grueling work in a Paris shed, with 40 tons of corrosive materials, to extract just one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride - and she takes readers on related side trips that show us the devastating tolls wrought at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl.

The exposure to radiation eventually killed Marie, in 1934 Pierre preceded her when he was struck by a horse-drawn carriage, in 1906. Like Redniss' previous book, 'Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies,' 'Radioactive' is an imaginative mix of drawings, photo-collages and text the result is a tender and haunting tribute to the scientists who fell in love while conducting research that led to their discovery of radium and polonium. At every stage of the tale about radioactive elements, Redniss jumps to the way this science was used by others: from naive business people making deadly glow-in-the-dark curiosities from. Marie and Pierre Curie's inspirational and tragic story has been told in numerous biographies, children's books, films and TV miniseries, but Lauren Redniss has revived it with astounding creativity and beauty in her new book Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books/ HarperCollins $29.99).

Radioactive by lauren redniss