Obsessive Genius
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Narrated by:
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Eliza Foss
About this listen
Through family interviews, diaries, letters, and workbooks that had been sealed for over 60 years, Barbara Goldsmith reveals the Marie Curie behind the myth - an all-too-human woman struggling to balance a spectacular scientific career, a demanding family, the prejudice of society, and her own passionate nature. Obsessive Genius is a dazzling portrait of Curie, her amazing scientific success, and the price she paid for fame.
The best-selling, "excellent...poignant - and scientifically lucid - portrait" (New York Times Book Review) of the remarkable Marie Curie....
©2005 Barbara Goldsmith (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: John Kroft
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.
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Fantastic book, weak technical execution
- By Paul on 10-13-18
By: Jennet Conant
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Labyrinths
- Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis
- By: Catrine Clay
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences at the University of Zurich. But the strict rules of proper Swiss society at the beginning of the 20th century dictated that a woman of Emma's stature - one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland - travel to Paris to "finish" her education, to prepare for marriage to a suitable man. Engaged to the son of one of her father's wealthy business colleagues, Emma's conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung.
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Carl plays center stage
- By Sparrowhawk on 12-23-16
By: Catrine Clay
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Great Scientists and Their Discoveries
- By: David Angus
- Narrated by: Benjamin Soames, Clare Corbett
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Nine remarkable men produced inventions that changed the world. The printing press, the telephone, powered flight, recording and others have made the modern world what it is. But who were the men who had these ideas and made reality of them? As David Angus shows, they were very different - quiet, boisterous, confident, withdrawn - but all had a moment of vision allied to single-minded determination to battle through numerous prototypes and produced something that really worked. This is a fascinating account for younger listeners.
By: David Angus
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The Butchering Art
- Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
- By: Lindsey Fitzharris
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.
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Not one boring moment!
- By WRWF on 12-22-17
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Thunderstruck
- By: Erik Larson
- Narrated by: Bob Balaban
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication. Their lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
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Reader cannot read
- By Bob on 12-08-07
By: Erik Larson
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
- 25th Anniversary Edition
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 37 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Here for the first time, in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly - or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than 25 years.
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Beware limitations of the reader
- By JFanson on 01-01-19
By: Richard Rhodes
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Ida M. Tarbell
- The Woman Who Challenged Big Business - and Won!
- By: Emily Arnold McCully
- Narrated by: Emily Arnold McCully
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in 1857 and raised in oil country, Ida M. Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists and probably the most influential in her time. Her series of articles on the Standard Oil Trust, a complicated business empire run by John D. Rockefeller, revealed to readers the underhanded, even illegal practices that had led to Rockefeller's success.
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Excellent!
- By AKA1 on 03-16-19
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Metaphysical Animals
- How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
- By: Clare Mac Cumhaill, Rachae Wiseman
- Narrated by: Alex Dunmore
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war’s darkest revelations.
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Book about nothing
- By Gerardo Naranjo Gonzalez on 06-14-22
By: Clare Mac Cumhaill, and others
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Rush
- Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father
- By: Stephen Fried
- Narrated by: John H. Mayer
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time he was 30, Dr. Benjamin Rush had signed the Declaration of Independence, edited Common Sense, toured Europe as Benjamin Franklin’s protégé, and become John Adams’s confidant, and was soon to be appointed Washington’s surgeon general. And as with the greatest Revolutionary minds, Rush was only just beginning his role in 1776 in the American experiment.
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The narration problem can be corrected
- By Sandra L. on 09-27-18
By: Stephen Fried
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The Birth of the Pill
- How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution
- By: Jonathan Eig
- Narrated by: Gayle Hendrix
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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We know it simply as "the pill", yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic.
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Overall Excellent Read
- By Rachel on 04-02-22
By: Jonathan Eig
What listeners say about Obsessive Genius
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lola
- 11-11-21
Great account of a genius ahead of her era
Great bio of a genius caught up in an era where women were denied access to study, professions and positions, and insight into a host of discoveries in physics, chemistry and medicine, now applied to everyday life across home, manufacturing, science and war. Curious anecdotes also of everyday life and society from late 1800s to the Nazi era and second world war.
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- Jean
- 12-31-16
Engrossing
There have been so many biographies about Marie Curie (Marya Salomea Sklodowska 1867-1934) that any new book is going to either present new material or look at the information from a different viewpoint. Goldsmith, a social historian, has chosen to pursue “the real woman”. Curie was one of only two women to graduate from the Sorbonne with a science degree. Curie was born in Russian occupied Poland and the University of Warsaw did not allow women to attend. She married Pierre Curie and shortened her name.
Goldsmith covers primarily the hatred, bigotry and prejudice Curie had to overcome rather than on her scientific discoveries. Goldsmith’s weakness is her difficulty in attempting to explain the scientific and theoretical aspects of Marie Curie’s work. Instead Goldsmith tells how the scientific establishment detested her. She won the Nobel Prize in 1903 for Physics. She shared this with her husband Pierre for discovering radioactivity. She was not allowed to give the keynote lecture that the winner traditionally gives because she was a woman. In 1911 Curie, now a widow, won a second Nobel Prize this time in Chemistry for the discovery of Radium. She won this one alone. Curie, a winner of two Nobel Prizes, was refused membership in the French Academy of Science because she was a woman. During WWI, she designed a mobile x-ray machine and then trained her daughter in its use. Her daughter then trained technicians to use it. In 1934 her daughter, Irene, discovered artificial radioactivity and won the Nobel Prize. Marie Curie discovered polonium, radium and radioactivity. She died on 3 July 1934 of aplastic pernicious anemia caused by radium radiation.
The book was well written and researched. The weakness is noted above. The book was interesting, but there are more in-depth biographies about Marie Curie available.
Eliza Foss does a good job narrating the book. Foss is a stage actor and award winning audiobook narrator. I have listened to numerous books she has narrated.
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9 people found this helpful
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- keith Kirkland
- 10-26-24
Great discoveries and great tragedies
The book was deeply inspiring and just as deeply tearful. The unknown dangers dealing with discovery of radioactivity, the constant denial due to sexism and jealousy, and the legacy left through 3 generation of Curies is such a remarkable story that if it had been fiction it would have felt more real. But this all-too-real story is remarkably executed in manner than gives both due credit while search for the truths in the myths. I highly recommend.
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- Boots
- 05-03-17
Mr. & Mrs. Curie; Pierre and Marie
Any additional comments?
This book gives a lot of credit to Mr. Pierre Curie which he deserves, he was a great scientist in his own right and helped make her what she became, a great scientist and person.
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- Suzanne H. Kerr
- 01-19-23
Interesting!
Loved learning about Curie even though my eyes glazed over when reading about scientific theories and experiments. But the book is entirely worth it!
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- Anna-Catherine
- 12-16-16
Loved it!
The story was well-written, and I felt as if I was there in the same room watching what are we listening to. The story provided details of Cities life I had been unaware of. Overall, I loved it.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Sarah Carroll
- 03-05-18
liking it so far, but....
a) the perpetuation of the myth that Einstein was anything but a stellar student before he got to university is blatantly false.
b) the frequent inability of the narrator to properly pronounce scientific terms is irksome to those of us who *do* know how they're pronounced.
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1 person found this helpful
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- John S
- 06-07-22
Educational
I wanted to hear more about the science,and less about inequality. Too many overtones of gender and race.Not enough about the work and discovery of Marie Curie.Radium and polonium should have been discussed more.Too much talk about equal rights.I will have to read Eve Curies biography that she wrote about her mother.Modern books like to push political nonsense propaganda to divide and conquer.
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1 person found this helpful