The Elements of Marie Curie

Dava Sobel is one of the most acclaimed and celebrated writers about science and human discovery in our time. Her books have collectively sold millions of copies in the U.S. and millions more abroad. They have regularly been on national and regional bestseller lists in the U.S. and Galileo’s Daughter was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Among its wide readership, The Elements of Marie Curie will appeal strongly to readers of books about the untold stories of women in STEM, such as Hidden Figures (100k+ hardcovers sold, 628K paperbacks) or Radium Girls (45k+ hardcovers sold, 218K paperback). Sobel's book is, first and foremost, a portrait of Marie Curie (1867-1934), still the most famous woman in the history of science, and of her immense scientific discoveries that won her two Nobel Prizes, first in Physics with her husband Pierre in 1903 for their discovery of the elements radium and polonium, and then, after Pierre’s tragic death in 1906, on her own in 1911 in Chemistry for her work in radioactivity. She remains the only woman to win two Nobel prizes, and one of only two people to win twice in different categories. As she did in her bestselling Galileo’s Daughter, Sobel comes at Curie’s life from a unique angle, weaving into its tapestry the stories of the remarkable young women who joined her trailblazing laboratory, the first in the world run by a woman, and went on to brilliant careers on their own. Indeed, Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, won her own Nobel Prize in 1935. Sobel brings Curie alive both in the laboratory and in her vibrant life outside science. Sobel’s most recent book, The Glass Universe, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR’s Science Friday. It was nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Galileo’s Daughter was a #1 New York Times Bestseller in paperback and won the 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. Longitude was originally published in 1995 and went through twenty-nine hardcover printings before being reissued in 2005 in a tenth anniversary edition with a foreword by Neil Armstrong. It has been translated into more than twenty languages and won the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It has sold over two million copies in the United States. Sobel’s stylish prose makes complex science accessible to lay readers and she presents it as part of an ongoing human drama and narrative. Sobel is beloved by booksellers and librarians around the country who will be eager to read early galleys of The Elements of Marie Curie. The book is fully illustrated with images throughout and a color insert section.