The newest book on the list, It’s What I Do by Lynsey Addario covers the story of not just the woman behind the camera but also that of the women in front of the camera. Addario is a photojournalist who has struggled to make it in a male dominated field. She has worked in nearly every major conflict zone in recent years and has fought to tell the stories of the people who live there. In this immanently readable memoir Addario tells how gender infiltrated every part of her personal and professional life with powerful honesty.
Radioactive is technically not a memoir but rather it is part art book, part graphic novel, and part biography. In it author Lauren Redniss tells the story of Marie and Pierre Curie, their life, love, and science. Peppered throughout with quotes from Curie, Radioactive tells the life of Marie Curie from her childhood in Poland to working and falling in love with Pierre to his sudden death in 1906. Redniss weaves this story together with subsequent developments in nuclear science linking it all back to the remarkable life of Marie Curie. The pictures that accompany this unique text lend an emotional resonance to the story that text alone could not provide.
-Bibliognost