Barbara Goldsmith

Barbara Goldsmith is well known for her biographies of such grand American figures as Gloria Vanderbilt, Victoria Woodhall and the Johnson family. Why choose a French scientist now, even a two-time Nobel Prize winner like the great Marie Curie? Here Goldsmith regales Charles Ruas with the story of her meeting with Madame Curie's daughter, Eve, (now 100), who at last opened the Curie family archives to the public, only to find them still radioactive a century after they were sealed. Mdme Curie was a Polish refugee who became the scientific genius who visualized what did not exist - radium - the substance which killed her, her husband and her Nobel Prize-winning daughter, though she denied its harmful effects to the end. Goldsmith gets her down, hot and cold, in Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie. Barbara Goldsmith is also the author of The Straw Man, Little Gloria...Happy at Last, Johnson v. Johnson, and Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. She is a trustee of both the New York Public Library and the American Academy in Rome, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of two Emmy Awards and several literary honors as well.

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