Pierre Curie

Marie Curie was reluctant to write about her husband, and the reserve shows on every page of this short life of him. She follows Pierre from a home-schooled boyhood through the crystallography and piezoelectricity he worked on before they met, the years in the cold shed on the rue Lhomond where they isolated radium, the Nobel Prize the couple shared, and his death under a horse-drawn wagon in 1906. She is exact about the science and nearly silent about the grief, which is what gives the book its weight. The American edition also carries her own autobiographical notes, the fullest account she ever gave of her life. Free here as a PDF and EPUB.