The most famous woman scientist of all time, Marie Curie has streets named after her and appears on the sixty-franc note, but she is generally thought to have been remote, impersonal, and obsessed with her work. Now biographer Barbara Goldsmith has been able to get beneath the image to the brilliant woman who discovered radium and paved the way for modern atomic knowledge, through access to Curie's diaries, letters, and workbooks, and interviews with her family.