These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich chronicles the strength and determination of a group of women working for the Radium Dial Company, a watchmaker in Ottawa, Illinois in the 1920s, which offered jobs to women while slowly poisoning them. Theirs is a story of survival in its most transcendent sense, as they refuse to allow the company that stole their health to kill their spirits - or endanger the lives of those who come after them.