"Strange Glow" hits all the notes you'd expect from a book described as "the story of people's encounters with radiation" — from physicist Ernest Rutherford's overturning of the"plum pudding" model of the atom to the "radium girls" who were poisoned by the glow-in-the-dark radium paint they applied to watch faces. But author Timothy J. Jorgensen does more than just retell the anecdotes. He uses them to illustrate his main argument: radiation is not an unfathomable bogeyman, but a well-understood phenomenon whose effects on health can and must be rationally considered given the challenges facing humanity.