Koncocoo

Best Environmental Issues

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (Official Guides to the Appalachian Trail)
The AT offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes — and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings. When this American transplant to Britain decided to return home, he made a farewell walking tour of the British countryside and produced Notes from a Small Island . Accompanied only by his old college buddy Stephen Katz, Bryson starts out one March morning in north Georgia, intending to walk the entire 2,100 miles to trail's end atop Maine's Mount Katahdin. As Bryson and Katz haul their out-of-shape, middle-aged butts over hill and dale, the reader is treated to both a very funny personal memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes through. Awed by merely the camping section of his local sporting goods store, he nevertheless plunges into the wilderness and emerges with a consistently comical account of a neophyte woodsman learning hard lessons about self-reliance.
Reviews
"I'm a sexagenarian who, on a recent vacation, happened to walk out and back on the first three miles or so of the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail (Springer Mtn, GA) and, in a fit of exhilaration, decided then and there that I would, by golly, hike the AT before I died. As I was joyfully entertained by his incisive sense of humor, I was simultaneously and seriously learning history, biology, geology (and several other -ologies) as well as being discomfitted by Bryson's documentation of our culture's dismissive practices regarding ecology."
"Read one and except for a few events, you've pretty much read them all and almost any extended backpacking trip involves the same rigors, risks, weather and that mixture of misery and exhilaration."
"Bill's storytelling captured me immediately...I was taking every step he took, I enjoyed every vista he looked out on, I was eavesdropping on his conversations with his fellow hikers and feeling the spectrum of emotions held for his friend and hiking companion."
"An adventure that walks you experientially and historically through the nation's longest series of trails from Georgia to Maine while feeling every fear from blisters, hunger, thirst, wildlife, climate changes, man's limitations and nature's nuances, all the while trekking with a forty pound pack on your back, and any one of these could do you in, well it's a wonder why the wild is so compelling."
"With the film in theaters, I decided to pick it up and give it a go. I loved this book, and place it among Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild," Cheryl Strayed's "Wild," and Elizabeth Gilbert's "The Last American Man" in terms of well-written essays that explore our yearning to return to a simpler, untethered way of life."
"Unfortunately some of his stories about what happened to people along the trail, made me not that interested in walking any trail."
"I think Bill Bryson is an incredibly good writer whose humor extends to poking as much fun at himself as he does at others."
"Bill Bryson is a great story teller and has become a family favorite, especially in audio version."
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Lab Girl
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. A New York Times 2016 Notable Book. National Best Seller. Named one of TIME magazine’s "100 Most Influential People". An Amazon Top 20 Best Book of 2016. A Washington Post Best Memoir of 2016. A TIME and Entertainment Weekly Best Book of 2016 An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world. Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Somehow she knows me: “the average person [who] cannot imagine himself staring at dirt for longer than the twenty seconds needed to pick up whatever object he just dropped.” And she doesn’t judge. Like life, for instance, and friendship and passion and love, for ideas, for work and for all living beings, including--shocker!--people. A tenured professor at the University of Hawaii, Jahren has built a career and a reputation in science by unearthing secrets hidden in fossilized plant life. Her work has resulted in at least 70 studies in dozens of journals, but it’s also given her a platform to talk about something else: widespread sexual harassment and discrimination in science. On her blog, in op-eds and in her new memoir, Lab Girl, Jahren wields her influence to call out a culture that has caused women to flee the field she so loves. I was drawn in from the start by the clarity and beauty of Jahren’s prose, whether she was examining the inner world of a seed, the ecosystem around the trunk of a tree, or recounting her own inspiring journey. They emerge from her memoir as much more than a bundle of biological processes, but beings with strange, secret lives, supported by astonishingly elegant machinery . In these pages you’ll find a renewed interest in the natural world, and notice things that have been hidden in plain sight. She writes: ‘Love and learning are similar, in that they can never be wasted.’ And neither is time spent reading this book.” —Lucie Green, The Guardian (UK). In [this] behind-the-scenes tour of science, we join her for misadventures and triumphs as she sets up three labs and conducts research in the Canadian Arctic, Ireland, Hawaii, and across the continental United States. Jahren spends the book teaching us that if we just look closely enough, we can see the opal lattice on a hackberry seed, the depths of loyalty in our closest friends, the wonder in a single leaf, and what we ourselves are supposed to become . She’s the type of scientist who cheerfully spends three seasons drilling through Arctic turf; between sessions of hard graft, her lab group takes road trips to see bizarre attractions, or attempts elaborate campfire cuisine. Lab Girl is the acutely personal account of the drive that propels people to the frontier of an academic discipline. Her eloquent rhapsodies about peerless soil samples, willow trees, and the tenacity of a cactus prompt a deeply inquisitive spirit in readers . Peppered with literary references to Genet, Beckett, Dickens and Thoreau, Jahren’s honest prose is insightful, eloquent, and funny, and she has a gift for explaining hard science in the most bewitching way . In the end, it’s easy to see the book as a love note—not just to plants, to science, and to the sweetness of discovery, but also to friendship and loyalty, to journeys big and small, to belonging and becoming.” —Kathleen Yale, Orion. “Jahren writes with such flair that a reviewer is tempted to just move out of the way and quote her; from the prologue on, a reader itches to call out fun facts to innocents nearby. Deft and flecked with humor, Lab Girl is also a hybrid—a scientist’s memoir of a quirky, gritty, fascinating life, punctuated by mesmerizing dispatches on botany . Snow’s two cultures [the sciences and the humanities] gives the book a bright spark, like playing tennis with an intriguing, ambidextrous friend. Her lab partner Bill, a sort of fraternal twin, carries the weight of emotional confederacy in the book . Like Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir or Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk , Lab Girl delivers the zing of a beautiful mind in nature.” —Karen R. Long, Seattle Times * “Sublime, entertaining . With good humor, plenty of science, scattered literary allusions and the occasional sarcastic zinger, Lab Girl is a memoir of a plant research scientist [that] illuminates both the science of the plant world and the ebb and flow of her personal life—her struggles to find professional success, love and family. Jahren emerges as a smart, practical, good-hearted woman who loves her work and also finds joy in her husband, young son and best friend, Bill.”—Bruce Jacobs, Shelf Awareness (starred). A pronounced oddball, a seeker of knowledge, and a trader of sardonic wisecracks, Bill is Jahren’s unfailing, unfussy sidekick; [he’s] never happier than when on the job, savoring the complexities of soil layers or scavenging secondhand equipment for the laboratories the two of them have built together . Jahren captures the ramshackle poetry of this friendship, whose loyalty is so deep and abiding that it forges a great love story, in spite of the utter absence of erotic interest in either party. Winning.” —Laura Miller, Slate “As a young girl growing up in Minnesota, Jahren spent her formative years in the labs of her father, a science teacher at the local community college. It is this literary upbringing fueled by science that heralds Jahren’s memoir as the beginning of a career along the lines of Annie Dillard or Diane Ackerman. In Lab Girl, she constructs her own life story— her struggling years as an undergraduate, the persistent sexist attitude of the scientific community, the constant lack of funds, her growing awareness of her bipolar disorder—with the attention to detail and respect for organic growth that has earned her increased recognition and funding in the later years of her career. Jahren, a geochemist, botanist and geobiologist, has spent the better part of the past two decades studying the secret lives of plants. It is full of pleasing turns of phrase, references to literary figures like Genet and Dickens, and a running botany allusion that punctuates the book’s biographical story. Most of all, it’s deeply personal, following Jahren’s battle with manic depression; a harrowing pregnancy; her unending struggle to secure funding in a quickly drying financial desert; and the loving platonic relationship she shares with her protégé and lab manager, Bill. Jahren’s work has taken her around the world, from the ancient forests of Norway and Denmark to the remote and treeless Arctic, and most recently to the lush gardens of Hawaii. Jahren’s aim is to make the reader appreciate the fascinations of studying flora, to infect us with the same enthusiasm that has driven her ever since she was a child hanging around in her father’s lab, falling hard for the sensuous allures of the slide rule. Jahren’s literary bent renders dense material digestible and lyrical, in fables that parallel personal history. Vladimir Nabokov once observed that ‘a writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.’ The geobiologist Hope Jahren possesses both in spades. Her new memoir is at once a thrilling account of her discovery of her vocation and a gifted teacher’s road map to the secret lives of plants—a book that, at its best, does for botany what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology, what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology . She communicates the electric excitement of discovering something new—something no one ever knew or definitively proved before—and the grunt work involved in conducting studies and experiments: the days and weeks and months of watching and waiting and gathering data, the all-nighters, the repetitions, the detours, both serendipitous and unfruitful . Born and raised in a rural Minnesota town built around a meat-processing plant and defined mostly by its brutal winters and Scandinavian restraint, Jahren assumed that the grim endurance of her Norwegian-immigrant ancestors was her legacy. She did turn out to be tenacious, though not exactly in the way she had pictured: Long hours spent entertaining herself as a child in her physics-teacher father’s work space piqued Jahren’s interest in science, and her housewife mother’s unhappiness propelled her to pursue higher education all the way to a UC Berkeley Ph.D. Today, she’s an internationally renowned geobiologist with three Fulbrights, her own world-class laboratory, and a Wikipedia page longer and starrier than most U.S. senators’. But even more than that, it’s a fascinating portrait of her engagement with the natural world: she investigates everything from the secret life of cacti to the tiny miracles encoded in an acorn seed, studding her observations with memorable sentences . Jahren’s singular gift is her ability to convey the everyday wonder of her work: exploring the strange, beautiful universe of living things that endure and evolve and bloom all around us, if we bother to look. In Lab Girl , pioneering geobiologist Jahren limns her journey [from] insecure young scientist [to] medals and professional and personal fulfillment. But her prose reaches another dimension when she describes her remarkable relationship with a lab guy, an undergraduate loner named Bill. The research partners dig holes, gather soil samples, battle personal demons, and keep each other grounded. She’s an acute observer, prickly—and funny as hell.” —Elizabeth Royte, ELLE “Attentive to subtle signs of growth and change, geobiologist Jahren turns her gaze not only outward but also inward and finds wonder even in minutiae: the flourishing of a seed, an emotional efflorescence in her own psyche. ‘There I transformed from a girl into a scientist, just like Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man, only kind of backward,’ she writes.” —Jennifer Maloney, The Wall Street Journal, “The Hottest Spring Nonfiction Books”. “Jahren, a professor of geobiology, recounts her unfolding journey to discover ‘what it’s like to be a plant’ in this darkly humorous, emotionally raw, and exquisitely crafted memoir. Jahren, who ‘loves [her] calling to excess,’ describes the joy of working alone at night, the ‘multidimensional glory’ of a manic episode, scavenging jury-rigged equipment from a retiring colleague, or spontaneously road-tripping with students. For Jahren, a life in science yields the gratification of asking, knowing, and telling; for the reader, the joy is in hearing about the process as much as the results.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review). The author’s father was a science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist. “Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl burns with her love of science, teaching us the way great teachers can. In Lab Girl , pioneering geobiologist Jahren limns her journey [from] insecure young scientist [to] medals and professional and personal fulfillment. But her prose reaches another dimension when she describes her remarkable relationship with a lab guy, an undergraduate loner named Bill. The research partners dig holes, gather soil samples, battle personal demons, and keep each other grounded. She’s an acute observer, prickly—and funny as hell.” —Elizabeth Royte, ELLE “Attentive to subtle signs of growth and change, geobiologist Jahren turns her gaze not only outward but also inward and finds wonder even in minutiae: the flourishing of a seed, an emotional efflorescence in her own psyche. ‘Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.’” —Dawn Raffel, More. It’s not surprising that today we relegate those who speak the language of biology, chemistry or physics to a kind of rarified ghetto. The best moments describe observation in nature, which lead to a question, which in turn formulates a hypothesis, generates an experiment and, with luck, yields the ecstasy of discovery. What Lab Girl offers, beyond the pleasure of reading it, is the insight that science is built of small contributions, not masterstrokes like e=mc2.
Reviews
"Yet this book, which might better be considered a platonic love story to Bill, her long time lab partner, rather than a book about the life of a scientist, was tainted by the gleeful disdain that Jahren and Bill show for many other people. One day, Jahren does not heed multiple warnings and directs the graduate student driver to go straight into a snow storm. The student driver, understandably shaken, asks to be dropped off at the airport so she can fly home, but Jahren and Bill yell at her and refuse, calling her a quitter. Jahren and Bill enjoy giving their students a repetitive, meaningless task, like labeling hundreds of bottles, and then telling them that, sorry, they won't be using their work after all."
"I appreciate the way she incorporated her struggles with mental illness, women in science and university funding (which will make any tuition paying parent give a HARD look at the college they are paying to educate their child at) within the book but never came off as whiny or complaining."
"I do us because us is what I know how to do.”. ~Hope Jahren, Lab Girl. This book is a love story to life, plants, science, best friends, spouses, and parenthood. I especially loved the relationship between her and her friend Bill and how she described the depth of their friendship: “That no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self.”. And how she spoke of the depth of motherhood. “Every kiss that I give my child heals one that I had ached for but was not given - indeed, it has turned out to be the only thing that ever could.”. I recommend this to anyone looking for some inspiration from a true story told in an interesting way and I happily give this book 4 stars."
"I got this book because our local library (where I volunteer) has a program going on that involves the book."
"Her mental illness and relationship with her lab assistant (who likely has autism, but is able to make her botany research possible with his amazing ability to construct lab equipment and assist her in her field work) are themes throughout the book."
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1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats.Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer.60005000In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species.First cities established in Sumer.40003000The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structuresGreat Pyramid at Giza265032First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s)800-840 A.D.Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy warVikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America.1000Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.*Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000.Black Death devastates Europe.1347-13511398Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Earth.The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.1492The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew.1493Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage.1519Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox**Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire.1525-1533The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro.1617Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors.English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth.1620*Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire.
Reviews
"Read this book at the library and decided I wanted a copy for myself."
"A wonderful insight into the true history of the western hemisphere before and after the conquest from the east."
"This is the kind of book that I pick up and read over and over again."
"A Classic of modern historical research."
"Well written, very readable and full of information your history teacher probably doesn't know!"
"so much of what was written questions the way we all think of the Americas pre 1491."
"Mann likes to jump around the time rather than stay chronological which my little brain has a hard time with - but the content is fascinating and I highly recommend this to any history buff!"
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Best Conservation

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (Official Guides to the Appalachian Trail)
The AT offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes — and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings. When this American transplant to Britain decided to return home, he made a farewell walking tour of the British countryside and produced Notes from a Small Island . Accompanied only by his old college buddy Stephen Katz, Bryson starts out one March morning in north Georgia, intending to walk the entire 2,100 miles to trail's end atop Maine's Mount Katahdin. As Bryson and Katz haul their out-of-shape, middle-aged butts over hill and dale, the reader is treated to both a very funny personal memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes through. Awed by merely the camping section of his local sporting goods store, he nevertheless plunges into the wilderness and emerges with a consistently comical account of a neophyte woodsman learning hard lessons about self-reliance.
Reviews
"I'm a sexagenarian who, on a recent vacation, happened to walk out and back on the first three miles or so of the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail (Springer Mtn, GA) and, in a fit of exhilaration, decided then and there that I would, by golly, hike the AT before I died. As I was joyfully entertained by his incisive sense of humor, I was simultaneously and seriously learning history, biology, geology (and several other -ologies) as well as being discomfitted by Bryson's documentation of our culture's dismissive practices regarding ecology."
"Read one and except for a few events, you've pretty much read them all and almost any extended backpacking trip involves the same rigors, risks, weather and that mixture of misery and exhilaration."
"One of the funniest books you will every read."
"Bill's storytelling captured me immediately...I was taking every step he took, I enjoyed every vista he looked out on, I was eavesdropping on his conversations with his fellow hikers and feeling the spectrum of emotions held for his friend and hiking companion."
"An adventure that walks you experientially and historically through the nation's longest series of trails from Georgia to Maine while feeling every fear from blisters, hunger, thirst, wildlife, climate changes, man's limitations and nature's nuances, all the while trekking with a forty pound pack on your back, and any one of these could do you in, well it's a wonder why the wild is so compelling."
"With the film in theaters, I decided to pick it up and give it a go. I loved this book, and place it among Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild," Cheryl Strayed's "Wild," and Elizabeth Gilbert's "The Last American Man" in terms of well-written essays that explore our yearning to return to a simpler, untethered way of life."
"Unfortunately some of his stories about what happened to people along the trail, made me not that interested in walking any trail."
"I think Bill Bryson is an incredibly good writer whose humor extends to poking as much fun at himself as he does at others."
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Best Environmental Ecology

1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats.Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer.60005000In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species.First cities established in Sumer.40003000The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structuresGreat Pyramid at Giza265032First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s)800-840 A.D.Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy warVikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America.1000Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.*Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000.Black Death devastates Europe.1347-13511398Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Earth.The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.1492The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew.1493Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage.1519Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox**Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire.1525-1533The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro.1617Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors.English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth.1620*Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire.
Reviews
"Read this book at the library and decided I wanted a copy for myself."
"A wonderful insight into the true history of the western hemisphere before and after the conquest from the east."
"This is the kind of book that I pick up and read over and over again."
"Well written, very readable and full of information your history teacher probably doesn't know!"
"so much of what was written questions the way we all think of the Americas pre 1491."
"Mann likes to jump around the time rather than stay chronological which my little brain has a hard time with - but the content is fascinating and I highly recommend this to any history buff!"
"Terrific book, a real education into the huge population of the many nations that lived on our continent prior to the invasion of the Europeans with their disease and predation."
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Best Recycling

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash
By showing us what happens to the things we've "disposed of," Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact-and that unless we undertake radical change, the garbage we create will always be with us: in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we consume. Royte is a journalist with a nose for the "sordid afterlife" of trash, thoroughly at home in the putrid world of "Coney Island whitefish" (used condoms); "disco rice" (maggots); and—the darling of American consumer culture and the nemesis of waste activists—"Satan's resin" (plastic). Her book takes the form of a quest for the surprising final resting places of her yogurt cups, beer bottles, personal computer, and organic-fig-cookie packaging, and leads to an impassioned attack on overconsumption in America. If Royte does not quite demonstrate the muckraking skills of an Eric Schlosser in "Fast Food Nation," she does expose the feculent underside of our appetite for things and challenges her readers to disprove the resigned assessment of a former New York sanitation commissioner: "In the end, the garbage will win."
Reviews
"I found the book interesting, especially since I will soon be working at a solid waste management company (which is the reason I wanted to do some research on the industry)."
"A good attempt by the author to actually trace the flow of her own garbage and other waste through the system of collection, processing, and final disposal. Also, she works on reducing her incoming stream of material (grocery store plastic bags as an example) that will go to either recycling, or the landfill. Some things of note: She does mention the amount of waste in a Fast Food Restaurant & follows the trail of the commercial side of the trash (what she gets when she buys a meal). (As an aside, I was camping at a KOA this summer & next to the facility was a special dumpster that a fast food restaurant used only for paper & cardboard waste. One final note: I had not considered the sheer volume of plastic that I personally go through in a typical weekly trash cycle until I read this book."
"It's the next best thing to being there - up close and personal with garbage, where we all need to be if we are to raise consciousness about the dirty little secrets of trash management, reverse the misconceptions that 'garbage goes away' and start the process of seriously shifting to a more mindful consumption culture."
"It's a matter of time before it comes back to you in some form through dangerous poisons in your drinking water or food, being washed up on a nearby shore, or in the air you breathe. I personally think her efforts to reduce her own waste footprint, while admirable and noble, is too small to make a difference and the burden should be put on the massive industry that creates this junk that will either never break down or will wind up as lethal poisons. It's not an easy pill to swallow, but Garbage Land made me aware of the scope of the problem and making industy responsible for their waste is now one of my personal issues."
"It was an interesting topic, but the book was very repeative and oversaturated in unnecessary details."
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Best Water Supply

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition
"The definitive work on the West's water crisis." ''When archaelogists from another planet sift through the bleached bones of our civilization, they may conclude that our temples were dams, says Reisner in this angry, exhaustive and gracefully written account of America's quest to turn the inhospitable, irredeemably dry West into a Garden of Eden…Not the first book on the subject, but one of the best.''. -- Kirkus Reviews ''[This] timely and important book should be required reading for all citizens.''. ''Masterful…Among the most influential environmental books published by an American since Silent Spring .''.
Reviews
"This is a timeless work detailing the history of water wealth and distribution in the West."
"Man this book is encyclopedic, with all that implies."
"While the editing causes some revisiting of projects ant times, this book gives a clear picture of the technical, economic, political, and bureaucratic forces surrounding the largest group of public works in American history."
"I recommend this book to anyone wanting to understand the history of the water "crisis" or has the least bit of interest in our nation's history!"
"While the activities recounted in the book paved the way to agriculture and population growth (and clearly contributed to the rise of the United States as a world leader), the calculated and manipulative things people of the time did to drive "progress" were monumental and jaw-dropping in some cases."
"It is not a perfect work: the author occasionally allows his passion to overwhelm his recounting of the facts, and it detracts from both his case and the flow of the book."
"A really excellent dissertation on the history of US water and the institutions that control it."
"It's easy to call all cities in the American West "cancers", and state or imply how and how much the West should've been settled, based on 20/20 hindsight and without thought for where settlers could've gone if every inch West of the 100th meridian had been settled only by a very limited number of environmentally prophetic, conscientious stewards."
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Best Weather

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms. That August, a strange, prolonged heat wave gripped the nation and killed scores of people in New York and Chicago. As the bureau's forecasters assured the nation that all was calm in the Caribbean, Cuba's own weathermen fretted about ominous signs in the sky. Hundreds of people gathered at the beach to marvel at the fantastically tall waves and gorgeous pink sky, until the surf began ripping the city's beloved beachfront apart. In Galveston alone at least 6,000 people, possibly as many as 10,000, would lose their lives, a number far greater than the combined death toll of the Johnstown Flood and 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. As barometers plummet and wind gauges are plucked from their moorings, Larson (Lethal Passage) cuts cinematically from the eerie "eyewall" of the hurricane to the mundane hubbub of a lunchroom moments before it capitulates to the arriving winds, from the neat pirouette of Cline's house amid rising waters to the bridge of the steamship Pensacola, tossed like flotsam on the roiling seas. Major ad/promo; author tour; simultaneous Random House audio; foreign rights sold in Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan and the U.K. (Sept.). Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Reviews
"I enjoyed reading about the story about the terrible hurricane that hit Galveston Texas in 1900. If you have an interest in learning about the history of weather forecasting, then this is the book for you. If you have an interest in the social history of the United States around 1900, then this is a good book to read."
"Extensive notes and references give sources for every word the people say or write, and for every fact stated--but there's nothing dry about this history; even if you already know about the Galveston Storm, this book is a page-turner."
"I live a short distance from Galveston and wanted to know more about the great storm."
"I would recommend this and his other books--Devil in the White City, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts--whole heartedly."
"I was totally caught up in this section and "felt" the hurricane and "felt" the agony and "felt" the despair."
"Larson's ability to place the reader in the midst of a place and time is amazing, and his ability to translate the experience of being in the midst of a storm that happened before any of us were alive makes the terror, sadness and desperation come alive in a way that even today's movies can't equal."
"Isaac Cline was head of the Galveston Meteorological Bureau, nationally part of a behemoth bureaucracy tipping into corruption, hellbent on never mentioning the word "hurricane" as a threat to the great wheel of commerce."
"If one has been to Galveston they find a beautiful coastal city full of mansions and lovely Victorian houses and cottages."
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Best Earth Sciences

Lab Girl
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. A New York Times 2016 Notable Book. National Best Seller. Named one of TIME magazine’s "100 Most Influential People". An Amazon Top 20 Best Book of 2016. A Washington Post Best Memoir of 2016. A TIME and Entertainment Weekly Best Book of 2016 An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world. Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Somehow she knows me: “the average person [who] cannot imagine himself staring at dirt for longer than the twenty seconds needed to pick up whatever object he just dropped.” And she doesn’t judge. Like life, for instance, and friendship and passion and love, for ideas, for work and for all living beings, including--shocker!--people. A tenured professor at the University of Hawaii, Jahren has built a career and a reputation in science by unearthing secrets hidden in fossilized plant life. Her work has resulted in at least 70 studies in dozens of journals, but it’s also given her a platform to talk about something else: widespread sexual harassment and discrimination in science. On her blog, in op-eds and in her new memoir, Lab Girl, Jahren wields her influence to call out a culture that has caused women to flee the field she so loves. I was drawn in from the start by the clarity and beauty of Jahren’s prose, whether she was examining the inner world of a seed, the ecosystem around the trunk of a tree, or recounting her own inspiring journey. They emerge from her memoir as much more than a bundle of biological processes, but beings with strange, secret lives, supported by astonishingly elegant machinery . In these pages you’ll find a renewed interest in the natural world, and notice things that have been hidden in plain sight. She writes: ‘Love and learning are similar, in that they can never be wasted.’ And neither is time spent reading this book.” —Lucie Green, The Guardian (UK). In [this] behind-the-scenes tour of science, we join her for misadventures and triumphs as she sets up three labs and conducts research in the Canadian Arctic, Ireland, Hawaii, and across the continental United States. Jahren spends the book teaching us that if we just look closely enough, we can see the opal lattice on a hackberry seed, the depths of loyalty in our closest friends, the wonder in a single leaf, and what we ourselves are supposed to become . She’s the type of scientist who cheerfully spends three seasons drilling through Arctic turf; between sessions of hard graft, her lab group takes road trips to see bizarre attractions, or attempts elaborate campfire cuisine. Lab Girl is the acutely personal account of the drive that propels people to the frontier of an academic discipline. Her eloquent rhapsodies about peerless soil samples, willow trees, and the tenacity of a cactus prompt a deeply inquisitive spirit in readers . Peppered with literary references to Genet, Beckett, Dickens and Thoreau, Jahren’s honest prose is insightful, eloquent, and funny, and she has a gift for explaining hard science in the most bewitching way . In the end, it’s easy to see the book as a love note—not just to plants, to science, and to the sweetness of discovery, but also to friendship and loyalty, to journeys big and small, to belonging and becoming.” —Kathleen Yale, Orion. “Jahren writes with such flair that a reviewer is tempted to just move out of the way and quote her; from the prologue on, a reader itches to call out fun facts to innocents nearby. Deft and flecked with humor, Lab Girl is also a hybrid—a scientist’s memoir of a quirky, gritty, fascinating life, punctuated by mesmerizing dispatches on botany . Snow’s two cultures [the sciences and the humanities] gives the book a bright spark, like playing tennis with an intriguing, ambidextrous friend. Her lab partner Bill, a sort of fraternal twin, carries the weight of emotional confederacy in the book . Like Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir or Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk , Lab Girl delivers the zing of a beautiful mind in nature.” —Karen R. Long, Seattle Times * “Sublime, entertaining . With good humor, plenty of science, scattered literary allusions and the occasional sarcastic zinger, Lab Girl is a memoir of a plant research scientist [that] illuminates both the science of the plant world and the ebb and flow of her personal life—her struggles to find professional success, love and family. Jahren emerges as a smart, practical, good-hearted woman who loves her work and also finds joy in her husband, young son and best friend, Bill.”—Bruce Jacobs, Shelf Awareness (starred). A pronounced oddball, a seeker of knowledge, and a trader of sardonic wisecracks, Bill is Jahren’s unfailing, unfussy sidekick; [he’s] never happier than when on the job, savoring the complexities of soil layers or scavenging secondhand equipment for the laboratories the two of them have built together . Jahren captures the ramshackle poetry of this friendship, whose loyalty is so deep and abiding that it forges a great love story, in spite of the utter absence of erotic interest in either party. Winning.” —Laura Miller, Slate “As a young girl growing up in Minnesota, Jahren spent her formative years in the labs of her father, a science teacher at the local community college. It is this literary upbringing fueled by science that heralds Jahren’s memoir as the beginning of a career along the lines of Annie Dillard or Diane Ackerman. In Lab Girl, she constructs her own life story— her struggling years as an undergraduate, the persistent sexist attitude of the scientific community, the constant lack of funds, her growing awareness of her bipolar disorder—with the attention to detail and respect for organic growth that has earned her increased recognition and funding in the later years of her career. Jahren, a geochemist, botanist and geobiologist, has spent the better part of the past two decades studying the secret lives of plants. It is full of pleasing turns of phrase, references to literary figures like Genet and Dickens, and a running botany allusion that punctuates the book’s biographical story. Most of all, it’s deeply personal, following Jahren’s battle with manic depression; a harrowing pregnancy; her unending struggle to secure funding in a quickly drying financial desert; and the loving platonic relationship she shares with her protégé and lab manager, Bill. Jahren’s work has taken her around the world, from the ancient forests of Norway and Denmark to the remote and treeless Arctic, and most recently to the lush gardens of Hawaii. Jahren’s aim is to make the reader appreciate the fascinations of studying flora, to infect us with the same enthusiasm that has driven her ever since she was a child hanging around in her father’s lab, falling hard for the sensuous allures of the slide rule. Jahren’s literary bent renders dense material digestible and lyrical, in fables that parallel personal history. Vladimir Nabokov once observed that ‘a writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.’ The geobiologist Hope Jahren possesses both in spades. Her new memoir is at once a thrilling account of her discovery of her vocation and a gifted teacher’s road map to the secret lives of plants—a book that, at its best, does for botany what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology, what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology . She communicates the electric excitement of discovering something new—something no one ever knew or definitively proved before—and the grunt work involved in conducting studies and experiments: the days and weeks and months of watching and waiting and gathering data, the all-nighters, the repetitions, the detours, both serendipitous and unfruitful . Born and raised in a rural Minnesota town built around a meat-processing plant and defined mostly by its brutal winters and Scandinavian restraint, Jahren assumed that the grim endurance of her Norwegian-immigrant ancestors was her legacy. She did turn out to be tenacious, though not exactly in the way she had pictured: Long hours spent entertaining herself as a child in her physics-teacher father’s work space piqued Jahren’s interest in science, and her housewife mother’s unhappiness propelled her to pursue higher education all the way to a UC Berkeley Ph.D. Today, she’s an internationally renowned geobiologist with three Fulbrights, her own world-class laboratory, and a Wikipedia page longer and starrier than most U.S. senators’. But even more than that, it’s a fascinating portrait of her engagement with the natural world: she investigates everything from the secret life of cacti to the tiny miracles encoded in an acorn seed, studding her observations with memorable sentences . Jahren’s singular gift is her ability to convey the everyday wonder of her work: exploring the strange, beautiful universe of living things that endure and evolve and bloom all around us, if we bother to look. In Lab Girl , pioneering geobiologist Jahren limns her journey [from] insecure young scientist [to] medals and professional and personal fulfillment. But her prose reaches another dimension when she describes her remarkable relationship with a lab guy, an undergraduate loner named Bill. The research partners dig holes, gather soil samples, battle personal demons, and keep each other grounded. She’s an acute observer, prickly—and funny as hell.” —Elizabeth Royte, ELLE “Attentive to subtle signs of growth and change, geobiologist Jahren turns her gaze not only outward but also inward and finds wonder even in minutiae: the flourishing of a seed, an emotional efflorescence in her own psyche. ‘There I transformed from a girl into a scientist, just like Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man, only kind of backward,’ she writes.” —Jennifer Maloney, The Wall Street Journal, “The Hottest Spring Nonfiction Books”. “Jahren, a professor of geobiology, recounts her unfolding journey to discover ‘what it’s like to be a plant’ in this darkly humorous, emotionally raw, and exquisitely crafted memoir. Jahren, who ‘loves [her] calling to excess,’ describes the joy of working alone at night, the ‘multidimensional glory’ of a manic episode, scavenging jury-rigged equipment from a retiring colleague, or spontaneously road-tripping with students. For Jahren, a life in science yields the gratification of asking, knowing, and telling; for the reader, the joy is in hearing about the process as much as the results.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review). The author’s father was a science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist. “Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl burns with her love of science, teaching us the way great teachers can. In Lab Girl , pioneering geobiologist Jahren limns her journey [from] insecure young scientist [to] medals and professional and personal fulfillment. But her prose reaches another dimension when she describes her remarkable relationship with a lab guy, an undergraduate loner named Bill. The research partners dig holes, gather soil samples, battle personal demons, and keep each other grounded. She’s an acute observer, prickly—and funny as hell.” —Elizabeth Royte, ELLE “Attentive to subtle signs of growth and change, geobiologist Jahren turns her gaze not only outward but also inward and finds wonder even in minutiae: the flourishing of a seed, an emotional efflorescence in her own psyche. ‘Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.’” —Dawn Raffel, More. It’s not surprising that today we relegate those who speak the language of biology, chemistry or physics to a kind of rarified ghetto. The best moments describe observation in nature, which lead to a question, which in turn formulates a hypothesis, generates an experiment and, with luck, yields the ecstasy of discovery. What Lab Girl offers, beyond the pleasure of reading it, is the insight that science is built of small contributions, not masterstrokes like e=mc2.
Reviews
"Yet this book, which might better be considered a platonic love story to Bill, her long time lab partner, rather than a book about the life of a scientist, was tainted by the gleeful disdain that Jahren and Bill show for many other people. One day, Jahren does not heed multiple warnings and directs the graduate student driver to go straight into a snow storm. The student driver, understandably shaken, asks to be dropped off at the airport so she can fly home, but Jahren and Bill yell at her and refuse, calling her a quitter. Jahren and Bill enjoy giving their students a repetitive, meaningless task, like labeling hundreds of bottles, and then telling them that, sorry, they won't be using their work after all."
"I appreciate the way she incorporated her struggles with mental illness, women in science and university funding (which will make any tuition paying parent give a HARD look at the college they are paying to educate their child at) within the book but never came off as whiny or complaining."
"I do us because us is what I know how to do.”. ~Hope Jahren, Lab Girl. This book is a love story to life, plants, science, best friends, spouses, and parenthood. I especially loved the relationship between her and her friend Bill and how she described the depth of their friendship: “That no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self.”. And how she spoke of the depth of motherhood. “Every kiss that I give my child heals one that I had ached for but was not given - indeed, it has turned out to be the only thing that ever could.”. I recommend this to anyone looking for some inspiration from a true story told in an interesting way and I happily give this book 4 stars."
"This gave insight into the difficulties that women have gaining credibility in biology, no matter what degrees they have or what they have published."
"Jahren is a good writer and tells the personal story of her relationships with coworkers and the frustrations and the joys she found in her world of science."
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Best Plants

Lab Girl
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. A New York Times 2016 Notable Book. National Best Seller. Named one of TIME magazine’s "100 Most Influential People". An Amazon Top 20 Best Book of 2016. A Washington Post Best Memoir of 2016. A TIME and Entertainment Weekly Best Book of 2016 An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world. Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Somehow she knows me: “the average person [who] cannot imagine himself staring at dirt for longer than the twenty seconds needed to pick up whatever object he just dropped.” And she doesn’t judge. Like life, for instance, and friendship and passion and love, for ideas, for work and for all living beings, including--shocker!--people. A tenured professor at the University of Hawaii, Jahren has built a career and a reputation in science by unearthing secrets hidden in fossilized plant life. Her work has resulted in at least 70 studies in dozens of journals, but it’s also given her a platform to talk about something else: widespread sexual harassment and discrimination in science. On her blog, in op-eds and in her new memoir, Lab Girl, Jahren wields her influence to call out a culture that has caused women to flee the field she so loves. I was drawn in from the start by the clarity and beauty of Jahren’s prose, whether she was examining the inner world of a seed, the ecosystem around the trunk of a tree, or recounting her own inspiring journey. They emerge from her memoir as much more than a bundle of biological processes, but beings with strange, secret lives, supported by astonishingly elegant machinery . In these pages you’ll find a renewed interest in the natural world, and notice things that have been hidden in plain sight. She writes: ‘Love and learning are similar, in that they can never be wasted.’ And neither is time spent reading this book.” —Lucie Green, The Guardian (UK). In [this] behind-the-scenes tour of science, we join her for misadventures and triumphs as she sets up three labs and conducts research in the Canadian Arctic, Ireland, Hawaii, and across the continental United States. Jahren spends the book teaching us that if we just look closely enough, we can see the opal lattice on a hackberry seed, the depths of loyalty in our closest friends, the wonder in a single leaf, and what we ourselves are supposed to become . She’s the type of scientist who cheerfully spends three seasons drilling through Arctic turf; between sessions of hard graft, her lab group takes road trips to see bizarre attractions, or attempts elaborate campfire cuisine. Lab Girl is the acutely personal account of the drive that propels people to the frontier of an academic discipline. Her eloquent rhapsodies about peerless soil samples, willow trees, and the tenacity of a cactus prompt a deeply inquisitive spirit in readers . Peppered with literary references to Genet, Beckett, Dickens and Thoreau, Jahren’s honest prose is insightful, eloquent, and funny, and she has a gift for explaining hard science in the most bewitching way . In the end, it’s easy to see the book as a love note—not just to plants, to science, and to the sweetness of discovery, but also to friendship and loyalty, to journeys big and small, to belonging and becoming.” —Kathleen Yale, Orion. “Jahren writes with such flair that a reviewer is tempted to just move out of the way and quote her; from the prologue on, a reader itches to call out fun facts to innocents nearby. Deft and flecked with humor, Lab Girl is also a hybrid—a scientist’s memoir of a quirky, gritty, fascinating life, punctuated by mesmerizing dispatches on botany . Snow’s two cultures [the sciences and the humanities] gives the book a bright spark, like playing tennis with an intriguing, ambidextrous friend. Her lab partner Bill, a sort of fraternal twin, carries the weight of emotional confederacy in the book . Like Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir or Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk , Lab Girl delivers the zing of a beautiful mind in nature.” —Karen R. Long, Seattle Times * “Sublime, entertaining . With good humor, plenty of science, scattered literary allusions and the occasional sarcastic zinger, Lab Girl is a memoir of a plant research scientist [that] illuminates both the science of the plant world and the ebb and flow of her personal life—her struggles to find professional success, love and family. Jahren emerges as a smart, practical, good-hearted woman who loves her work and also finds joy in her husband, young son and best friend, Bill.”—Bruce Jacobs, Shelf Awareness (starred). A pronounced oddball, a seeker of knowledge, and a trader of sardonic wisecracks, Bill is Jahren’s unfailing, unfussy sidekick; [he’s] never happier than when on the job, savoring the complexities of soil layers or scavenging secondhand equipment for the laboratories the two of them have built together . Jahren captures the ramshackle poetry of this friendship, whose loyalty is so deep and abiding that it forges a great love story, in spite of the utter absence of erotic interest in either party. Winning.” —Laura Miller, Slate “As a young girl growing up in Minnesota, Jahren spent her formative years in the labs of her father, a science teacher at the local community college. It is this literary upbringing fueled by science that heralds Jahren’s memoir as the beginning of a career along the lines of Annie Dillard or Diane Ackerman. In Lab Girl, she constructs her own life story— her struggling years as an undergraduate, the persistent sexist attitude of the scientific community, the constant lack of funds, her growing awareness of her bipolar disorder—with the attention to detail and respect for organic growth that has earned her increased recognition and funding in the later years of her career. Jahren, a geochemist, botanist and geobiologist, has spent the better part of the past two decades studying the secret lives of plants. It is full of pleasing turns of phrase, references to literary figures like Genet and Dickens, and a running botany allusion that punctuates the book’s biographical story. Most of all, it’s deeply personal, following Jahren’s battle with manic depression; a harrowing pregnancy; her unending struggle to secure funding in a quickly drying financial desert; and the loving platonic relationship she shares with her protégé and lab manager, Bill. Jahren’s work has taken her around the world, from the ancient forests of Norway and Denmark to the remote and treeless Arctic, and most recently to the lush gardens of Hawaii. Jahren’s aim is to make the reader appreciate the fascinations of studying flora, to infect us with the same enthusiasm that has driven her ever since she was a child hanging around in her father’s lab, falling hard for the sensuous allures of the slide rule. Jahren’s literary bent renders dense material digestible and lyrical, in fables that parallel personal history. Vladimir Nabokov once observed that ‘a writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.’ The geobiologist Hope Jahren possesses both in spades. Her new memoir is at once a thrilling account of her discovery of her vocation and a gifted teacher’s road map to the secret lives of plants—a book that, at its best, does for botany what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology, what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology . She communicates the electric excitement of discovering something new—something no one ever knew or definitively proved before—and the grunt work involved in conducting studies and experiments: the days and weeks and months of watching and waiting and gathering data, the all-nighters, the repetitions, the detours, both serendipitous and unfruitful . Born and raised in a rural Minnesota town built around a meat-processing plant and defined mostly by its brutal winters and Scandinavian restraint, Jahren assumed that the grim endurance of her Norwegian-immigrant ancestors was her legacy. She did turn out to be tenacious, though not exactly in the way she had pictured: Long hours spent entertaining herself as a child in her physics-teacher father’s work space piqued Jahren’s interest in science, and her housewife mother’s unhappiness propelled her to pursue higher education all the way to a UC Berkeley Ph.D. Today, she’s an internationally renowned geobiologist with three Fulbrights, her own world-class laboratory, and a Wikipedia page longer and starrier than most U.S. senators’. But even more than that, it’s a fascinating portrait of her engagement with the natural world: she investigates everything from the secret life of cacti to the tiny miracles encoded in an acorn seed, studding her observations with memorable sentences . Jahren’s singular gift is her ability to convey the everyday wonder of her work: exploring the strange, beautiful universe of living things that endure and evolve and bloom all around us, if we bother to look. In Lab Girl , pioneering geobiologist Jahren limns her journey [from] insecure young scientist [to] medals and professional and personal fulfillment. But her prose reaches another dimension when she describes her remarkable relationship with a lab guy, an undergraduate loner named Bill. The research partners dig holes, gather soil samples, battle personal demons, and keep each other grounded. She’s an acute observer, prickly—and funny as hell.” —Elizabeth Royte, ELLE “Attentive to subtle signs of growth and change, geobiologist Jahren turns her gaze not only outward but also inward and finds wonder even in minutiae: the flourishing of a seed, an emotional efflorescence in her own psyche. ‘There I transformed from a girl into a scientist, just like Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man, only kind of backward,’ she writes.” —Jennifer Maloney, The Wall Street Journal, “The Hottest Spring Nonfiction Books”. “Jahren, a professor of geobiology, recounts her unfolding journey to discover ‘what it’s like to be a plant’ in this darkly humorous, emotionally raw, and exquisitely crafted memoir. Jahren, who ‘loves [her] calling to excess,’ describes the joy of working alone at night, the ‘multidimensional glory’ of a manic episode, scavenging jury-rigged equipment from a retiring colleague, or spontaneously road-tripping with students. For Jahren, a life in science yields the gratification of asking, knowing, and telling; for the reader, the joy is in hearing about the process as much as the results.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review). The author’s father was a science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist. “Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl burns with her love of science, teaching us the way great teachers can. In Lab Girl , pioneering geobiologist Jahren limns her journey [from] insecure young scientist [to] medals and professional and personal fulfillment. But her prose reaches another dimension when she describes her remarkable relationship with a lab guy, an undergraduate loner named Bill. The research partners dig holes, gather soil samples, battle personal demons, and keep each other grounded. She’s an acute observer, prickly—and funny as hell.” —Elizabeth Royte, ELLE “Attentive to subtle signs of growth and change, geobiologist Jahren turns her gaze not only outward but also inward and finds wonder even in minutiae: the flourishing of a seed, an emotional efflorescence in her own psyche. ‘Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.’” —Dawn Raffel, More. It’s not surprising that today we relegate those who speak the language of biology, chemistry or physics to a kind of rarified ghetto. The best moments describe observation in nature, which lead to a question, which in turn formulates a hypothesis, generates an experiment and, with luck, yields the ecstasy of discovery. What Lab Girl offers, beyond the pleasure of reading it, is the insight that science is built of small contributions, not masterstrokes like e=mc2.
Reviews
"Yet this book, which might better be considered a platonic love story to Bill, her long time lab partner, rather than a book about the life of a scientist, was tainted by the gleeful disdain that Jahren and Bill show for many other people. One day, Jahren does not heed multiple warnings and directs the graduate student driver to go straight into a snow storm. The student driver, understandably shaken, asks to be dropped off at the airport so she can fly home, but Jahren and Bill yell at her and refuse, calling her a quitter. Jahren and Bill enjoy giving their students a repetitive, meaningless task, like labeling hundreds of bottles, and then telling them that, sorry, they won't be using their work after all."
"I appreciate the way she incorporated her struggles with mental illness, women in science and university funding (which will make any tuition paying parent give a HARD look at the college they are paying to educate their child at) within the book but never came off as whiny or complaining."
"I do us because us is what I know how to do.”. ~Hope Jahren, Lab Girl. This book is a love story to life, plants, science, best friends, spouses, and parenthood. I especially loved the relationship between her and her friend Bill and how she described the depth of their friendship: “That no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self.”. And how she spoke of the depth of motherhood. “Every kiss that I give my child heals one that I had ached for but was not given - indeed, it has turned out to be the only thing that ever could.”. I recommend this to anyone looking for some inspiration from a true story told in an interesting way and I happily give this book 4 stars."
"Her mental illness and relationship with her lab assistant (who likely has autism, but is able to make her botany research possible with his amazing ability to construct lab equipment and assist her in her field work) are themes throughout the book."
"This gave insight into the difficulties that women have gaining credibility in biology, no matter what degrees they have or what they have published."
Find Best Price at Amazon