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Hope Jahren, What's with all the books by women calling themselves girl? It is kind of disturbing. Why do so few of us claim woman?
One of the books I read and finished in 2016 but haven’t told you about yet is Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. Jahren is a geobiologist, which essentially means she studies plants. But not plants as a botanist would. Some of what she studies has to do with the ancient remains of plants so we spend lots of time digging holes in the middle of nowhere and sometimes in very cold places. Or she studies how spruce trees grown from seeds of trees that had a warmer season react in colder weather versus spruce grown from seeds that had a very cold season. Geobiologist. I had no idea this was a thing. If I had, I might be working as one right now.
Or not. Because from what Jahren says getting funding for your own lab is a huge amount of work. The university pays her salary and it is up to her to get grants to fund her research and pay her lab assistant, Bill.
Jahren met Bill in college when she was a grad student working as a TA. Bill has followed Jahren around from university to university and lab to lab since Jahren’s first job. They are great friends and Bill sounds like a really good guy and interesting person, but I often found myself wondering why he puts up with Jahren as a boss. In spite of being homeless for awhile in the beginning and living in a tiny office at Jahren’s lab because she couldn’t pay him enough so he could afford an apartment, he must obviously get something out of the arrangement since they are still working together and the book is Jahren’s homage to Bill.
And that’s all fine and good, but I was not interested in reading an homage to Bill. I want to know about what it is like to be a geobiologist with her own lab. She reveals she is bipolar but doesn’t talk directly about how it affects her work and it is obvious that it does. I want to know about what it is like being a woman doing science in a male dominated field. She does talk a little about the sexism she encountered, how she had to work extra hard to gain any kind of recognition and how she was banned from her own lab while she was pregnant. Being banned from her lab sounds like there may have been more complications to it that she reveals, it also obviously comes with a big dose of sexism.
She didn’t talk about this enough though. She told story after story of walloping antics she and Bill were involved in like driving halfway across the country at the last minute so she could present a paper at a conference. She got a couple grad students to come along so they could all take turns driving and wouldn’t have to stop at a hotel. She made them all pee in bottles because there was no time to stop. But she pig-headedly insisted on driving through a snowstorm and one of the students driving had never driven in snow before and ended up flipping the minivan when she hit a patch of ice. Jahren still wouldn’t call it quits though and they made it to the conference. We don’t get to know how the conference went or even what it is like to attend such a conference.
In fact, we don’t get to see Jahren doing much work at all. But I know she does as she talks about spending days working in the lab until the wee hours and she has won a number of science awards. However, reading Lab Girl makes it sound like she spends most of her time goofing off, or pressuring students into doing things they might not want to, or leaving Bill to do everything.
In between Jahren’s personal chapters are chapters about trees and plants. These short in between chapters were wonderful and exciting and full of fascinating information. They were a stark contrast to the madcap adventures of the personal chapters and provided an all too brief glimpse of Jahren as scientist deserving of awards. Even the writing was better, more focused, often lyrical:
Each beginning is the end of waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.
In the in between chapters I learned stuff:
The mass ratio of plants to animals in the ocean is close to four, while the ratio on land is closer to a thousand. Plant numbers are staggering: there are eighty billion trees just within the protected forests of the western United States. The ratio of trees to people in America is well over two hundred. As a rule, people live among plants but they don’t really see them.
Doesn’t that make you want to pay more attention? It does me!
And as a gardener who regularly plants and saves seeds, celebrates when plants move themselves around my garden to interesting places, or grumbles when they get themselves into areas I don’t want them, I was surprised to learn
Of the many millions of seeds dropped on every acre of the Earth’s surface each year, less than 5 percent will begin to grow. Of those, only 5 percent will survive to their first birthday.
This made me kind of sad.
Even though I liked the in between chapters better than the personal chapters and had some grumbles about the book as a whole, I still enjoyed it overall. It wasn’t quite the book I expected it to be, nonetheless, it is a book by a successful woman scientist and that is worth something.
I read a great review of this by Valorie at Books Can Save a Life, which made me add it to my wishlist, I can see how you would love her to have answered a few more questions given your interest in the field and how her bipolar condition affects her work, that would require a significant degree of self awareness and humility I imagine. Great and honest review, thank you so much!
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Claire, thanks! I think I might have read Valorie’s review, I can’t remember for sure since I have read a number of bloggers who reviewed it. In spite of all my grumbles, I still did enjoy the book, I wouldn’t have finished it otherwise! I hope you enjoy it when you read it!
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I really enjoyed this book, and aside from the sections about her son (which I related to intensely as the mother of an only son who is growing up way too fast) the sections I enjoyed most were the nature writing ones, like you. But I was left with questions about Jahren herself, and wondered how much she didn’t share because of her “tight-lipped” Scandinavian heritage (which she seemed to reference a lot if I remember correctly.) I also wondered why her lab partner Bill figured so prominently while there was virtually nothing about her husband. She’s a conundrum. I really liked it but didn’t love it as much as I thought I would.
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Laila, heh, yeah she mentioned her Norwegian heritage quite a lot and while it’s true (there are lots of Norwegians and Swedes in MN and the culture has had much influence here), it also makes for a bad excuse especially if you are writing a memoir! Heh, yeah the husband seemed to kind of drop in from nowhere and then pretty much disappeared which was weird because if she spent so much time at the lab I wanted to know how she managed to maintain her marriage and spend time with her son. Conundrum is right! but like you I still enjoyed it, just not as much I wanted to.
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I’ve seen this book on a lot of Best Nonfiction Reads of 2016 and now with your review – it’s definitely on my list!
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Iliana, I hope you enjoy it if you read it!
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Stephanie, this was one of my favorite reads of the year, and I would have to say it was unusual in that I thought it had some huge flaws but I still liked it anyway. The flaws you’ve largely addressed here. That long trip she took with the students and Bill bothered me, too. I also had no idea she had a mental illness until I got to that chapter – I was completely taken by surprise. I thought it strange that it wasn’t more integrated with the rest of her story, but on the other hand I’ve read so much about mental illness I liked that this wasn’t the focus. I don’t know if you’ve worked in academia; I found that as a medical librarian working with the grad students – well, they have very different lifestyles, astonishing in the amount of work, low pay and hardship, plus women put up with a ton of crap. Hope and Bill’s relationship is certainly unusual but I can see it in the context of science research. I loved her plant and seed sections, too. It got me riled up a bit, how we don’t support research as we should in this country. I hope we get more women in science memoirs, I’ll bet there are so many interesting stories.
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Valorie, I wasn’t so surprised by the mental illness because with all the manic episodes she described I felt like something was wrong so when she finally comes out it with it was a relief because it explained a lot. I do work in academia, at a university law library 🙂 Very different than medical though as students working as summer associates at law firms make as much or more than I do during the same period. And yeah, women in the law get a lot of crap too. I was upset too by how hard it is to get research funding when it doesn’t have direct cash/business value. I too hope we get more women in science memoirs! And in spite of my grumbles, I did still enjoy the book 🙂 thanks for your thoughtful comment!
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Even though it sounds like the book has some flaws- and I will notice them even more now- I do still want to read it and look forward to learning some fascinating things about plants!
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Jeane, in spite of the flaws it is still a good a book! I hope you like it if you read it!
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I think the book would have been better had she stuck more to the in-betweeen chapters! She does not sound like a great person and she seems like some of those bullying supervisor at Grad school. In fact she does not see to talk about things that matter, like sexism in science. I think I will pass this personal ode to self!
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cirtnecce, I would have enjoyed the book more if it was less sit-com and more serious but it still was good. I don’t think Jahren is ever actually mean and bullying to her students, I think the way she tells the stories comes across as flippant which isn’t great and doesn’t reflect well on her, but I don’t think she is a bad person. In the end she seems like someone who genuinely cares about science and her students even if sometimes he cares about science more.
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I’ve never heard of geobiology as a field of science, maybe its one of the cinderella branches which would explain why she has to struggle to get funding. its probably not the kind of research that would interest the multinationals …
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Sounds like a slightly frustrating book but one that would be well worth reading. Geobiology sounds fascinating, something like a science founded by Von Humboldt and full of profound implications for ourselves in the planet.
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Ian, yes, slightly frustrating but still worth reading. Geobiology is fascinating and the more I learned the more I wish I had known about it back when I first entered university as a biology major. I would have been okay dissecting leaves instead of changing my major because dissecting pigs and cats was too traumatizing! The field does sound something very Humboldtian!
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BookerTalk, they do struggle to get funding mostly because the kinds of things they study don’t produce economically valuable results. From the sound of it, the best funded labs are the ones that do stuff that business can make money off of, which is really sad.
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I have heard a lot of good things about this book.
I like the idea of the alternating chapters on nature. It sounds like a distinctive thing for a writer to do.
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Brian Joseph, in spite of the flaws it was a pretty good book and I did learn about a field of science I had never heard of before. The alternating chapters were kind of unusual and they worked well.
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I was curious about this–it was on my wishlist and sounds really interesting (love the quotes you shared–poor seeds, I had no idea!). But like you, I think I would prefer and enjoy more, reading about the sorts of things you quoted than the really personal stuff. Thanks for sharing–may take a peek at it, but you pretty much answered whether this is something I might pick up sooner than later.
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Danielle, it wasn’t a bad book and I did enjoy it, it just was not how I like my science memoirs to be. I bet you would enjoy it too, but wouldn’t love it.
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