Review by New York Times Review
LARGE NUMBERS AMAZE; numbers of large numbers amaze even more. Cognitive neuroscience can explain why (numbers of a certain opulence can be grasped only conceptually, and thus stupefy) but it takes a passionate geobiologist with the soul of a poet to make us really swoon in the face of computational amplitude. Science is in the end a love affair with numbers, and when it comes to botany, the "numbers are staggering," Hope Jahren writes in her spirited account of how she became an eminent research scientist. "Lab Girl" lets loose with a salvo of stunning numbers in its first paragraph: The mass ratio of plants to animals on land is a thousand to one, and the average plant on land is a two-ton tree that lives for more than a century. There are more than 200 trees to each human in the United States - some 80 billion trees in national parks alone. "Since I've discovered these numbers," Jahren writes, "I can see little else." We can see why. An aim of hers 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 professor father's lab, falling hard for the sensuous allures of the slide rule. Early on she discovers one generous mystery of scientific inquiry - in the course of making it, it makes you: "A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments, she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge." Jahren's literary bent renders dense material digestible, and lyrical, in fables that parallel personal history. "A tree's wood is also its memoir," and the first leaf that unfurls from a seed "is a new idea," like those a scientist investigates to establish a career. Trees need to meet their "annual budgets" for growth just as an academic must secure funding, over and over. And willows, "the Rapunzel of the plant world," continually shed bits that take root downstream in genetic replicas - inseparable, like Jahren and her lab partner Bill, a character every bit as extraordinary as any of the wild organisms she describes. The sardonic Bill, of Armenian extraction, enters her life when she's a graduate student at Berkeley and proceeds to enliven both it and her narrative for the remainder. When writing about a symbiotic fungus that permits a tree to grow where it otherwise might fail or the constancy of the light cycle that sets off protective hardening against the winter freeze, she is invoking their friendship. Both scientists are natural loners, but together are lonely no more. They build labs at three universities; on occasion Bill takes up residence in them, when he's not living in a van, that is. He is funny, hard-bitten, loyal and achingly touching: After Jahren marries and has a son, she hopes Bill too will find love. He dismisses the notion by observing that since Armenians often live to 100, at not yet 50 he's too young to date. If her use of allegory to make science approachable verges on pat, Jahren can be forgiven, for it allows her to deliver a gratifying and often moving chronicle of the scientist's life. She also earns her license to issue warnings we would do well to heed. Jahren is determined we stop taking trees for granted. They are a miracle 300 million years in the making. That they are still around is testimony to their ingenious powers of survival. Or perhaps to our inability - yet - to destroy every last one, though not for lack of trying: We are on track to rid the planet of trees within 600 years. So plant one tree this year, Jahren implores. "Becoming a tree is a long journey," she writes, a sometimes perilous one, as a great majority - 95 percent - will not live past their second year. So too is the road to becoming a scientist, and especially a female one; sexism in science is a major theme of the book. Trees nourish life in uncountable, always beautiful, ways, and to plant one is to plant hope. MELISSA HOLBROOK PIERSON is the author of five books, most recently "The Secret History of Kindness."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Jahren, a professor of geobiology at the University of Hawaii, recounts her unfolding journey to discover "what it's like to be a plant" in this darkly humorous, emotionally raw, and exquisitely crafted memoir. In clever prose, Jahren distills what it means to be one of those researchers who "love their calling to excess." She 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 to a roadside monkey preserve. She likens elements of her scientific career to a plant world driven by need and instinct, comparing the academic grant cycle to the resource management of a deciduous tree and the experience of setting up her first-desperately underfunded-basement lab to ambitious vines that grow quickly wherever they can. But the most extraordinary and delightful element of her narrative is her partnership with Bill, a taciturn student who becomes both her lab partner and her sarcastic, caring best friend. It's a rare portrait of a deep relationship in which the mutual esteem of the participants is unmarred by sexual tension. 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. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Jahren's first book is a refreshing mix of memoir about her journey as a woman scientist and musings about plants, the central focus of her successful scientific endeavors. What's most refreshing is the author's openness about her relationship and collaboration with research partner Bill. Over the course of 20 years their field treks take them to the North Pole, the back roads of Florida, and Ireland's countryside. Meanwhile they build three labs, including their current one at the University of Hawaii. At times funny and at other points poignant, this work expresses Jahren's passion for paleobiology-her subdiscipline within environmental geology-through her insights into plant life and growth. She skillfully ties this knowledge to her own life stories and successfully conveys the dedication required to build and sustain a research agenda and the requisite lab at any major U.S. research institution. VERDICT This title should be required reading for all budding scientists, especially young women. However, being a scientist is not essential in order to savor Jahren's stories and reflections on living as well as fossil plant life. [See Prepub Alert, 10/26/15.]-Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world. The author's father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren's journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the waye.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed's first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: "Each beginning is the end of a 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." The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley 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. Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
