Review by Booklist Review
How do planets form? NASA's Psyche Asteroid Mission, poised to launch in August 2022 and led by one of only two women ever to head up a NASA space exploration mission, hopes to find out. The scientific career of Lindy Elkins-Tanton is impressive, even inspiring, but as her memoir reveals, her road into the world of science was a rocky one. After a childhood that saw both privilege and abuse, she sought refuge in science, only to discover again and again that her presence in the scientific world would often be seen, sometimes even by her closest colleagues, as unearned, temporary, and conditional. Rightly aware that the sciences are as much about people as data, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman covers its author's prodigious scientific work alongside her traumatic background and her struggles to convince her institution to address the behavior of an abusive faculty member. The book's honesty is not cynical, but rather sincerely optimistic, as Elkins-Tanton explores ways to create better, more inclusive disciplines through curiosity, generosity, and collaboration.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Planetary scientist Elkins-Tanton traces her path from MIT geology student to principal investigator of NASA's Psyche mission in this often poetic memoir. After graduating from MIT with a bachelor's in geology, a master's in geochemistry, and eventually a Ph.D. in geology, Elkins-tanton performed field studies in Siberia that helped her develop a theory for the cause of a Permian-era extinction event, and worked on NASA's Psyche mission, set to launch in August 2022 with a mission to explore an asteroid that "may be a piece of one of the first metal cores to form in our solar system." Interspersed with her account of her professional accomplishments are personal stories of challenges the author faced, including her divorce, periods of profound depression, and the sexism she's faced: "All of us women were told at one point or another that we were at MIT on sufferance, that we were not really good enough." Elkins-Tanton shines in her ability to render the process of scientific discovery in eloquent prose: "I wish with all my heart that every person could, in at least one discipline, pursue and come to know through a long path traveled all that has been discovered, right to the edge of human understanding." This is a wonderful paean to the beauty of scientific exploration. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The principal investigator of NASA's Psyche mission lays bare the challenges and rewards of succeeding as a woman in a male-dominated field and how the sublime beauty of the universe brought her strength and solace. Winning a major NASA space exploration contract is an accolade that only two women in history have received--and one of them is Elkins-Tanton. In this enthralling and inspiring book, the author, a renowned geophysicist, shares her experience ascending the field, from her training at MIT to her current position leading the mission to explore the asteroid Psyche. In August 2022, she and her team are scheduled to launch a rocket to begin its 3.4-year trip to Psyche, which may be a piece of one of the first metal cores to form in our solar system and could provide never-before-seen data about how the Earth's metal core formed. Elkins-Tanton describes the harrowing personal obstacles she overcame, from childhood abuse to cancer, and the sexism she encountered in each of her increasingly high-powered roles--a stark reminder that despite advances in equity, in the eyes of male colleagues, women are often "nothing but a symbol for sex" rather than being seen as "a whole person." Of course, misogyny is not news; what makes the author's story so compelling is her unrelenting effort to "make a change in culture, a change in expectation, that causes a change in our subconscious reactions and thus in our implicit bias." Elkins-Tanton does not limit her scope to harassment, though that is a central concern. She innovated classroom learning and team building to create space for every person to contribute and thrive, an approach that was recognized by NASA's review board and played a role in the success of the Psyche proposal. Ultimately, she created a matrix to allow for every voice and therefore space to "drive human knowledge farther." A fearless, riveting, and galvanizing book from a star in the U.S. space program. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
