Recommended Reads #74

Have you ordered a copy of Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl yet?

Here’s my review on Goodreads. A more professional review comes from the head of book reviews at the New York Times, who raved about it. And this is not a woman who raves about books. She says: Lab Girl “does for botany what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology, what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology.”

I think the book captures really what it feels like to be a scientist, to do science, and work at making a career in science. But it’s a lot more than that, you’ll know what I mean after you read it.

You can get a copy of Lab Girl at your local library. It comes out on 05 April but you can put your name on the library’s waiting list.

You can order a copy from Barnes and Noble, or order from an independent bookseller though AbeBooks. The Goodreads page for Lab Girl has links to all kinds of booksellers. If you want to support my wonderful local bookstore, then you can order it from Vroman’s in Pasadena and they’ll ship it to you anywhere. Vroman’s has been around for more than 100 years and I want it to stick around for at last another hundred. This is the bookshop that you can see out of the window from the apartment building in Big Bang Theory. Trust me, you want to give them your business. They’re wonderful. You can tell them, “Doctor Mac sent me.” Which won’t mean anything to them at all, and that would be kinda funny.

There’s also the audiobook for Lab Girl, read by the author.

If you look among the ‘recommended sites’ at the bottom of this page you’ll see HopeJahrenSureCanWrite. Which is true. So when you’re done with the book, this site has all kinds of witty stuff not in the book.

Have a great weekend.