Lab Girl
Hope Jahren, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101873724
Summary
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. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more.
Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together.
It is told through Jahren’s remarkable stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”; and about the inevitable disappointments, but also the triumphs and exhilarating discoveries, of scientific work.
Yet at the core of this book is the story of a relationship Jahren forged with a brilliant, wounded man named Bill, who becomes her lab partner and best friend. Their sometimes rogue adventures in science take them from the Midwest across the United States and back again, over the Atlantic to the ever-light skies of the North Pole and to tropical Hawaii, where she and her lab currently make their home.
Jahren’s probing look at plants, her astonishing tenacity of spirit, and her acute insights on nature enliven every page of this extraordinary book. Lab Girl opens your eyes to the beautiful, sophisticated mechanisms within every leaf, blade of grass, and flower petal.
Here is an eloquent demonstration of what can happen when you find the stamina, passion, and sense of sacrifice needed to make a life out of what you truly love, as you discover along the way the person you were meant to be. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth— September 27, 1969
• Where—Austin, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.S., University of Minnesota; Ph.D, University of California-Berkeley
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Manoa, Hawaii
Hope Jahren is an American geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Hawaii, known for her work using stable isotope analysis to analyze fossil forests dating to the Eocene. She has won many prestigious awards in the field, including the James B. Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union. Her book Lab Girl (2016) has been applauded as both "a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world" and a literary fusion of memoir and science writing.
Early life and education
Jahren was born in Austin, Minnesota. Her father taught a physics and earth science at a community college and encouraged her play in the laboratory. Her mother, a student of English literature, nurtured in her daughter a love of reading.
Jahren completed her undergraduate education in geology at the University of Minnesota, graduating cum laude in 1991. She earned her Ph.D in 1996 at the University of California-Berkeley in the field of soil science. Her dissertation covered the formation of biominerals in plants and used novel stable isotope methods to examine the processes.
Career and research
From 1996 to 1999, she was an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she conducted pioneering research on paleoatmospheres using fossilized plants. She discovered the second methane hydrate release event that occurred 117 million years ago.
From 1999 to 2008, worked at Johns Hopkins University where she received media attention for her work with the fossil forests of Axel Heiberg Island in Canada's Arctic Ocean. Her studies of the trees allowed her to estimate the environmental conditions on the island 45 million years ago. She and her collaborators analyzed depletion of oxygen isotopes to determine the weather patterns there that allowed large Metasequoia forests to flourish during the Eocene.
Her research at Johns Hopkins also included the first extraction and analysis of DNA found in paleosol (old soil) and the first discovery of stable isotopes existing in a multicellular organism's DNA.
Jahren is currently a full professor at the University of Hawaii. Her research there focuses on using stable isotope analysis to determine characteristics of the environment on different timescales.
Honors and awards
Jahren has received three Fulbright Awards: in 1992 for geology work conducted in Norway, in 2003 for environmental science work conducted in Denmark, and in 2010 for arctic science work conducted in Norway.
In 2001, Jahren won the Donath Medal, awarded by the Geological Society of America. In 2005, she was awarded the Macelwane Medal, becoming the first woman and fourth scientist overall to win both the Macelwane Medal and the Donath Medal. Jahren was profiled by Popular Science magazine in 2006 as one of its "Brilliant 10" scientists. She was a 2013 Leopold Fellow at Stanford University's Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Support for science awareness
Jahren is an advocate in raising public awareness of science. Her interview on MSNBC credits her as one of many scientist working to lift the stereotype surrounding women and girls in science.
She happened upon #ManicureMondays after a laboratory incident, and decided to share it with fellow scientists through a tweet. Seventeen magazine originally came up with the idea, but focused mainly on manicured and painted fingernails. Jahren decided that she wanted to share what she thought was fun, important and most of all involved the use of her hands. She encouraged fellow scientist; specifically girls to tweet pictures of their hands conducting scientific experiments. The idea was to raise awareness of science research as well as of women working in science.
In addition to her deep appreciation of the joys of science Jahren has written compellingly about the sexual harassment of women in science. She recommends that people draw strong professional boundaries, and that they carefully document what occurs, beginning with the first occasion of harassment.
Personal
Jahren is married to Clint Conrad, a fellow scientist. They live in Manoa, Hawaii, and have a son. Their dog Coco is the 2nd place Amateur long-jump Dockdog in the state of Hawaii. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/17/2016.)
Visit the author's blog.
Book Reviews
This book is an embarrassment of riches; Hope Jahren is a gifted botanist as well as a gifted writer. In Lab Girl the reader gets to experience the stressful, competitive world of a research scientist trying to survive in academia while also navigating becoming a wife and eventually a mother, all while managing what is often a debilitating mental illness.… This is a book you won’t want to miss — her blog is every bit as entertaining and well written as Lab Girl; you can find her at hopejahrensurecanwrite.com. READ MORE …
Cara Kless - LitLovers
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 engrossing new memoir, Lab Girl, 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.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Large numbers amaze; numbers of large numbers amaze even more. Cognitive neuroscience can explain why…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.... Jahren's literary bent renders dense material digestible, and lyrical, in fables that parallel personal history.... [She] deliver[s] a gratifying and often moving chronicle of the scientist's life.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson - New York Times Book Review
Jahren grew up in small-town Minnesota, playing in her father’s science lab and laboring in her mother’s garden. Her first book invites readers to fall in love, as she did, with science and plants. The award-winning scientist travels the world studying trees with her best friend and lab partner, and finds refuge from life’s conflicts in the lab. "There I transformed from a girl into a scientist, just like Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man, only kind of backward," she writes.
Jennifer Maloney - Wall Street Journal
A scientific memoir that’s beautifully human. Jahren, a geochemist, botanist and geobiologist, has spent the better part of the past two decades studying the secret lives of plants. Part memoir, part biology text, part criticism of the status quo of the scientific community, Lab Girl reminds us that, in ways, we are strikingly like our blossoming brethren. Lab Girl is anything but technical. 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 protege and lab manager, Bill.
Melissa Cronin - Popular Science
Warm, witty.... Lab Girl is her recounting of the near half century of adventures, setbacks, and detours that brought her from there to here. 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.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly
Deeply affecting.... a totally original work, both fierce and uplifting: a biologist’s natural history of her subjects, and herself. In Lab Girl, pioneering geobiologist Jahren limns her journey [from] insecure young scientist [to] medals and professional and personal fulfillment. Jahren recognized as an undergrad that science would be her true home—a place of safety, warmth, and light [where] she could be part of something larger than herself. A belletrist in the mold of Oliver Sacks, she is terrific at showing just how science is done. But her prose reaches another dimension when she describes her remarkable relationship with a lab guy, an undergraduate loner named Bill.... Jahren’s writing is precise, as befits a scientist who also loves words. She’s an acute observer, prickly—and funny as hell.
Elizabeth Royte - Elle
(Starred review.) Jahren...recounts her unfolding journey to discover “what it’s like to be a plant” in this darkly humorous, emotionally raw, and exquisitely crafted memoir.... 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.) 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. —Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.... The author's tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and [her lab partner] 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.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're made available. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Lab Girl...then take off on your own:
1. How did Jahren's upbringing help determine her dedication to science? Consider her father's background as a science teacher and her mother's love of English literature.
2. One of the literary tropes Jahren uses in her memoir is the comparison of plant life with human life. Talk about the parallels she draws between her subjects and herself. In what ways are we all similar to our rooted, blossoming brethren? Do you see those parallels in your own life?
3. What do you find most remarkable in Jahren's descriptions of the wonders of the natural world? Consider, for instance, the sheer numbers of the plant world. Or how the willow tree clones itself...or the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi...or the airborne signals of trees in their perennial war against insects.
4. Talk about Jahren's struggle with manic depression and how it has affected her life and work.
5. How would you describe Jahren's relationship with her lab partner Bill? What makes both professional and personal relationship work?
6. Describe some of the hardships that make life difficult for any scientist — bucking the status quo, the often endless waiting for results, the grunt work, or the scarcity of funding. Also, talk about the masculine culture Jahren faced as a woman scientist.
7. Will you ever take a tree—or any plant life—for granted again?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Rebecca Traister, 2016
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476716565
Summary
In 2009, the award-winning journalist Rebecca Traister started All the Single Ladies—a book she thought would be a work of contemporary journalism—about the twenty-first century phenomenon of the American single woman.
It was the year the proportion of American women who were married dropped below fifty percent; and the median age of first marriages, which had remained between twenty and twenty-two years old for nearly a century (1890–1980), had risen dramatically to twenty-seven.
But over the course of her vast research and more than a hundred interviews with academics and social scientists and prominent single women, Traister discovered a startling truth: the phenomenon of the single woman in America is not a new one.
And historically, when women were given options beyond early heterosexual marriage, the results were massive social change—temperance, abolition, secondary education, and more.
Today, only twenty percent of Americans are wed by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960. The Population Reference Bureau calls it a "dramatic reversal." All the Single Ladies is a remarkable portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the single American woman.
Covering class, race, sexual orientation, and filled with vivid anecdotes from fascinating contemporary and historical figures, All the Single Ladies is destined to be a classic work of social history and journalism.
Exhaustively researched, brilliantly balanced, and told with Traister’s signature wit and insight, this book should be shelved alongside Gail Collins’s When Everything Changed. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1975
• Raised—near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Rebecca Traister is a senior writer at Salon.com, where she has covered women in media, politics, and entertainment since 2003. She covered, with much attention and acclaim, the 2008 campaign from a feminist (and personal) perspective. She received a huge response to her pieces on Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, the media’s coverage of the candidates, and the role of women within the media. Her first book Big Girls Don't Cry is the result. It makes sense of this moment in American history, in which women broke barriers and changed the country’s narrative in completely unexpected ways.
Traister's 2016 New York Times' best-seller All the Single Ladies has been met with wide critical acclaim, leaving the Boston Globe proclaiming "We're better off reading Rebecca Traister on women, politics, and America than pretty much anyone else." Today, only twenty percent of Americans are wed by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960. The Population Reference Bureau calls this a "dramatic reversal."
All the Single Ladies is a remarkable portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the single American woman. Covering class, race, sexual orientation, and filled with vivid anecdotes from fascinating contemporary and historical figures, All the Single Ladies is destined to be a classic work of social history and journalism. Exhaustively researched, brilliantly balanced, and told with Traister’s signature wit and insight, this book explores the rise of the unmarried woman as a political and cultural force.
At the podium, Traister shares her first-person account of being a young woman navigating this turbulent and exciting time while keeping track of the modernization of the women's movement and the explosion of a new generation of feminism. She explains how—thanks to the campaigns of Clinton and Palin, and the history-making work and visibility of Michelle Obama, Tina Fey, and Rachel Maddow, Katie Couric, and others—America got a powerful view of the ways and directions in which roles for women had expanded in the forty years since the second wave, as well as the limitations that remained.
An in demand speaker, Traister speaks regularly at prominent national events, including on panels at the EMILY’s List annual gathering, NARAL events, among other women’s organizations, and at events surrounding the Democratic National Convention. She is perfect for universities, town halls, in addition to other conventions, conferences, and organizations looking for an intelligent and contemporary take on feminism and its evolution in politics, media, entertainment, and society at large.
Traister has also written for a range of national publications, including a profile of a trip to Africa with Bill Clinton for Elle, the New York Times, Vogue, and a profile on Rachel Maddow for the Nation. She has appeared on CNN, CNN Headline News, MSNBC, NPR’s Brian Lehrer Show, and other TV and radio outlets.
Traister started out in the media as an entry level assistant at Talk magazine, and then as a fact checker at the New York Observer, where she soon became the most unwilling gossip columnist in the history of New York nightlife, before reporting on the film industry in the city. In 2003, she moved to Salon.com, where she had been hired as the Life section’s staff writer. She wound up writing so many stories from a feminist point of view that soon her beat simply became about women.
Traister was raised outside Philadelphia, where she attended Quaker high school, and then went on to major in American Studies at Northwestern University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York City. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Traister brings a welcome balance of critique and personal reflection to a conversation that is often characterize more by moral policing than honest discussion.... Perhaps one of the most important aspects of [her] narrative is her acknowledgement that the experiences of single women are far from identical.... An informative and thought-provoking book for anyone--not just the single ladies—who want to gain a greater understanding of this pivotal moment in the history of the United States.
Gillian B. White - New York Times Book Review
[I]mpressively well researched...it's the personal narratives drawn from more than 100 interviews...that make the book not just an informative read but also an entirely engaging one.... Some of what's covered in the book is already well-trod ground...but the exemplary framework of cultural inclusion, the personal candor and palpable desire to lift up each and every one of us, is what makes All the Single Ladies a singularly triumphant work of women.
Rebecca Carroll - Los Angeles Times
[Traister is] one of the nation’s smartest and most provocative feminist voices.... All the Single Ladies is a multifaceted endeavor. Bringing together US history and life in this 21st century, through data, interviews, and an enormous stack of reading and viewing material,...Traister produces an invigorating defense of a demographic too often criticized and caricatured, rather than recognized for its profound effect on American society
Rebecca Steintz - Boston Globe
The enormous accomplishment of Traister's book is to show that the ranks of women electing for nontraditional lives...have also improved the lots of women who make traditional choices...This rich portrait of our most quietly explosive social force makes it clear that the ladies still have plenty of work to do.
slate
Wonderfully inclusive, examining single women from all walks of life—working-, middle-, and upper-class women; women of color and white women; queer and straight ones…With All the Single Ladies she brings her trademark intelligence and wit to bear.
Roxanne Gay - Elle
Incorporating a lively slew of perspectives of single ladies past and present, Traister....sticks to her central argument that the world is changing and policies need to catch up to the social reality. The result is an invigorating study of single women in America with refreshing insight into the real life of the so-called spinster.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This fast-paced, fascinating book will draw in fans of feminism, social sciences, and U.S. history.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Exploring all aspects of single life—social, economic, racial, and sexual—Traister’s comprehensive volume, sure to be vigorously discussed, is truly impressive in scope and depth while always managing to be eminently readable and thoughtful.
Booklist
A feminist journalist argues that single women, who now outnumber married women in the United States, are changing society in major ways.... An easy read with lots of good anecdotes, a dose of history, and some surprising statistics, but its focus on one segment of one generation of single women is a drawback.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for All the Single Ladies...then take off on your own:
1. If you are a single woman, does this book resonate with you? If married, does it?
2. Why, according to Rebecca Traister, has the resistance to independent women been so intense? She compares the growth of single womanhood as powerful as the sexual revolution and abolition of slavery. Do you agree—in other words, does Traister make a convincing case?
3. How does Traister draw distinctions between privileged women (uwually white) and underprivileged women (usually women of color)? How, for instance does each subset of women view the role of work in their lives?
4. Do you agree with Traister's assessment that one of the "unacknowledged truths of female life is that women's primary, foundational, formative relations are as likely to be with each other as they are with men"? is that true for you or for other women you know? Is it true of men, as well?
4. Is marriage still the end goal for most women...or not? What does Traister think...and what do you think, on both a personal and cultural level?
5. Talk about one of the book's major premises—that the rise of the median age for a woman's first marriage, which has risen to 27, has had a momentous effect on the American cultural landscape.
6. Traister examines the lives of unmarried women throughout history who worked as abolitionists, fought for voting rights, who wrote for a living, or even ran countries. Which profiles do you find most interesting or most impressive?
7. How did literature once treat unmarried women (e.g., Wharton's Lily Bart or Dickens's Miss Havisham)? How are they treated in today's media (e.g., Sex and the City, Damages, or Scandal?)
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape
Peggy Orenstein, 2016
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062209726
Summary
A clear-eyed picture of the new sexual landscape girls face in the post-princess stage—high school through college—and reveals how they are negotiating it.
A generation gap has emerged between parents and their girls. Even in this age of helicopter parenting, the mothers and fathers of tomorrow’s women have little idea what their daughters are up to sexually or how they feel about it.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with over seventy young women and a wide range of psychologists, academics, and experts, renowned journalist Peggy Orenstein goes where most others fear to tread, pulling back the curtain on the hidden truths, hard lessons, and important possibilities of girls’ sex lives in the modern world.
While the media has focused—often to sensational effect—on the rise of casual sex and the prevalence of rape on campus, in Girls and Sex Peggy Orenstein brings much more to the table.
She examines the ways in which porn and all its sexual myths have seeped into young people’s lives; what it means to be the "the perfect slut," and why many girls scorn virginity; the complicated terrain of hookup culture and the unfortunate realities surrounding assault.
In Orenstein’s hands these issues are never reduced to simplistic "truths;" rather, her powerful reporting opens up a dialogue on a potent, often silent, subtext of American life today—giving readers comprehensive and in-depth information with which to understand, and navigate, this complicated new world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 1961
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College
• Awards—(see Recognition below)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California
Peggy Orenstein is an American essayist and author of nonfiction books. A native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, she attended Oberlin College where she earned a B.A.
After college, she moved to New York City, where she worked as an associate editor at "Esquire," later acquiring senior editing positions at Manhattan, Inc. and 7 Days. In 1988, after moving to San Francisco, California, she became managing editor of Mother Jones and, in 1991, a writer and producer at Farallon Films. She is married to filmmaker Steven Okazaki. They have a daughter and live in San Francisco's Bay Area.
Books
♦ 2020 - Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
♦ 2016 - Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape
♦ 2011 - Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl
Culture
♦ 2007 - Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother
♦ 2000 - Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World
♦ 1994 - Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap
Other
A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, Orenstein has also written for the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Elle, More, Mother Jones, Slate, O: The Oprah Magazine, New York Magazine and The New Yorker.
She has contributed commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered. Her articles have been anthologized multiple times, including in The Best American Science Writing.
She has been a keynote speaker at numerous colleges and conferences and has been featured on, among other programs, Nightline, Good Morning America, Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air and Morning Edition and CBC’s As It Happens.
Recognition
In 2012, Columbia Journalism Review named Orentstein one of its "40 women who changed the media business in the past 40 years."
She has been recognized for her "Outstanding Coverage of Family Diversity," by the Council on Contemporary Families and received a Books For A Better Life Award for Waiting for Daisy. Her work has also been honored by the Commonwealth Club of California, the National Women’s Political Caucus of California and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Additionally, she has been awarded fellowships from the United States-Japan Foundation and the Asian Cultural Council. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/3/2016 .)
Book Reviews
[T]hought-provoking….The interesting question at the heart of Girls & Sex is not really whether things are better or worse for girls. It's why—at a time when women graduate from college at higher rates than men and are closing the wage gap—aren't young women more satisfied with their most intimate relationships? "When so much has changed for girls in the public realm," Orenstein writes, "why hasn't more…changed in the private one?"
Cindi Leive - New York Times Book Review
(Starred review.) [A]n eye-opening, sometimes horrifying look at sex for today’s girls and young adults.... In this smart, earnest, and timely assessment, Orenstein urges frank, open communication...declaring it the best way to encourage girls and boys to make safe, healthy decisions.
Publishers Weekly
[A]ccessible prose and narrative style will bring the work of many thoughtful experts to a wider audience.... While this book largely documents our systemic failure to support young women's sexual thriving, the final chapters point toward potential solutions, including an important reminder that men and boys must be included in any successful intervention. —Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. Lib., Boston
Library Journal
Sex and teenagers have always gone together, but parents reading Orenstein’s frank exploration of current trends may still be in for a shock…. This isn’t a comfortable book to read (Orenstein herself admits twinges a few times), but it’s an important one.
Booklist
[A]n eye-opening study of the way that girls and women in America think, feel, and act regarding sex.... What she discovered was both intriguing and highly disturbing.... Ample, valuable information on the way young women in America perceive and react to their sexual environment.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider using these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Girls & Sex...and take off on your own:
1. Orenstein finds the contraries in the beliefs held by today's young women: the dismissal of male patriarchy coupled with the desire for male sexual approval. How do you, or any woman, align those divergent views?
2. The teenaged girl get ready for a date in her college dorm tells Orenstein that her desire for the night "is to be just slutty enough, where you're not a prude but you're not a whore." What do you think of her attitude toward sex? It's modern, but is it freeing...is it healthy...is it empowering? Is it moral? What is the difference between "slutty" and a "whore"? What is the perfect slut?
3. Follow-up Question to 2: How did the young woman, a college economics major with, presumably, a fair amount of intelligence, come to acquire her attitudes toward sex and "getting attention from guys"?
4. Talk about the "hookup culture." Why does Orenstein find it so disturbing--aside from the fact that she doesn't want to appear judgmental? And that begs the question about the rightness or wrongness of "judging" our children's behavior. What do you think?
5. Why aren't women more satisfied with their intimate relationships, especially given the fact that they're graduating at a higher rate than men and closing the wage gap? In other words, they're finding success in the public sphere...why not in the private one?
6. What affect does pornography have on male expectations?
7. Is taking your clothes off a sign of empowerment or self-determination? One young woman tells Orenstein, "I love Beyonce. She’s, like, a queen. But I wonder, if she wasn’t so beautiful, if people didn’t think she was so sexy, would she be able to make the feminist points she makes?" What's your opinion?
8. How does Orenstein feel about abstinence-only sex-ed programs? Should sex education be left to parents?
9. Talk about the role of alcohol in the youth culture.
10. What would be the ideal sexual code appropriate for today's young women...and men? How could we go about, as a society, promulgating it?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime feel free to use these, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Dimestore: A Writer's Life
Lee Smith, 2016
Algonquin Books
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616205027
Summary
For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For forty-five years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story.
Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy’s dimestore. It was in that dimestore—listening to customers and inventing adventures for the store’s dolls—that she became a storyteller.
Even when she was sent off to college to earn some “culture,” she understood that perhaps the richest culture she might ever know was the one she was driving away from—and it’s a place that she never left behind.
Dimestore’s fifteen essays are crushingly honest, wise and perceptive, and superbly entertaining. Smith has created both a moving personal portrait and a testament to embracing one’s heritage. It’s also an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 1, 1944
• Where—Grundy, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A. Hollins College
• Awards—O. Henry Award (twice) (more below)
• Currently—lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina
Lee Smith is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
Early life and education
Lee Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, less than 10 miles from the Kentucky border. The Smith home sat on Main Street, and the Levisa Fork River ran just behind it. Her mother, Gig, was a college graduate who had come to Grundy to teach school. Her father, Ernest, was the owner and operator of a Ben Franklin store in Grundy.
Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing—and selling, for a nickel apiece—stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers."
After spending her last two years of high school at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, Virginia, Smith enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke. She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well-known essayist and novelist) became go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs. In 1966, her senior year at Hollins, Smith submitted an early draft of a coming-of-age novel to a Book-of-the-Month Club contest and was awarded one of twelve fellowships. Two years later, that novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed (1968), became Smith's first published work of fiction.
Following her graduation from Hollins, Smith married James Seay, a poet and teacher, whom she accompanied from university to university as his teaching assignments changed. They had two sons. In 1981, however, the marriage broke up, and she accepted a teaching job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she taught for many years. In 1985, by then divorced from Seay, married journalist Hal Crowther. The couple currently lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Writing
Since 1968, Smith has published fifteen novels, as well as four collections of short stories, and has received eight major writing awards including the Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature in 2013.
Novels
1968 - The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed
1971 - Something in the Wind
1980 - Black Mountain Breakdown
1983 - Oral History
1985 - Family Linen
1988 - Fair and Tender Ladies
1992 - The Devil's Dream
1995 - Saving Grace
1996 - The Christmas Letters
2003 - The Last Girls
2006 - On Agate Hill
2013 - Guests on Earth
Short story collections
1981 - Cakewalk
1990 - Me and My Baby View the Eclipse
1997 - News of the Spirit
2010 - Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
Memoir
2016 - Dimestore: A Writer’s Life
Recognition
Smith has received numerous writing awards, including the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Mercy University Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature (the first recipient.) (Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/30/2016.)
Book Reviews
[H]eartwarming…. Dimestore shares the habits that may have saved Smith from her own tendency to get too “wrought up,” one of which was to approach storytelling “the way other people write in their journals,” in order to make it through the night. Fiction became her lifelong outlet, a means of sustaining and reaffirming the connection to her work, as well as a way to preserve the rich mountain culture she so loved as a child.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dimestore may prove to be a work that connects wildly with readers. Because truth is often more powerful than fiction, and because the tale she has actually lived so far to tell is rendered keenly, irrepressibly and without self-pity. Lee Smith, the person, emerges as one of nonfiction’s great protagonists.
Raleigh News & Observer
Now, at last, we have Dimestore: A Writer’s Life, a seasoned, open-hearted memoir…. Yes, Lee Smith is a writer, and without that, we probably would not have this engrossing memoir. But at heart, Lee Smith is a woman – openhearted, spirited, humble – and it is those qualities especially that inspire and make us glad as we read.
Charlotte Observer
[P]rofoundly readable.... Like her novels, Smith’s memoir is intimate, as though writer and reader are sitting together on a front-porch swing. She writes in the rich vernacular of her youth. Smith’s details are so piercingly remembered, so vividly set on the page, that I felt wrapped in a great blanket of familiarity. Her memoir is a warm, poignant read about a lost time and place, a love of books and a celebration of the quirks and oddities of home.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
[E]ntertaining and poignant collection of Southern memories.... Throughout it all, Smith weaves in her candid observations on the changing South and how she developed into a Southern writer, spurred on by the likes of Eudora Welty.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Smith at her finest. There is not one false note in the book....wonderful...filled with tenderness, compassion, love, and humor.... [H]ighly recommended for....readers who are interested in the changes in small-town America.
Library Journal
Candid and unsentimental, Smith's book sheds light on her beginnings as writer while revealing her resilience and personal transformations over the course of a remarkable lifetime. A warm, poignant memoir from a reliably smooth voice.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start discussion for Dimestore...and then take off on your own:
1. As a child, Lee Smith dreamed of being in the South of France, drawing on a cigarette, "hollow-cheeked and haunted." How do childhood dreams inspire a life? Have you ever had such dreams...and followed them...or wanted to?
2. Talk about Lee's family. How, for example, did Lee's mother's own upbringing clash with her daughter's tendency to accept and blend into the culture of southwest Virginian?
3. Trace Lee Smith's journey as a writer, who when told to write what she knew, thought, "All I knew was that I was not going to write about Grundy, Va., ever, that was for sure." How did she reverse that decision and come to embrace her heritage?
4. Follow-up to Question 3: Describe Lee's growing up years. Would you consider them idyllic? How did her youthful experiences come to shape her writing?
5. Talk, especially, about the dolls in her father's store and the way she invented "long, complicated life stories for them." Consider, too, the role of the one-way mirror through which she watched customers. What did it teach her about writing?
6. What the impact did other Southern writers have on Lee's development as a writer: Faulkner, Styron, Welty and Sill. How did she begin to see her own life in Grundy, Virginia, as "stories"?
7. What role does mental illness play in Lee's family life?
8. In what way did fiction became an outlet for Smith, a habit that saved her from getting "too wrought up." How did her writing eventually became an affirmation of life in Grundy and a way to preserve the mountain culture?
9. Lee says that "most of us are always searching, through our work and in our lives: for meaning, for love, for home." Is that the role of writers...to help us understand where we come from?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime use these, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Carlo Rovelli, 2015 (2016, U.S.)
Penguin Books
96 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399184413
Summary
The international bestseller that reveals all the beauty of modern physics in seven short and enlightening lessons.
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is a book about the joy of discovery.
Carlo Rovelli brings a playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics, offering surprising—and surprisingly easy to grasp—explanations of Einstein's general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world.
He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, back to the origins of the cosmos, and into the workings of our minds.
"Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world," Rovelli writes. "And it’s breathtaking." (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 3, 1956
• Where—Verona, Italy
• Education—B.S., M.S. University of Bologna; Ph.D., University of Padova
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Marseille, France
Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist and writer who has worked in Italy and the USA, and currently works in France. His work is mainly in the field of quantum gravity, where he is among the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory. He has also worked in the history and philosophy of science.
Academia
In 1981, Rovelli graduated with a BS and MS in Physics from the University of Bologna, and in 1986 he obtained his PhD at the University of Padova, Italy. Rovelli refused military service, which was compulsory in Italy at the time, and was therefore briefly detained in 1987.
He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Rome, Trieste, and at Yale University. Rovelli was on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh from 1990 to 2000 where, although now in France, he continues to hold the post of Affilated Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
Currently, Rovelli works in the Centre de Physique Theorique at Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France. He is the first president of the Samy Maroun Center for Quantam Physics founded in 2014.
Loop quantum gravity
In 1988, Carlo Rovelli, Lee Smolin, and Abhay Ashtekar introduced a theory of quantum gravity called loop quantum gravity. In 1995, Rovelli and Smolin obtained a basis of states of quantum gravity, labelled by Penrose's spin networks, and using this basis they were able to show that the theory predicts that area and volume are quantized. This result indicates the existence of a discrete structure of space at very small scale.
In 1997, Rovelli and Michael Reisenberger introduced a "sum over surfaces" formulation of theory, which has since evolved into the currently covariant "spinfoam" version of loop quantum gravity. In 2008, in collaboration with Jonathan Engle and Roberto Pereira, he introduced the spin foam vertex amplitude which is the basis of the current definition of the loop quantum gravity covariant dynamics. The loop theory is today considered a candidate for a quantum theory of gravity. It finds applications in quantum cosmology, spinfoam cosmology, and quantum black hole physics.
Physics without time
In his 2004 book Quantum Gravity, Rovelli developed a formulation of classical and quantum mechanics that does not make explicit reference to the notion of time. The timeless formalism is needed to describe the world in the regimes where the quantum properties of the gravitational field cannot be disregarded. This is because the quantum fluctuation of spacetime itself make the notion of time unsuitable for writing physical laws in the conventional form of evolution laws in time.
This position has led him to face the following problem: if time is not part of the fundamental theory of the world, then how does time emerge? In 1993, in collaboration with Alain Connes, Rovelli has proposed a solution to this problem called the thermal time hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, time emerges only in a thermodynamic or statistical context. If this is correct, the flow of time is an illusion, one deriving from the incompleteness of knowledge.
Relational quantum mechanics
In 1994, Rovelli introduced the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, based on the idea that the quantum state of a system must always be interpreted relative to another physical system (like the "velocity of an object" is always relative to another object, in classical mechanics). The idea has been developed and analyzed in particular by Bas van Fraassen and by Michel Bitbol. Among other important consequences, it provides a solution of the EPR paradox that does not violate locality.
History and philosophy of science
Rovelli has written a book on the Greek philosopher Anaximander, published in France, Italy, US, and Brazil. The book analyses the main aspects of scientific thinking and articulates Rovelli's views on science. Anaximander is presented in the book as a main initiator of scientific thinking.
For Rovelli, science is a continuous process of exploring novel possible views of the world; this happens via a "learned rebellion," which always builds and relies on previous knowledge but at the same time continuously questions aspects of this received knowledge. The foundation of science, therefore, is not certainty but the very opposite, a radical uncertainty about our own knowledge, or equivalently, an acute awareness of the extent of our ignorance.
Religious views
In his book on Anaximander, Rovelli argues that the conflict between science and religion is ultimately unsolvable, because (most) religions demand acceptance of some absolute truths, while scientific thinking is based on constant questioning of any truth. Thus, for Rovelli the source of the conflict is the acceptance of ignorance as the basis of science versus religion's claims that it is the repository of certainty.
Popular writings
2006 - What Is Time, What Is Space? (Di Renzo, Editore)
2011 - The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy
2014 - A Journey into Loop Quantum Gravity and the History of the Main Underlying Ideas
2015 - Seven Brief Lessons of Physics
Recognition
1995 - Int'l. Xanthopoulos Award, Int'l. Society for General Relativity and Gravitation
2009 - First Prize, FQXi Contest—The Nature of Time
2013 - Second Prize, FQXi Contest—The Relation Between Physics and Information
Senior member, Institut Universitaire de France
Member, Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences
Honorary member, Accademia di Scienze Arti e Lettere di Verona
Honorary Professor, Beijing Normal University (China
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/20/2016.)
Book Reviews
The writing is elegant and poetic, and Carlo's explanatory clarity is compelling. He organized this short book into seven lessons that introduce the non-specialized reader to the most fascinating questions about the universe, including how we learn about it.
NPR
Rovelli has a rare knack for conveying the top line of scientific theories in clear and compelling terms without succumbing to the lure of elaborate footnotes... a breath of fresh air.
Guardian (UK)
Brief but eloquent... The slim volume is stereotypically the province of poetry, but this beautifully designed little book shows that science, with its curiosity, its intense engagement with what there really is, its readiness to jettison received ways of seeing, is a kind of poetry too
Financial Times (UK)
A slim poetic meditation... Rovelli belongs to a great Italian tradition of one-culture science writing that encompasses the Roman poet Lucretius, Galileo, Primo Levi and Italo Calvino. The physics here is comprehensible and limpid, and Rovelli gives it an edge through his clear-eyed humanistic interpretations.
Independent (UK)
Bite-sized but big on ideas: Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics…makes the mysteries of the universe almost comprehensible.
Evening Standard (UK)
Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons on Physics has turned relativity and quantum physics into best-selling material.
la Repubblica
If you want to understand what gets physicists out of bed in the morning, there is no better guide than Rovelli.... Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is an absorbing, lovely book.... This is physics as romantic poetry and, by God, it’s beguiling
New Statesman
[Carlo Rovelli’s] concise and comprehensible writing makes sense of intricate notions such as general relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology and thermodynamics. Rovelli's enthusiastic and poetic descriptions communicate the essence of these topics without getting bogged down in details.
Scientific American
Physics has always been popularized, but professor Rovelli’s book is something else: his prose stands out as pristine and seductive at the same time, with all the substance that arouses a real interest in his readers.
Corriere della Sera
[E]nchanting.... [Rovelli] poses a Zen-like question…that leads to the book’s heart: he asserts that the study of infinitesimal particles and black holes is part of being human, and that the divide between science and the rest of learning is artificial.
Publishers Weekly
Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli, one of the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory…tells you everything you ever wanted to know about physics in under 100 pages. And it's fun, too.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli shares his thoughts on the broader scientific and philosophical implications of the great revolution that has taken place over the past century…. An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both scientists and general readers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Seven Brief Lessons on Physics...then take off on your own:
1. Rovelli deals with the most difficult issues of post-Newton physics: relativity, quantum physics, gravity, and much more. Consider each chapter at a time: which concepts do you find easiest to grasp...and which most difficult?
2. Overall, does Rovelli present these complex theories in a manner that lay people can understand? Where does he succeed, and where does he fall short?
3. Consider Rovelli's concept of time: it exists only when there is heat. Nothing in physics means "now"—time is only a matter of statistics. Do you grasp this esoteric idea of something we depend on in our personal lives...day by day, minute by minute? In other words how do you square Rovelli's cosmic idea of time with the concept of metrical time? Time based on entropy? Or on the earth's revolution around the sun? Einstein's time is bent by gravity. How does Rovelli's thermodynamic approach jibe with any of these concepts of time?
4. Discuss the concept of how one thing and its opposite can both be true at the same time. What other physics concepts fly in the face of "common sense"?
5. "The world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships," Rovelli writes. He seems to mean that everything exists only in its relationship to something else. Can you explain this more thoroughly, or find examples?
6. Rovelli says that studying physics is part of being human, that it is a way to connect us with ourselves as well as with the greater cosmos. Discuss what he means. Do you agree?
7. What are the new frontiers of physics? Where do physicists go from here according to Rovelli? Has science run up against a wall, as some physicists have worried? Or are there promises of new answers yet to come for some of the most stubborn scientific questions?
8. Talk about the book's last chapter, which encourages us to become more self-aware before it is too late. "All of our cousins are already extinct," Rovelli points out. What does he mean by self-awareness and what are the consequences of its lack? What do you take away from Rovelli's admonitions?
9. What does Rovelli have to say about free will?
10. Rovelli refers to physics as an adventure. Is it for you? Or is it a slog? Or is physics still something so arcane that it's nearly impossible for you to grasp? How have you come away from Seven Brief Lessons? Enlightened a lot? Enlightened somewhat? Or as befuddled as you were beforehand?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, feel free to use these, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)