Lab Girl
May 31, 2018
Every once in a while, I love a book. It’s even better when it’s a book I read almost by accident. And that’s what happened with Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren.
In a hurry, I grabbed the book from the library simply because the cover noted that it was a Politics and Prose (a wonderful independent bookstore) “Staff Pick”. I now know that it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 2016.
The book is about trees and plants (Jahren is a geo-biologist) and about the author's relationship with her lab partner and best friend Bill. She alternates between a few pages about her work (I will never look at a tree the same way) and a few pages about her life. She makes the science easy and the personal parts compelling. Her complicated story made me laugh out loud at times. At the same time, she captures the poignancy of her life and its challenges.
This blog does not pretend to be a book review, but sometimes you gotta share.