Lab Girl: A Memoir

4.4 | 9,766 ratings

Price: 15.75

Last update: 12-17-2024

About this item

National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Autobiography, 2016.

An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime collaboration, in work and in life; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see and think about the natural world.

Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she's studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book might have been a revelatory treatise on plant life. Lab Girl is that, but it is also so much more. Because in it, Jahren also shares with us her inspiring life story, in prose that takes your breath away.

Lab Girl is a book about work, about love, and about the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren's remarkable stories: about the things she's discovered in her lab as well as how she got there; about her childhood - hours of unfettered play in her father's laboratory; about how she found a sanctuary in science and learned to perform lab work "with both the heart and the hands"; about a brilliant and wounded man named Bill, who became her loyal colleague and best friend; about their adventurous, sometimes rogue research trips, which take them from the Midwest all across the United States and over the Atlantic, from the ever-light skies of the North Pole to tropical Hawaii; and about her constant striving to do and be the best she could, never allowing personal or professional obstacles to cloud her dedication to her work.

Jahren's probing look at plants, her astonishing tenacity of spirit, and her insights on nature enliven every minute of this book. Lab Girl allows us to see with clear eyes the beautiful, sophisticated mechanisms within every leaf, blade of grass, and flower petal and the power within ourselves to face - with bravery and conviction - life's ultimate challenge: discovering who we are.

SassyPants

A unique and engaging memoir

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2018

This is not typical of a book I would read, but it received excellent reviews and I was interested to read about a female scientist from rural Minnesota. For someone who is trained in scientific writing, Dr. Jahren is a damn fine writer of prose for the general public! I wish she had been one of my science teachers in college because she writes about plant life and evolution in a way that I actually understood and found interesting. The book chapters cleverly alternate between information about trees that foreshadow the next chapter about the author’s life.

Hope Jahren is born in rural Minnesota to a difficult mother and a father who teaches science at a local college. She spends much of her childhood in her father’s lab and she is encouraged to explore and learn. Unfortunately, her upbringing does not prepare her for social relationships an the world at large. She receives her doctorate from Berkeley, where she also meets her lifelong friend and lab partner Bill. They have a unique, hard to define, but totally accepting relationship. Dr. Jahren takes Bill with her to Georgia and her first teaching and research job. They traverse the US and ultimately end up in Norway. Along the way, she marries, has a son, and faces her own mental demons. All while she comes into her own as a scientist.

The biology lessons were wonderful and easy to understand. The book is a fascinating look into the dedication, tenacity, and humor required to achieve your goals. I enjoyed this book tremendously! I learned things and I will also have a new appreciation for the trees and plants in my yard and my community.

B. Case

Focuses on a two-decade-long symbiotic scientific partnership between the author and her lab assistant

Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2016

I was drawn to this book after reading a short biographical sketch of Hope Jahren in Time magazine’s special edition of “The 100 Most Influential People.” I’d never heard of this prize-winning scientist before and wanted to know more about her. In the article, she was headlined as being “science’s great communicator.” That stunning phrase sold me: I just had to buy her book. There is nothing I love better than to read brilliant science authored by an accomplished academic who also writes eloquently.

The book took me two days to finish and held my interest throughout. But in the end, the book was as equally fascinating as it was disappointing. It also left me frustrated. Let me explain.

The memoir takes up perhaps two thirds of the text, but interspersed throughout are many small chapters, each illuminating some small facet of botany. Virtually every one of these life-science essays was exquisitely written and intellectually enchanting. I loved them! In many ways they reminded me of some of the best science writing of E. O. Wilson. I would definitely buy another book by Jahren that was focused on some popular aspect of geology, chemistry, or botany. These essays were five-star gems…but this book is not getting five stars because those essays only formed a minor part.

As charmed as I was by the book’s botany essays, I was disenchanted (and frustrated) with the biographical chapters. In my view, all lives are fascinating if you scratch deep enough, and Jahren’s life was, indeed, very interesting. But what this author seemed to lack is any deep psychological perception about herself. In so many ways, Jahren seemed like a stranger to her own emotional and psychological landscape. I found that startlingly odd in a woman who was otherwise so incredibly brilliant. I always wanted her to take me deeper, but instead she generally just followed the action. Sometimes her vignettes were intriguing, sometimes amusing, sometimes downright silly (revealing youthful immaturity, lack of judgment, and inexperience)…and a few times, they were bit too technical for my general interest.

Her memoir consisted of a disjointed grouping of chronological stories selected from her life. At the end, the author reveals that she had chosen most of the stories because she and her lab partner, Bill, often reminded each other about them and took great joy in talking about them. If these stories amused the two of them, she was sure they would amuse others…including the reading public.

The stories come from the author’s day-to-day academic experience as a research geochemist and geobiologist. But taken together as a group, the stories actually celebrate the history of her extremely odd, two-decade-long relationship with her lab assistant, Bill. As a whole, the stories puzzled me more than they entertained or amused me…and by the end, the man and their relationship remained more of an enigma than anything else.

“People still puzzle over the two of us, Bill and me. Are we siblings? Soul mates? Comrades? Novitiates? Accomplices? We eat almost every meal together, our finances are mixed, and we tell each other everything. We travel together, work together, finish each other’s sentences, and have risked our lives for each other.”

In the end, I found the book incredibly frustrating. There was so much more I wanted to know, but the author never took me there…never revealed those aspects of her life…or those feelings in her heart! Was she guarding them or was she unaware of them? Frankly, I don’t know.

hylactor

Plants are not like us, yet we share a place to live with them. A fantastic and timely read.

Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2016

"Lab Girl" is made up of short and seemingly only loosely connected narratives. However, the reader quickly finds out that the short chapters are connected in so many different ways. Some people want a more detailed memoir, but I like her dry sense of humor and irony, and I am glad she is not giving me every little detail of her life. The facts described are carefully chosen instead to provide the reader with food for thought.

For me, the most interesting theme in the book concerns plants and our relation to them: they represent a form of life fundamentally different from how we live. They are so different (and Jahren does a good job of giving us some science without giving us too many details) that it is hard for us even to imagine what it is like being a plant. In order to imagine how a plant lives, we risk lending it too many human qualities and thus making the very difference disappear that we are trying to imagine. I think Jahren does a good job of explaining their difference yet trying to bring us closer to them, without making it seem too touchy-feely, without anthropomorphizing plants too much. Plants are so different from us (humans, animals), yet we share the same earth, which is hugely significant. Her book suggests that thinking about plants makes us rethink who we are, which I find a very original and richly compelling idea.

The discussions of plant biology tie in nicely with the personal aspects of her narrative. I especially like the reflections on living on the brink of homelessness --both in the case of people (scientists) and plants (the kudzu). Today, we need to think more about the fact that our resources are limited--just as are those of trees and plants. On top of this, what she has to say about women in science, women's relationship to their bodies (which they can forget less easily than men can in our modern society) and, last but not least, living with mental illness are also pretty stimulating and timely.

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