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.
With Lab Girl, Jahren has taken the form of the memoir and done something remarkable with it. She’s made the experience of reading the book mimic her own lived experience in a way that few writers are capable of...
It’s a powerful and disarming way to tell a story, and I admire the craft behind it. Mostly, though, I love this book for its honesty, its hilarity and its brilliant sharp edges. Jahren has some serious literary chops to go along with all that science she gets up to. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Geochemist Hope Jahren writes with such flair that a reviewer is tempted to just move out of the way and quote her...Deft and flecked with humor, Lab Girl is also a hybrid — a scientist’s memoir of a quirky, gritty, fascinating life punctuated by mesmerizing dispatches on botany.
Jahren's writing is precise, as befits a scientist who also loves words. She's an acute observer, prickly, and funny as hell. Lab Girl does have one flaw: Jahren feels perpetually dissed by male scientists, but she offers little empirical evidence of gender bias. Yes, sexism in the field abounds, but without actually showing this, Jahren misses a chance to enlighten readers who may presume those days are long gone. Lab Girl is a totally original work, both fierce and uplifting. And so we indulge in the author's exuberance with botanical metaphors. She's living (and much-lauded) proof that people, like seeds, sometimes need a little help...
It is this literary upbringing fueled by science that heralds Jahren’s memoir as the beginning of a career along the lines of Annie Dillard or Diane Ackerman. She constructs her own life story — her struggling years as an undergraduate, the persistent sexist attitude of the scientific community, the constant lack of funds, her growing awareness of her bipolar disorder — with the attention to detail and respect for organic growth that has earned her increased recognition and funding in the later years of her career.
[C]entral to the book is [Jahren's] friendship with an eccentric colleague named Bill who becomes her fellow plant-obsessive, platonic soul mate, and (sometimes literal) partner in crime. Her accounts of their ongoing dialogues can feel more clumsy than profound, but 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.
If her use of allegory to make science approachable verges on pat, Jahren can be forgiven, for it allows her to deliver a gratifying and often moving chronicle of the scientist’s life. She also earns her license to issue warnings we would do well to heed.
Rambling tales of eccentric colleagues and late-night discoveries are interspersed with lyrical, mostly illuminating, but sometimes treacly essays on plants that are metaphorically tied to a point in the author’s life ... [Lab Girl offers a lively glimpse into a scientifically inclined mind. Ms. Jahren’s writing style, honed on her prolific Twitter feed and feisty, outspoken blog, is sentimental at times but also raucous (there’s lots of swearing) and surprisingly candid (she suffers from mania). The book is a portrait, not a story; it doesn’t have a driving narrative, and the best moments describe not feelings but process.
Don’t be distracted by how pedestrian this sounds. At times upliftingly joyous, at times emotionally brutal, Lab Girl is unlike any other memoir — scientific or otherwise ... Throughout the comedic tales and the searing honesty, Jahren’s prose shines like a chunk of amber from her beloved soil. 'My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe,' she writes. 'It is my retreat from the professional battlefield; it is the place where I coolly examine my wounds and repair my armor. And just like church, because I grew up in it, it is not something from which I can ever really walk away.' If Jahren will ever write about her lab again, none of the rest of us want her to walk away from it either.
