Memoir Review: Lab Girl (audio book)

Title: Lab Girl

Author: Hope Jahren (Audio read by the author)

Publication Info: Random House Audio, 2016. Hardcover by Knopf, 2016 (290 pages)

Source: Library digital resources

Publisher's Blurb:

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 Girlis a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren’s 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.

My Review:

I'm not always a fan of authors reading their own works. Most aren't professional readers, and all too often it shows. Hope Jahren isn't a professional reader, but she does a beautiful job with her book, and  by reading it herself she is able to bring a depth to the story that I don't think can be found any other way. Although I haven't read the print version of the book, I listened to this with my husband while we drove across the country. He did read the book last year, and I think was more impressed with the quality of the writing after hearing her read it (he had made some criticisms about her style that he recanted to a large extent). I recommend listening to the book, and possibly reading it as well (I will probably do both, as the ebook is sitting on my e-reader).

The book itself has a structure that was at first disconcerting. Chapters of natural history (primarily regarding the trees that are the main object of her study) alternate with the longer chapters that form the memoir. Once I figured out what was going on, though, I enjoyed the natural history for its own sake, as well as contemplating how it fit with the personal story she was telling. People with no interest in what makes trees tick might find it off-putting, but I think most readers can enjoy it. Jahren's training in writing academic prose is in most danger of showing up in these sections, but she controls it well.

The author's personal story is powerful and at times painful. Jahren's struggle for acceptance in the scientific and academic world is all too familiar, though as she went through graduate school in the 1990s one might have hoped matters had improved over the days when women had to sue to be given tenure. The story of her lab tech, who remains both a mystery and a fascinating character, as well as the author's best friend in a weird kind of way (I think that when she sees the pair of them as siblings--maybe twins--she might come the closest), is equally important and equally interesting. I never quite got a grip on Bill's character, and I think that Jahren never does, either--which is part of why she is writing the book.

There is another side to the book as well. Jahren suffered from bi-polar disorder, and for many years "suffered" is the right word. She was far older than she should have been before she was diagnosed correctly and got the help she needed. That, however, led to the most painful part of the story for me to listen to, which was the account of her pregnancy, which had to be endured without her medications--and she had to quit them cold turkey. The result was ugly, and culminated in a delivery, described with a little too much detail, that was all too much like my own first baby (though thank goodness I didn't share her other issues). I think both of us can only be grateful for modern obstetric science.

The book felt to me like it lost a little bit of it's direction when things finally began to go well for the author. The real story was how she (and Bill) got to that point, and that was a story worth contemplating.

My Recommendation:

Read it. If you have any interest in science, or in what it's like to be a woman in science, or for that matter in what makes oddball scientific characters tick, read it. Also, read it if you like trees. If possible, listen to the audio version.

Photo Friday: Water and Light

No flash fiction this week, due primarily to procrastination. Instead, I'll share some photos I took over the holidays, mostly of water and light (with a few trees thrown in). I have a feeling that until I get some kind of grip on the edits to Death By Adverb I'll be burrowing into the archives for photos on more Fridays that this. [Note: progress is happening on DBA. I have figured out, I hope, most of what needs to be done. Doing it, of course, is always another matter.]

Leaves under the surface, their own world.

 Mirrors.

Treetops

I sat on the ground to photograph the twinkling lights in the pussywillow tree. Still trying to figure out why the lights flared that way.

Fairy lights

I think this is my favorite abstract for the year.

Friday Flash: The Tree

A couple of weeks ago Chuck Wendig presented a flash fiction challenge to write a story in some way involving a tree. I was too busy and distracted to do it then, so today I have a half-flash (just over 500 words instead of my usual 1000) on a tree.

The Tree

I am the oldest resident of this village, and what I do not know of its people and history cannot be known. When all are in haste and fear, I alone stand calm and unchanged. Yet none now alive have heard my voice.

I am the oak that shades the village square, and I have had not one to speak to for many long years. Now there is one who may, at last, linger beneath my boughs long enough to hear my voice. He is still too young for other two-leggers to pay him heed, or even to know himself what it is he hears. But I can begin to tell my history to this seedling, that as he grows old he will remember me.
**
I was planted by the hand of a man who loved quiet and rest, though his trade was hot and noisy, with fires—I shudder at the thought—and hammers. But he planted my acorn that there might someday be cool shade in which one could nap on a hot afternoon, knowing he would not live to enjoy that shade himself. It is a sorrow I have, that my human companions, so few in any case, live such short lives. For the man’s sake, I grew as quickly as I could, and I was able to cast a modest shade before he lay down at my feet and did not rise again. His son lived to see me reach broad branches to shelter his home, and he did not cut my branches for his forge fire.

It was the daughter of the son, the third smith to ply the trade beneath my boughs, who first learned to hear my voice. She learned, too, that to be heard conversing with a tree brought great sorrow. She fled alive, but I could not follow, and I never saw her again. I feared for a time that the villagers—for a village had in those three generations grown around the forge—would cut me down, but if they didn’t value my voice, they did like my shade and the acorns they fed to their pigs, so they convinced themselves that the smith had merely been mad.

Since that time I have sheltered twenty generations of humans, and their small ones have climbed my trunk and lain on my broad branches, and loved me. The elders have sought rest and refreshment in my shade in summer, and trusted to my strength in winter winds.

But only three times have I found one who can listen to me, and you, the third, will be the last. For my heart is failing me, and this winter the winds will not shake my limbs, but break them. And then I fear I will fall on the very things I have sheltered my whole life.

You must tell them.

You must be the cause of my ending, but you must also save an acorn. Plant it here to take my place when I am gone, that there may be a large and generous tree in your grandson’s time.

And talk to your new tree. She will be lonely.

***

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

Friday Flash: The Dancer and the Shattered Shell

Chuck gave us another ten random titles this week, and this time I used the random number generator to pick one for me. So, in 1000 words, here is...

The Dancer and the Shattered Shell

The glade spun past the dancer. His eyes took it all in as a blur of color, motion so fast it ceased to move, became a water-color scarf in which to wrap himself.

Alec let himself spin gradually to a stop, watching as the trees sorted themselves back into individual trunks and branches, and smiled. The boys who made fun of him for dancing—had mocked him until he’d retreated to the woods to dance for only the trees—knew nothing. He finished his dance, bare feet tapping the meadow grass, and bowed to his arboreal audience. Alec liked dancing for the trees. When he thought about it, he thought that being forced to the forest was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Panting a little from his dance—the music in his head had been fast, a driving beat that kept him moving—Alec trotted off to the big oak to check the nest.

The oak stood in the center of the forest, and felt like a relic of an older time. Where most of the trees were slim-trunked and straight, Alec could not reach around even half of the oak’s sturdy base. And the branches, rather than climbing in neat ladders, reached in all directions with a randomness that still managed to be graceful.

Alec liked climbing trees, and the oak was perfect for it, the broad, sturdy branches at just odd enough intervals to be interesting. He had been climbing the oak for years, and he’d been hiding there when he found the nest.

Alec remembered the day. Most of the time the woods were his own, but on that day the neighborhood kids penetrated deep into the forest, not following or chasing him, but looking for crabapples to throw at stray cats. Alec climbed the tree to his usual level then, hearing the boys coming closer and afraid they would see him, he turned and climbed higher, to where the leaves and branches hid the ground completely. He knew that people hardly ever looked up, but he would take no chances. After a time, he forgot the other boys, and climbed for the love of climbing, and for the love of the tree.

He had come on the nest in the highest branches that would support his weight. It was big. Big enough that he looked quickly around to be sure the occupants weren’t home, though when he peeped over the edge, the nest was empty of both birds and eggs. It was just a huge nest, suggesting a larger bird than he had ever noticed about the forest.

After that day, Alec climbed several times to the highest branches of the tree to look at the nest. In the spring, a single, large egg appeared, and he became more careful about getting near the nest. He knew now what bird lived there, and had no desire to meet with beak and talons designed to rip apart small animals. He stayed away for the summer, once climbing a nearby tree to see if he could peek in. He could see nothing and didn’t try again.

Now it was fall, and when Alec had danced the changing seasons, he went again to see the nest. If the egg had hatched, the fledgling must by now be flying and independent, or it would not make it through the winter.

He had missed the tree. It felt like home. Rather, it felt like what he thought home ought to feel like. It covered him, hid him, made him safe. It brought him to the adventure of heights. And it gave him the nest.

Alec scanned the trees and the sky to be sure that there were no large raptors hanging about, ready to defend the nest. They should be long gone, or did birds like that leave their nests in winter, the way the robins and wrens did? He wasn’t sure, so he looked hard.

Then he peeked over the edge of the nest. There they were. The shattered shards of the huge shell, kicked aside but never fully destroyed, despite the activity that must have filled the nest for weeks after the chick hatched. Alec held his breath, wondering if he dared.

Almost without willing it, he reached out a hand, and touched the largest piece of shell. Then, hurrying, eyes as much on the sky as on the task, he scooped up as much of it as he could, stowed it in the hood of his sweatshirt, and climbed back down the tree. He looked about, hoping the bird would understand, then forgot everything else in studying the shell. The colors, the curve of the broken pieces, the smoothness of the surface. It all fascinated him, and filled him with delight.

The space under the tree was clear. Little grew in the shade of the great spreading branches. Alec laid the shattered shell on a patch of moss and began to dance.

He didn’t know that the great birds watched as he danced the hatching and the flight.

He soon learned, however, that the neighborhood bullies had been watching. They circled him, mocking. Alec gritted his teeth, ignored them, and kept dancing. When he felt the first rock, he flinched, but did not lose his rhythm. In any case, what could he do? If he fled, they would follow, and he would go down under a pile of fists and kicks.

When he danced, they never quite dared to touch him. Alec didn’t know why. It was his dancing, as much as his poverty and loneliness, that made them hate him. And yet, to dance was to be protected. Until now.

A second boy bent and picked up a rock. They had found a way to touch him without touching him. The frenzy of a mob told hold, and three rocks struck Alec. Still bleeding, he kept dancing.

Then the giant birds swept down, beaks and claws extended.

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2016

Just  few more days to enter the Goodreads Giveaway for Death By Trombone!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Death By Trombone

by Rebecca Douglass

Giveaway ends January 31, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Flash Fiction Friday: The Third Birch

Hopefully, next week I'll be back to struggling with the Wendig challenges, as this is the final week of the round-robin competition he set up for February. In the meantime, I went on-line and found a random title for this week's story.  I present, in 950 words...

The Third Birch

The Moss children played in the birch grove almost every day. The three oldest liked to climb the trees, or play tag or hide-and-seek among the smooth white trunks. Amelia, the youngest, thought of the grove as more than a place to play, though no one knew that, because no one paid her much attention most days. She was just “the baby,” and considered by her older siblings to be too young to keep up in their games, even if she could have run. They showered her with love and attention when they thought of it, and forgot about her when they ran off to play their games.

So Amelia sat under the third birch to the left of the path, the one none of them could climb because it had no branches for a long way up. Some catastrophe had stripped it long ago. John tried to shin up it sometimes, but even he couldn’t do it. Sarah and Timmy didn’t even try, because if John couldn’t climb something, there wasn’t any point in them attempting it. So they left the third birch to Amelia, and she left them to their games.

Amelia was something of an after-thought, three years younger than Timmy. The other three had come along one right after the other, only 16 or 18 months between. So naturally they considered her the baby, and alternately cossetted and ignored her, as older siblings do, the more so because she couldn’t run and climb as they did.

Amelia, at age 6, still understood many things the older kids had forgotten. She understood the sound the breeze made in the top of her tree, and she understood what the rabbits were saying when they came and wiggled their noses at her. They never came to the other children, because they were never still. Rabbits liked children who sat still, and Amelia, who had a twisted foot that kept her from running well, sat still far more often than any of the other children.

One spring afternoon she sat with her back to the tree, admiring the grove, and feeling loved and comforted by her smooth-barked friends. He brothers and sister were playing tag, and she watched with a little smile. Some days Amelia hated not being able to run as fast or walk as far as the others. Some days she hated being left out. But on this day, she didn’t mind. She was thinking.

Other children had trouble keeping secrets. They chattered constantly, so words came out without their willing it. Amelia, in learning to keep still while the others ran about, had also learned to keep quiet. She had no end of secrets, secrets no one else might think were valuable, but which she knew to be the secret of joy.

One of Amelia’s secrets was a mother fox and her kits. They denned under the fence post a yard or two from her tree, and she sat there so often, and so quietly, that the foxes had stopped worrying about her. When the others ran off to the far end of the birch grove, the mama fox came out, and today, three fuzzy kits came out after her, brand new and wobbly on their little legs. They didn’t walk even as well as Amelia did. They wobbled about and played in the sun on the soft, new grass, until a shadow overhead warned of a hawk, and then the mama fox shooed the kits back into the den, following them down the hole in the ground. And Amelia sat and hugged her secret to herself and smiled.

She was still smiling when the others came back.

“What are you so happy about?” Sarah asked. Sarah never did believe that Amelia could actually be happy. Sarah was so full of energy that sitting still wasn’t even a possibility. How could Amelia be happy when she couldn’t run about?

“Nothing,” Amelia lied. “It’s a nice day. Who won the game?” She could always distract them by asking about their games. The question started Timmy and John to arguing. Each thought he had won, but Sarah finally told them she had. Amelia kept smiling, because she knew that she had won.

Another day, Amelia sat under her birch while a gentle rain fell. The others had gone running for the house when the rain started,
and forgotten her. She could have gotten up and walked home, and she knew she should have. But the rain wasn’t very wet, and she liked the way it shone on the trees. It turned the white of their trunks whiter, and made the black scars blacker, and that was so beautiful it almost hurt. That was another secret.

But secrets ended on the last day of school. The others ran ahead to change clothes and then go play in the birch grove. Amelia, who had now finished her first year of school and knew a great deal more than she had a year before, including that her school clothes were now her play clothes, went straight to the birch grove and her tree.

The farmer who owned the grove was there, with his three grown sons. And the trees either side of the path lay dying on the ground. The farmer had decided the path needed to be widened so he could take a wagon through, but Amelia didn’t know that. She knew only that her best friend was dead, and she flung herself on its smooth, white body, weeping. The farmer couldn’t dislodge her, nor could his sons, and they stood about scratching their heads and wondering what to do next.

When her brothers and sisters came, Amelia lay on the slaughtered birch, and neither moved nor spoke.

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2015