Long time on the to-read list and worth it!

Lab Girl
by Hope Jahren


Weird and wild biography...with trees.  Plants of all sorts, really, and a couple of crazy goof-ball scientists who can't sit back and contemplate nature without digging, stirring, cutting and centrifuging every thing in sight. You got to love 'em.

Mixed in with their adventures in science is some real science, often chapter for chapter. She'll discourse on the structure and utility of wood for instance, then switch to the laying on of rings of her life in the lab.  A discourse on plant sex and the rarity at which a grain of pollen lands on a pistil and becomes a new life, leads beautifully into a chance encounter with a man at an outdoor barbeque.  But none of this is forced--it's effortless and beautiful. Even the really scary parts are told without apology or hyperbole and only after you step away do you realize how close disaster really loomed.

Let me just sum up--there's a reason this book was so in demand at the library.  It's good.