Lab Girl

 "The more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world."

---Helen Keller

This epigraph opens Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, a memoir Bonnie Lyons highly recommends and I'm saving for my road trip reading.

The dedication: "Everything that I write is dedicated to my mother."

The beginning of the prologue:

     People love the ocean.  People are always asking me why I don't study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii.  I tell them that it's because it's lonely empty place.  There is six hundred times more life on land than there is in the ocean, and the fact mostly comes down to plants.  The average ocean plant is one cell that lives for about twenty days.  The average land plant is a two-ton tree that lives for more than one hundred years.  The mass ratio of plants to animals in the ocean is close to four, while the ratio on land is closer to a thousand. The ratio of trees to people in America is well over two hundred. Plant numbers are staggering; there are eighty billion trees just within the protected forests of the western United States.  As a rule, people live among plants but they don't really see them.  Since I've discovered these numbers, I can see little else.

     So humor me for a minute, and look out your window. 

Bonnie says that this writer makes science accessible and fascinating to those of us who are not trained scientists.  

So I am going to look out my window more and learn the names of more plants to increase my "joyousness and confidence " in my kinship with the rest of the world.