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A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman: A Memoir Hardcover – June 7, 2022
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From one of the world’s leading planetary scientists, a luminous memoir of exploration on Earth, in space, and within oneself—equal parts ode to the beauty of science, meditation on loss, and roadmap for personal resilience
"Fierce, absorbing, and ultimately inspiring." —ELIZABETH KOLBERT
"[A] riveting book, beautifully written." —Washington Post
Named a Best Book of the Year by Christian Science Monitor and Science News
Deep in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, three times farther from the sun than the Earth is, orbits a massive asteroid called (16) Psyche. It is one of the largest objects in the belt, potentially containing the equivalent of the world’s total economy in metals, though they cannot be brought back to Earth. But (16) Psyche has the potential to unlock something even more valuable: the story of how planets form, and how our planet formed. Soon we will find out, thanks to the extraordinary work of Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Principal Investigator of NASA’s $800 million Psyche mission, and the second woman ever to be awarded a major NASA space exploration contract.
The journey that brought her to this place is extraordinary.Amid a childhood of terrible trauma, Elkins-Tanton fell in love with science as a means of healing and consolation. But still she wondered, was forced to wonder: as a woman, was science “for her”? In answering that question, she takes us from the wilds of the Siberian tundra to the furthest reaches of outer space, from the Mayo Clinic, where Elkins-Tanton battled ovarian cancer while writing the Psyche proposal, to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where her team brought that proposal to life.
A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman is a beautifully-constructed memoir that explores how a philosophy of life can be built from the tools of scientific inquiry. It teaches us how to approach difficult problems by asking the right questions and truly listening to the answers—and how we may find meaning through exploring the wonders of the universe around us.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWilliam Morrow
- Publication dateJune 7, 2022
- Dimensions6 x 0.93 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100063086905
- ISBN-13978-0063086906
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Lindy Elkins-Tanton has led a fascinating life, full of wonder and discovery and also pain and loss. Her memoir, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, is fierce, absorbing, and ultimately inspiring.” — Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction
“A riveting book, beautifully written...With a brave candor, Elkins-Tanton examines all aspects of her experiences—personal and professional, the good and the bad—to plumb the very meaning of her life...[Provides] a ringside seat to the discomforts and thrills of a geological expedition.” — Washington Post
"A deeply personal and enlightening book of one amazing woman’s leadership and teachings in science and self-discovery." — Col. Chris Hadfield, former Commander of the International Space Station and #1 Bestselling Author of An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
"The principal investigator of NASA’s Psyche mission lays bare the challenges and rewards of succeeding as a woman in a male-dominated field and how the sublime beauty of the universe brought her strength and solace. ... Enthralling and inspiring. ... A fearless, riveting, and galvanizing book from a star in the U.S. space program." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Elkins-Tanton shines in her ability to render the process of scientific discovery in eloquent prose. … A wonderful paean to the beauty of scientific exploration.”
— Publishers Weekly
"[A] beautiful and inspiring memoir." — Christian Science Monitor (Best Books of the Year)
"A captivating story about an exceptional career and a remarkable life." — Ars Technica
"A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman is an inspiring tale of grit and grace, and a captivating study of leadership in changing times. Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a talented storyteller with a story that must be told. More than a memoir of how we explore other worlds, she has written an insightful narrative of how we live on this one. It is one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written." — DAVID W. BROWN, author of The Mission
"Wonderful. ... [A] sometimes harrowing, often heroic, and adventurous chronicle." — Planetary Radio
"Covers wide-ranging personal and professional terrain with depth and insight." — Nautilus
"Engaging. ... This memoir chronicles the journey of one woman in science but is also a rallying cry to make academia a more supportive and diverse workplace so that the research community can better address the societal and scientific challenges of the 21st century." — Science
"Engaging and candid. ... Spotlights the challenges and successes of being a woman in a male-dominated field. ... With wide appeal to a wide audience, this work provides a closer look at the human side of science." — Library Journal
"Elkins-Tanton explores ways to create better, more inclusive disciplines through curiosity, generosity, and collaboration." — Booklist
"It would be easy to recommend A Portrait as inspiration for others who have wondered if science is for them, but perhaps the book is more valuable as a source of insight for those who have never asked that question themselves." — Nature
"Moving. ... [Elkins-Tanton's] struggles with childhood trauma and sexism in her career lay bare the barriers that many women in science still face." — Science News (A Best Book of the Year)
About the Author
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a world-renowned planetary scientist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is the Principal Investigator of NASA’s Psyche mission, and Vice President for the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University, one of the top Earth and planetary science research schools in the United States. Among her major original research achievements are the discovery that the Siberian flood basalts caused the end-Permian extinction, the revelation that rocky planets are born wet, and the concept of “drip volcanism.” Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her.
Product details
- Publisher : William Morrow (June 7, 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0063086905
- ISBN-13 : 978-0063086906
- Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.93 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #598,468 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #895 in Astrophysics & Space Science (Books)
- #1,250 in Scientist Biographies
- #17,985 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a scientist studying the formation and evolution of rocky planets. She was born and grew up in Ithaca, New York, and now splits her time between Arizona and the quiet hills of western Massachusetts.
Elkins-Tanton is the Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, ASU Vice President for the Interplanetary Initiative, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company led by CEO Turner Bohlen, training and measuring problem-solving and critical thinking. She received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT. She was a researcher at Brown University, faculty at MIT, and a director at the Carnegie Institution for Science before moving to a directorship at Arizona State University. She has led four field expeditions in Siberia. She has been the Astor Fellow at Oxford University, is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and of the American Mineralogical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s research and work lies in three related areas: The physics and chemistry of terrestrial planetary formation and internal evolution, creation of effective interdisciplinary teams for maximizing discovery, and student-centered learning and the reformation of education for the Information Age.
Using models and observations, she and her collaborators have explicated how the evolution of planetesimals (the building blocks of planets) includes partially differentiated and other complex compositional structures, explaining observations from meteorites and asteroids. Her work on the accretion of rocky planets shows that rocky planets everywhere are likely born habitable: Even the magma ocean stages of terrestrial planet formation retained sufficient water to create habitable planets without additional water delivery.
On the Earth, she and her team confirmed that the Siberian flood basalts caused the end-Permian extinction: The magmatism released carbon, sulfur, and halocarbons sufficient to drive catastrophic global climate change, and the flood basalts began with a world-record volume of volcaniclastics, many burning a significant coal volume.
Finally, the Beagle Learning team has shown how the productivity of research questions can be rated using a rubric and scored successfully by artificial intelligence.
She and her family love traveling and discovering the people, animals, and plants of new places. At home she keeps trail cams up to record the nocturnal activity around their houses; in Massachusetts, the cameras record bears, fishers, grey foxes, owls, and more. She’s recently been learning how to identify mosses. On weekends, she and her husband, mathematician and educator James Tanton, hike in the desert, mind their lime and grapefruit trees, and watch the Gambel’s quail.
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Many of the experiences she describes are unique to women, but any man can also admire her motivations, the risks she has taken, the difficult calls she has made, and the resilience she demonstrates. The author does a good job of describing how she has developed her own leadership style shaped by her experiences, the successes and failures in trying to make it work. I know I would be delighted to have a boss who operates this way, whether male or female.
I think any young woman, and most young men, would find the book inspirational, proof that someone with modest resources but a drive to persevere can overcome some serious setbacks, including rape, sexual harassment, a lengthy career detour, crises of confidence, and cancer. Her story is not over, so I hope she will get many opportunities to share more of what she has learned.
When I chose to leave research-heavy academia for a career focused on teaching, one of the many reasons was because I looked around at female role models I had and I couldn’t see myself in them. “If I have to be like that to ‘succeed’, I don’t want it.” Except for Lindy. Our paths crossed briefly while she was a postdoc and I was a graduate student.
Her vision of fundamental kindness and supportive collaboration is what I want science to be when it grows up. The way she brings “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” into the classroom and makes it a real, achievable, actionable, should-be-standard style… mwah ::chef’s kiss:: (as the kids say these days).
As then, and still now, I want to be like her when I grow up, not just as a scientists, but also as a person.
When I chose to leave research-heavy academia for a career focused on teaching, one of the many reasons was because I looked around at female role models I had and I couldn’t see myself in them. “If I have to be like that to ‘succeed’, I don’t want it.” Except for Lindy. Our paths crossed briefly while she was a postdoc and I was a graduate student.
Her vision of fundamental kindness and supportive collaboration is what I want science to be when it grows up. The way she brings “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” into the classroom and makes it a real, achievable, actionable, should-be-standard style… mwah ::chef’s kiss:: (as the kids say these days).
As then, and still now, I want to be like her when I grow up, not just as a scientists, but also as a person.
How much did I love this book? I used an audible credit for the audiobook, but then I had to purchase a hard copy so that I could go back to it again and again, and I have a list of people to recommend it to as long as my arm, and one in particular who will be receiving a copy as a gift, and no…I’m not giving away my own copy!
❤️
Then it goes downhill to name dropping and self congratulatory. She also packed in the science, something I’m not afraid of, but waaaaay too much for a book to the general public, IMO. By the time she gets to discussing the NASA mission she led I was bored and again she got into the weeds.
Overall, I nearly gave it two stars.