Memoirs & Coffee Book Group to Discuss "Lab Girl"

The next meeting of Bernardsville Public Library’s book discussion group, Memoirs and Coffee, will be held on Tuesday, April 25 at 10:30 am. Manager Pat Kennedy-Grant will lead the discussion of "Lab Girl" (2016) by Hope Jahren. [The author will not be present.]

The author is an acclaimed scientist who has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. This, her first book, is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also much more. “Lab Girl” is 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.

The book was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and a New York Times Notable Book. The New York Times review called it “engrossing” and “thrilling” and added that it “does for botany what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology, what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology.”

There is no charge to join the book discussion and no registration is needed. Call the library at 766-0118 for more information.