Hope Jahren, Lab Girl, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016

This book should be read by everyone involved in STEM education - it provides insight into the difficulties that are experienced by women in academia in STEM fields.  Actually, it has much of interest to anyone planning an academic career.  The book is very well written - Jahren has a blog called #HOPEJAHRENSURECANWRITE and Hope Jahren sure can write!  The book intersperses interesting short sections on trees, plants and paleobiology with Jahren's story of building labs at Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Hawaii.  I'm not going to repeat what you can find in other reviews.  If you want a content review or to read an interview, you can find them at Kirkus Reviews, The New York Times, Elle, The Guardian, Time, Library Journal, and many other places from the Irish Times to Entertainment Weekly

The importance of books like this was underlined for me last weekend.  I was at a Louis Stokes Alliance conference, and an African American Scientist was reflecting about his career.  He related two incidents, in the first a young woman was passing his office, stopped, walked back and looked in and said "I never thought that I would see a professor that looked like you,"  the other incident was less savory, another student shared his opinion that someone who looked like the professor clearly didn't really deserve to be a professor.  We need books like Hope Jahren's because while we are now well into the twenty-first century, there are those amongst us who have not embraced the changes of the twentieth century, or, in some cases, the nineteenth.  I reiterate, everyone should read this book, buy an extra copy so that you can loan it to your friends.  If you are like me, you won't want to loan out your first copy as you will want to re-read it.