Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 09/15/2016 Swaby (Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—and the World, 2015) tackles a younger audience, bringing drama to these 33 tales geared to the female scientists of tomorrow. (Male aspirants would find much of value in here as well.) Many of these pioneers worked in obscurity, their accomplishments purloined by more clubbable male colleagues. Consider Rosalind Franklin, whose prototype model of the molecular structure of DNA was apparently leaked to the soon-to-be acclaimed team of Watson and Crick. Her legacy? A slighting mention in Watson’s book The Double Helix: she “might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes.” The author has a way with metaphor: Hedy Lamarr, whose off-set tinkering led to the wireless technology we enjoy today, spent a brief period pre-Hollywood as a trophy wife, a phase Swaby describes as “performing her act as a well-coiffed houseplant.” Only a handful of the women profiled (nursing reformist Florence Nightingale, astrophysicist-turned-astronaut Sally Ride) received the kudos due them during their lifetimes. - Copyright 2016 Booklist.