#53 [2025/CBR17] Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I've already read a couple of books by Taylor Jenkins Reid and generally liked them, but I think Atmosphere (2025) is my favorite (so far). I first saw Atmosphere on NPR's Favorite books, and then my book club started talking about it too, which is why I picked it up.

Atmosphere takes place in the early 1980's at the NASA space shuttle program. We follow the women who are in NASA's second class of astronauts to ever allow women. Joan Goodwin is an Astronomer unhappily teaching introductory classes to spoiled Freshman when she hears that NASA has opened up applications for women. After not making it her first try, she tries again the next year and is accepted. 

The book jumps back and forth between 1981--following Joan when she first comes to NASA and her ensuing training, and 1984--when Joan is in the control room for a space shuttle mission. Both story lines are compelling. 

***SPOILERS***Atmosphere contains themes of women in male-dominated spaces, the excitement of space flight, and family, but it is more than anything a love story. Joan meets a fellow woman in her class, Vanessa Ford. Joan admires Vanessa, and the two become friends. There is romantic tension there from the beginning but Joan is pretty shut down sexually, not understanding why people make such a big deal of kissing and sex. She hasn't even considered that she might not have been with the right person.

The blossoming of the relationship between Joan and Vanessa is very sweet and feels real, but it comes with its own problems. NASA did not allow gay and lesbian people in its astronaut corps. They had to keep their relationship secret, and both felt their job threatened by suspicions of their love.

Back in 1984, the shuttle is up in space and something goes drastically wrong. Joan is the astronaut in the control room in charge of communicating with the astronauts on the shuttle. Most of the astronauts on the shuttle were in her class, and she is good friends with them. The tension is high. But as I read the book, I began to understand the depth of the relationship between Joan and Vanessa. And Vanessa is on that shuttle, too.

Joan is talking to the love of her life for what she thinks might be the last time. Hundreds of people are listening, and she can't let the true nature of their relationship show. I have to tell you that I was really crying for a good chunk of the end of the book. I had become attached to the characters and the story, and the circumstances were heartbreaking. ***END SPOILERS***

I really enjoyed reading this book. I liked the main characters, their relationships, the excitement of a trip on a space shuttle, and the details of their training. It almost felt like this book was written for me. Strongly recommended.

P.S. Joan was a lover of the stars, even saying she was lucky to go to Joshua Tree National Park as a child to see them. I happened to be in Joshua Tree while I was reading this book. I tried to appreciate the stars like Joan did, and they did look cool. However, I am too ignorant, and I don't know what I'm looking at. I tend to lose interest quickly.

#48 [2025/CBR17] Replaceable You by Mary Roach

Although it's been a number of years since I've read a book by Mary Roach, I have read quite a few. Mary Roach writes non-fiction--digging into whatever topic seems to catch her fancy. Quite often this topic is at least a little bit taboo. She's written a book about sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), and ghosts (Spook). When I was told her latest book was coming out, I immediately put a hold on it at the library. 

Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy (2025) is Roach's latest book. I thought it was interesting, and I definitely learned some things, but I didn't find it quite as readable as I have some of her other books. I have discovered about myself that whatever subject I'm learning about, I prefer to really dig into it, understand it fully, and explore every corner. Replaceable You (and many of Roach's books) keeps it fast paced, jumping from topic to topic with witticisms and little jokes. It can be fun, but I found myself getting frustrated. 

Roach tackles a number of different subjects in Replaceable You, including: the history of building fake noses, skin grafting, using pig organs for humans, growing organs, repurposing sexual organs, prosthetic legs, the iron lung, ostomy bags, hair transplants, and more. The overarching theme is an acknowledgement of how complex the human body is, and how difficult a time we have when we try to create part of it ourselves. It is amazing what some doctors have accomplished, but I'm a little afraid that we're walking ourselves right into a harrowing science-fiction movie.

My favorite parts of the book were when Roach showed how the research affected people personally. I enjoyed learning about the woman who wanted a prosthetic over her real foot because her original was so damaged. I also found the chapter on ostomy bags pretty interesting. I had never really thought about the stigma and challenge of trying to live your life with an ostomy bag. Finally, the chapter on the woman who had used an iron lung at night for most of her life was both fascinating and unexpectedly heart wrenching. 

There was a fair bit of information about the use of animals in all this research, including growing pig organs for humans and more. I am not against all animal testing. I realize that it has helped countless people's lives, but it still makes me uncomfortable, and I didn't enjoy reading about some of it. I also occasionally had a hard time following some of the more advanced research. Again, I felt like I needed more explanation to really understand what was going on and how much more needed to be done before it became something that was medically useable. 

Fans of Mary Roach will almost certainly enjoy this book as well, although I didn't find it as readable as some of her others.

#43 [2023/CBR15] The Icepick Surgeon by Sam Kean

My husband's brother gave him a paperback copy of The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science (2021) by Sam Kean. My husband read the book and enjoyed it, and it looked interesting. It was in my mind as a to-read book, but--as often happens--there was always something else to read and I kept putting it off. However, once Bingo got going, I was sure I could use it for something, which finally pushed me into reading it.

The Icepick Surgeon was a well-written book that kept my attention. Kean discusses a number of scientists and doctors who did bad things. Sometimes these things were done to further science, sometimes they were done for money, and sometimes they were done purely for ego. In twelve different chapters, Kean delves into twelve different stories: beginning with the pirate/naturalist William Dampier in the late 1600's and ending with Annie Dookhan who was convicted of falsifying drug test results for thousands of criminal cases in 2013.

Each story is detailed and fascinating, but this is not always a fun book to read. Humans are capable of some horrible things, and I often had a pit of dread in my stomach as I read. For instance, one chapter is all about how Edison and his underling tortured dogs and horses with electricity to try to prove that AC is more dangerous than DC. This eventually led to the first electric chair, which was not a success.

Some of these stories I'd known about before. I had definitely heard of the Nazi's medical testing during World War II. I had also heard of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. But I had never heard of Dr. John Cutler and his STD experiments in Guatemala. I guess because Cutler was in a foreign country, he felt freed from any ethical standards. After World War II, Cutler infected prostitutes, prisoners, and asylum inmates with STD's without their knowledge or consent. This is an American doctor that worked for the U.S. government and had his agency's approval during his experiments.

One of the most egregious cases was an asylum patient named Bertha. "Dr." Cutler injected syphilis germs into her arm in February of 1948. She developed lesions and her skin began peeling off, but he denied her any treatment for three months. By August 23, 1948, Bertha was clearly dying. I guess because she was already dying, Cutler felt it was okay to inject gonorrheal pus into her urethra, eyes, and rectum, and then he reinjected syphilis. "Within days, Bertha was weeping pus from both eyes and bleeding from her urethra. She died August 27." (168) I can't even wrap my head around being able to do this to another human being. 

Other chapters that really captured my interest were the Harvard professor that psychologically tortured an underage Ted Kaczynski for three years (Kaczynski was only seventeen when he first got to Harvard). This work may have been used by the CIA to help them with interrogations, but it seemed the professor really enjoyed making Kaczynski as upset as possible. Finally, Dr. John Money insisted that a young boy named Bruce could simply be changed to Brenda after his penis was destroyed as a baby by an incompetent surgeon. It's not only that Money was wrong, but he had no scientific basis for his finding, he was driven by ego, he lied to the child's parents, and sexually abused Bruce and his brother when they came for follow up appointments.

Kean frames these stories as not just a sensationalistic view of other peoples' suffering, but to honor the victims, remember what happened to them, and learn--so that this kind of thing doesn't happen again. He ends the book with potentially new ethical dilemmas that might come up with space travel, artificial intelligence, and other technological advances.

In the end, this book was sometimes hard to read, but it was consistently interesting, and I definitely learned some things.

CBR15Bingo: History

#33 [2017/CBR9] "Lab Girl" by Hope Jahren

Unsurprisingly, I found Lab Girl by Hope Jahren through NPR's List of Best Books of 2016. This is a non-fiction memoir about Jahren's life in research and science, beginning as a lab tech at a hospital to finally being in charge of her own lab at a University. I enjoyed this book very much, much more than I was expecting.

There are many different aspects to this book, each of them fascinating in their own right. First, Jahren is a successful woman scientist, a minority in her field. It was interesting to read her perspective. "In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can't possibly be what you are." She is perceptive and strong, and often nails the challenges of what it's like to be a woman in her position. "I have been told that I can't do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman." In addition to being a woman in science, Jahren also discusses the constant stress of getting funding together in order to keep her lab running. It was an inside look into something I never thought much about.

Another aspect of Jahren's life that she shares in this book is her struggles with Bi-polar disorder. She is incredibly successful and driven, but (especially before she was diagnosed) she struggled with her disease. It became an issue again when she got pregnant and had to go off of her meds. I admired Jahren's inclusion of this struggle in her book, but it wasn't her whole life and it didn't define her.

The part of the book that surprised me the most--as far as how much I enjoyed her writing--was Jahren's short essays about plant life. Jahren's whole life is focused on trees and plants, and there is no doubt that she loves her work. She can tell the story of a single seed like it's the most compelling soap opera on television. She almost made me want to go back to school just to learn more about the kind of work she does. I'm not especially interested in science or plants, but Jahren was able to explain to me why they are fascinating and important.

The majority of the book reads as something of a love letter to her lab partner Bill. They met while she was in graduate school, and have worked together ever since. They are the ideal work partners, balancing each other out and perfectly understanding how the other works. Their relationship is something that's hard for me to wrap my head around. It's always been platonic, both before and after Jahren's marriage to her husband. But it is also very intimate. They spend an incredible amount of time together, travel together, and I think it would be unthinkable for them to stop working together now. I would have been interested to see how Bill viewed this relationship.

I definitely recommend this book. I enjoyed Jahren's honest writing about her life and her story is worth learning about.

"Tiny but determined, I navigated the confusing and unstable path of being what you are while knowing that it's more than people want to see."

"On some deep level, the realization that I could do good science was accompanied by the knowledge that I had formally and terminally missed my chance to become like any of the women that I had ever known."

#27 [2017/CBR9] "Beginner's Guide: Love and Other Chemical Reactions" by Six de los Reyes

"It is a theory generally accepted in certain circles that love, like the rest of the known universe, can be broken down into an exact science."

First of all, let me just admit that it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that this book took place in the Philippines. I just assumed that it involved an immigrant family in the United States. It wasn't until I was very far along in the book that the author mentioned Manila, and the whole book made a little more sense to me.

NPR's Best Books List of 2016 led me to Beginner's Guide: Love and Other Chemical Reactions by Six de los Reyes. It is a sweet romance with a rather unlikely heroine. Kaya Rubio is at school doing research on Molecular Genetics. Her life is about research and labs. And although she spends a lot of time with her lab partner, Eugene, she is too busy to find any time for romantic interests. "I had abandoned casual and recreational socialization on the basis that the probability of success did not justify the effort and repeated reinforcement that I am undesirable." Unfortunately for Kaya, her family is large, gregarious, and loves to pressure her to find a man. After another tortuous family party, Kaya decides that she will get a date before her cousin's wedding.

So, Kaya steps up to this challenge just as she's faced all the previous challenges in her life: like a scientific experiment. She plans to set up ten dates, evaluate them on a number of criteria and choose the one that is best. She sets up the dates at her local coffee shop, has her friends send some men her way, and gets to work. Her experiment takes an unexpected turn when she begins spending more time with Nero, the hunky, young man who runs her coffee shop, than her dates.

I enjoyed this book. Kaya's obstinate focus and success was rather refreshing. I also loved Nero. He was a great character and a perfect romantic hero. And that might have also been my only problem with this book. I just couldn't see them together. I didn't see it happening--at least not until Kaya became a little more open. I know that's what dream fulfillment in romance novels is all about--where dream men just happen to show up at the perfect time and let you become your best self. I guess it just seemed even more far-fetched in this one.

"The worst that could happen is rejection and heartbreak, and frankly we deal with that everyday already."