On February 2, 2018 I had the honor of reading a segment of Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl.

From the New York Times Review:

Her engrossing new memoir, “Lab Girl,” is at once a thrilling account of her discovery of her vocation and a gifted teacher’s road map to the secret lives of plants — a book that, at its best, does for botany what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology, what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology.

The reading was hosted by KCSB 91.9 as part of the annual UCSB Reads program, which selects an intellectually stimulating, interdisciplinary book by a living author that appeals to a wide range of readers and can be incorporated into the University of California, Santa Barbara curriculum.

In the chosen segment (beginning on page 12), Jahren describes how the expansive winters and sweltering, fecund summers shaped her relationship with the cycles of natural life.