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Reviews tagging 'Medical content'
The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson
1 review
ege's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
3.0
The goal of this book was to give a high-level description of the history of people looking for life on Mars and details about more recent NASA Mars research, and it accomplished that. If you're interested in the topic, it does a good job.
This book does that trope that a lot of other popular science books do where it's mostly on topic, interspersed with memoir vignettes. It's not my favorite trope of the genre, but everyone does it. Dr. Johnson seems to downplay her individual role in her own achievements, and makes a point to never call a spade a spade when it comes to the politics of her being one of the two(?) female scientists working on the NASA Mars projects. The way her memoir is told made me feel depressed about how women in science are sometimes treated, in a way I absolutely wouldn't have been if I just read her CV.
And a head's up, there's some details about her C section included. I'm not a fan of the decision to give us so many details about her birth story, and exactly 0 details about getting her lab at Georgetown set up, when the book is about the history of her scientific field. There's room for both!
This book does that trope that a lot of other popular science books do where it's mostly on topic, interspersed with memoir vignettes. It's not my favorite trope of the genre, but everyone does it. Dr. Johnson seems to downplay her individual role in her own achievements, and makes a point to never call a spade a spade when it comes to the politics of her being one of the two(?) female scientists working on the NASA Mars projects. The way her memoir is told made me feel depressed about how women in science are sometimes treated, in a way I absolutely wouldn't have been if I just read her CV.
And a head's up, there's some details about her C section included. I'm not a fan of the decision to give us so many details about her birth story, and exactly 0 details about getting her lab at Georgetown set up, when the book is about the history of her scientific field. There's room for both!
Content Warnings
Minor: Medical content
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