65 Books Like A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman

While there has been some controversy about the science in Simard’s book, there’s no doubt that it’s a great read that juxtaposes Simard’s personal life with her scientific life.

I was drawn to her personal story, which takes place in both government and academic spheres. I cried with her when her brother passed away, and I was proud with her when her daughter said she might want to study forestry at university.

The mix of science and memoir works well in this book, showing how the two are inextricably entwined. I was impressed by how hard Simard worked to keep her family together, particularly when she was a professor at UBC in Vancouver, and they were living in Nelson.  

I liked that Jahren told the unvarnished truth of her experience in academia; like Zimmerman, she also shares how academia treats pregnant people. 

She talks about training the next generation of scientists, which is one of the main goals of the scientific enterprise.

Though I wasn’t impressed with the hazing ritual she and her lab manager had for new students in the lab, I did appreciate the excellent writing and well-paced narrative. Jahren is a stunning writer, and her book is neatly separated into sections about a tree, followed by a chapter about life mimicking that tree. 

I loved this book because it deftly communicated the author’s love of botany and the challenges facing it as a science.

I was introduced to a whole new world: that of plants and their role in our ecosystems. I also enjoyed the story about Zimmerman’s fieldwork in Guyana and how she wasn’t really cut out for fieldwork, but was good at organizing things for their trip home.

I recommend this book if you want to get inside knowledge of the university, including how poorly women are often treated—especially when they are pregnant and/or nursing. Zimmerman also brings to life the world of botany and how it’s becoming a dying science just when we need it the most. 

I found that the length of Colwell’s career has given her a depth of experience that shines a light on just how bad science was for women even in the 1950s and 60s.

We sometimes forget that women have been discriminated against for decades, even as they’ve fought hard-won battles to be treated fairly. I appreciated Colwell’s detailed narrative of her science, too, and how the challenge of finding a solution to a scientific problem led to much celebration when that solution was found.

I also liked that she told stories of other women in science, like Nancy Hopkins at MIT, who worked tirelessly for equality for women at her institution. 

As I read this book of 37 individual stories, I felt so pleased that these leading astronomers, all women, had taken the time to write and publish their stories about the obstacles they had faced in scientific research and recognition due to gender prejudice. It was tough but compelling to read out the only woman in a physics class having belittling names called out to her as she entered the room and men who took credit for women’s work.

My astronomer kid self adored this book. My adult self was astonished by this accomplished work of nonfiction. Dual narratives take the stage on each page. First, the star that is trying so hard to be born, and second, the girl Cecilia Payne who tries so hard to understand the natural world. As the star goes through various phases, so does Cecilia, who longs to make scientific discoveries. Brilliantly told, the stories of the star and Cecilia parallel each other. I found myself going back and forth between them, marveling at inset pencil and walnut ink illustrations that never overpowered the text.

As a girl, I, too, loved natural science and wished this book had been published in my day. I might have been prepared to carve my way into a man’s world, as Cecilia did. Back matter fills in how stars are born—Cecilia’s discovery—plus a timeline of her amazing… show more.

I live in the world of words. This book plunged me delightfully into the world of images—photographs of distant galaxies and of artworks inspired by those photographs. The subject of the book is the pioneering astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, whose patient, painstaking scrutiny of astronomical photographs at Harvard 100 years ago led her to discover the patterns in the behavior of Cepheid variable stars that opened the doors to the mapping of the universe.

The author of the book is Anna Von Mertens, a visual artist working with charcoal and textiles who juxtaposes the story of Leavitt’s breakthrough, the work of other women like Leavitt at the Harvard College Observatory, the images that provided the foundation for Leavitt’s thinking, and Von Mertens’ own inspired riffs on those images.

Thinking about this book, I’m reminded of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” a phrase originally coined by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and which is often interpreted to mean that women ought to rebel in order to be remembered – although Ulrich’s original intent was actually to encourage us to appreciate the quiet impact that billions of ordinary women have made upon history.

In The Stargazer’s Sister, Caroline Herschel, the often-ignored sister of famous astronomer William Herschel, is a shy and soft-spoken soul, who starts out assisting with her brother’s work and ends up becoming an accomplished astronomer in her own right.

A beautiful and atmospheric read, this book is a great reminder that women’s contributions to science throughout history often consisted of unglamorous, behind-the-scenes work – but that doesn’t mean that they should be credited any less for their skill and ingenuity! 

A fascinating account of the remarkable lives—and wives—of several Russian aristocrats who were sentenced to prison, hard labor, and exile in Siberia after participating in a failed attempt to overthrow Tsar Nicholas I in December of 1825. Eleven wives (two of them princesses) of those unfortunate noblemen voluntarily followed their husbands to Siberia, even though the women were forced to give up their own lands, titles, and children back in Moscow and St. Petersburg. 

The Princess of Siberia focuses on one family in particular, the Volkonskys, who settled in Irkutsk, the capital of eastern Siberia, after Prince Sergei Volkonsky's years of hard labor in the silver mines in Russia's Far East. His wife, Maria—a princess from a distinguished family in European Russia—stayed with him throughout his imprisonment and exile in Siberia. She later became known in Irkutsk as "The Princess of Siberia" because of her many charitable works and cultural… show more.

An intrepid traveler and talented journalist, George Kennan (1845-1924), is better known for his second book about Russia, published in 1891: Siberia and the Exile System, a two-volume study of Siberian penal colonies and exile conditions. But his first book, published 20 years earlier, is among my favorites about Russia. In his introduction to a 1968 reprint of Tent Life in Siberia, American author Larry McMurtry called it "one of the most appealing classics of nineteenth-century travel [writing]."

In 1865, 20-year-old Kennan, an accomplished telegrapher, was hired by Western Union to survey part of Siberia for the possible construction of a telegraph line across Russia, connecting Alaska to Europe. This memoir of his two years in Siberia is a rousing tale of his adventures among the native people and the Russian settlers he encountered there, as well as the many hardships that he and his partner endured, from… show more.