Several books.

(I really, really need to photograph the new Clapotis and put it up here, but so far I've not worn anything appropriate to put it over...maybe for tomorrow morning if I can get moving early enough).

I've got three more books I finished to discuss.
(This is part of my ongoing "Books Completed" topic, just so I can look back at the end of the year and remind myself that I did, in fact, get a decent amount of reading done).

Two of these books were read over break; the third I started while coming back but didn't even TRY reading once I transferred to the Hell-Bus. (One thing I don't think I mentioned: they played movies ALL NIGHT LONG on the bus. And the lowest level of volume was louder, even with earplugs, than what I set my television on. So I now know the basic plotlines of "Boiling Point," "I Am Legend," "John Q.," "Remember the Titans" [which was actually pretty enjoyable and was the one showed after I stopped trying to sleep about 8 am Monday morning] and "National Treasure")

But anyway. On to the books:

"Death of a Dreamer," M.C. Beaton. This is a "cozy" type mystery, featuring Hamish MacBeth, a policeman in the small town of Lochdubh. A strange woman moves in, a charming man who is an artist arrives, but things start to go downhill from there. Part of the story is sort of a meditation on living alone and being seen as an "old maid" and whether or not one can accept that. (MacBeth was on the brink of asking a woman - a woman he barely knew! - to marry him because he feared he was approaching "old maid" type lifestyle. The upshot being, after some further events, that living alone really isn't so bad).

Or at least that's what I got out of it. Simple story (though the murder was not who I anticipated it would be) but nice "local color" type setting.

"Finding Darwin's God" by Kenneth Miller. Interesting book. It is written by a man who is a cell biologist and a devout Roman Catholic, and in the first half of the book he provides examples supporting the scientific process of evolution (including some I wasn't familiar with) and making the argument that these processes, though rooted in the natural world, in no way lead to us having to deny the existence of God. He also takes apart some of the non-scientific arguments against evolution and provides evidence as to why they don't work, and why, in some cases, it could even be argued that, taken to their logical conclusions, they do more harm to faith than good for it. In the second half he makes more of a philosophical case for faith in God, basically saying that being a scientist doesn't mean you have to reject the existence of a spiritual realm or try to explain away certain occurrences which he argues are best accepted as miracles.

He also makes the argument - based on some of the stuff from quantum physics - that at the tiniest and most fundamental level the universe is kind of not-perfectly-knowable, that there are cases were (he argues) the Hand of God could enter and influence things a certain way - he talks a lot about the experiments that show you can't always predict what particles will do and from there makes the argument in favor of the existence of something beyond matter. The interesting thing is that his arguments are very similar to things I thought after I first started reading quantum physics; he states it better and argues it more eloquently than I could but it's kind of oddly reassuring to see that I'm not "crazy" for thinking that quantum mechanics could convince one of the existence of a plane beyond the mere physical.

So, ultimately his conclusion is: you need not reject the scientific process of evolution nor must you reject faith in a Higher Power (and not just some kind of vague, "God can be anything, man" type faith: as I said, he's a Roman Catholic and has quite orthodox beliefs).

It will be interesting to see what my student who is reading it for a readings class will have to say.

The third book was my favorite. It's called "Women in the Field" and is about early female naturalists (mostly people in the 19th century). It talks about some of their interests, some of their contributions, and gives short biographies of 20 or so of the women. A few I had known of before: Agnes Chase (the most famous agrostologist) and Rachel Carson being two. The interesting thing about this book was the biographical detail - how some of the women had to live when they were out in the field (Ynes Mexia spent months living under a palm-thatched roof - no walls, just a roof - while doing field work in South America).

One of the other things that strikes me - a lot of the women weren't married. Or if they were, it was to husbands who were in the same or similar fields. I wonder if it's still difficult for a woman scientist to be married to a guy who either isn't as supportive of her, or has a career outside of the sciences. (In a few cases, the women were widowed early. Or they were married but their husbands "disappeared" - probably left them - but they continued to use his name and the "Mrs." status).

One of the changes that is striking: there was a lot more sexism in those days (at least in some cases). Women had to work a lot harder to be accepted by scientific societies or get careers in academia (Or, more commonly: have a man who was willing to stick up for them and push their cause). However, though there's a lot less sexism now, I do think there's another -ism we see in academia: Ageism. A lot of the women in the book STARTED their careers in their mid to late 30s, some even as late as their 50s, and they were successful. And I remember feeling a little "old" and "out of place" when I was in grad school APPROACHING 30. And from talking with a few other women in the sciences, I'm not the only one who's felt that. I think it would be harder for a woman in her late 30s or early 40s to approach most graduate schools and be taken seriously, or be treated as an equal to the "kids" in their 20s - because I KNOW people would be thinking, "But when she's out of here, she will be XX years old...how much more useful career does she think she has left?" And that's very discouraging.

(I think it's worse at the big research schools than the smaller ones, but then most of the "inhumanities" students experience tend to be worse at the big research schools)

So while we've made progress in some ways, there's still progress to be made in other areas.

I WILL say one positive and very cheering note was reading about women who basically changed career focus in their 30s and 40s and 50s, who learned about a whole new group of organisms, who made big contributions to the field in a time when many of their sisters would be considered to be coming towards the end of their "useful" lives. Gives me hope that maybe I WILL be able to learn the dang lichens after all, and I WILL be able to do something useful and publish something good in the coming years. I think there's so much emphasis in academic culture these days on the idea of the "young Turk" or "iconoclastic young Ph.D." that people who are mid-career or later kind of get overlooked, that people may look at them and go, "Well, they have tenure now, so we can't expect anything more good out of them."

And there's a lot of support out there - both career and emotional support for people who are "new" in their jobs; it's kind of like they expect the people who've been doing it for a while to have it all figured out - or they don't think they're deserving of any help or attention any more.

And that's a very discouraging thing. I do think ageism is a big problem in some areas of our society; we may just not think about it.