Britain has always been a place of innovation, especially when it comes to science. Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are obvious examples. Both left a lasting impact on the field of science, and you’d struggle to find a person who didn’t know about these great men. But famous names can sometimes overshadow other individuals who are also worthy of praise.
At a time when female scientists were almost unheard of, an ingenious young woman named Ada Lovelace completed an ingenious piece of work, proving that imagination is a vital part of scientific innovation.
And yet, for all my nostalgia, I like the way I read now. There are stacks of books in my house that will never be depleted, not just because I’m constantly adding to them—true—but because I simply can’t get to them all, not in this lifetime, not at the slower, more attentive pace at which I now read. Reading is no longer a race that I might win, but a lifelong companion, a dear friend who’s always there for me but never, ever asks for a slice.
Instead, her intensely evocative powers are reserved for things you don’t normally think of as objects of romance: nature, music, friendship, a little tin cup.
This is a vividly written, absorbing memoir of a life filled with triumphs (including her daughter Susan’s own successes as an Olympic gold medal-winning rower) over near-constant adversity. The precise reasons for the continual undermining of her research and academic prestige are left open, though Breaking Through hints that science today suffers because it requires its practitioners to publish papers in numbers rather than merit and to seek grants for safe research, as opposed to risky but potentially groundbreaking work. Quantity not quality has become a career driver.
“Life is short,” she observes. “You don’t want to have regrets that you didn’t get to know a friend because they were different from you, whether that be a person, or an animal, or a vegetable. Try it and see what you think.”
In “Misunderstood Vegetables,” Selengut offers an ethos of redemption and respect, diversity and inclusion, acceptance and love. That might sound like a lot for a book about vegetables, but it’s a book about vegetables beautifully done.