Some little known and long forgotten people
Remember hearing about Corrie ten Boom? She and her father were watchmakers in Holland. During WWII, she saved countless Jews from the Gestapo and was put in a concentration camp once discovered. She lived to tell about it all in her book The Hiding Place. Larry Loftis has written the first biography of ten Boom entitled The Watchmaker’s Daughter. The Wall Street Journal calls it “a story that deserves to be remembered.’
Tremors in the Blood , by Amit Katwala, tells the true story of how three men invented the polygraph. Writing in truly non-fiction form, Katwala introduces the reader to actual criminal cases involving the use of the lie-detector machine, as well as the lives of the three inventors. Readers who like true crime stories will love this book!
Book club discussions of the wildly popular Lessons in Chemistry often suggest that the heroine of the book faced obstacles in the 1950’s that women in science do not face in more recent times. Right? WRONG!! Kate Zernike writes about Nancy Hopkins, a DNA research scientist at MIT. As her efforts yielded groundbreaking results in the field, Hopkings noticed that she was being denied lab space and the tools and personnel she needed to conduct her research. Also, she wasn’t getting her usual teaching assignments, and her male colleagues conspired to adopt her special curriculum as their own and publish it in book form. All of this happened in the 90’s, AFTER the women’s movement. Hopkins rallied other female scientists at MIT to produce the ‘1999 Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT’, a document in which MIT admitted that it had discriminated against its women scientists. The study had a far reaching inpact on gender equity in universities in this country and abroad. Kate Zernike’s has documented this process in an engaging book entitled The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins , MIT and the Fight for Women in Science.
