Patently Female by Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek, John Wiley, ÂŁ17.95/$24.95, ISBN 0471023345
I FIND inventions intriguing—I particularly enjoy hearing how and why they came about, and I am often asked why there aren’t more female inventors—so I looked forward to reading this book, but I was generally disappointed.
Some stories—notably those of Teri Pall and Ada Lovelace—are well told, but many seem to be largely myth. And several inventions appear to be grossly over-hyped. Many stories appear entirely without dates, and could have happened at any time in the past 150 years.
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Worst of all, the stories are told in a relentlessly folksy style, so that the technology is almost never clearly explained, and the science is frequently sloppy enough to be plain wrong, as in “Cold temperature kills most bacteria” and “an atom so rich in helium”.
I also feel that the continual aggressive feminism gets in the way of the stories, and I do not believe that a book like this needs a foreword, a preface, and an introduction, as well as two pages of acknowledgements, before you even get to chapter one.