Excerpt from Transient and Strange by Nell Greenfieldboyce, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Now, I'm not a scientist, any more than my children are. But it turns out that, like them, and for not dissimilar reasons, I felt compelled to experiment—to essay. While the stories I share in this book mostly deal with common occurrences that many people experience while growing up or parenting—like getting hit on by an older guy during adolescence, considering the possibility of abortion, calming a frightened child—I either experienced them or remember them as someone who has spent decades contemplating the history, culture, and values of the scientific enterprise. Despite what's taught in school about the scientific method, much of scientific inquiry, like poetry, involves play and metaphor and idiosyncratic obsessions and just plain fiddling around with mysterious things, things that are—to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman—transient and strange.

Excerpted from Transient and Strange by Nell Greenfieldboyce. Copyright © 2024 by Nell Greenfieldboyce. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.