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Her Space, Her Time - Shohini Ghose ****

There are a good number of books out now celebrating female scientists - in Her Space, Her Time, Shohini Ghose, a physics professor at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario, takes in a range of astronomy and astrophysics-related areas covering major contributions made by women since Victorian times.

Once upon a time, the only name in here that would probably have rung a bell is Marie Curie. To be honest, this is probably still true for most of the public (though, to be fair, they would equally be hard pressed to name male physicists other than Newton and Einstein). However, thanks to the seismic shift in recent years, if you read popular science, you will also be familiar with the likes of Annie Jump Cannon, Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, Henrietta Leavitt and Lise Meitner at the very least.

What's good about Ghose's book is that it also brings in a range of others who are less well known from Anna Draper to Wu Chien-Shiung. Each of those mentioned has made a significant contribution and Ghose gives us a good summary of their work in an approachable fashion. There are some excellent, rarely-told stories here.

My only problem with books like this - and, to be honest, any that move away from a handful of leading names and try to dig down into the broader contributions of scientists, is that it can become simply too large a cast to handle. I know scientific endeavours since the 1930s have tended to be undertaken by quite large groups, but the reality is that as readers we need a relatively small number of scientists to focus on: otherwise it's hard to get any feel for any individual's story.

Ghose achieves a reasonable balance in this respect, but having a theme like does mean there are a couple of dozen names to get your head around, rather than looking at one major piece of science, or focusing on the life of a small number of scientists. Even so, it is definitely one of the better titles to take this kind of wide-ranging overview.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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