For much of her career, Nell Greenfieldboyce has written about science for NPR, reporting on a range of topics, among them a giant collective of octopuses, asteroid dust, the color of dinosaur eggs and signs of life on Mars. In Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life (Norton, $27.99, 9780393882346), Greenfieldboyce adds the personal to the scientific, threading the two together to create a memoir in essays.
In the book’s opening essay, “The Symbol of a Tornado,” Greenfieldboyce recounts a phase that most parents will recognize: the quest to calm her preschool-age son’s nighttime fears. When he first asks her about tornadoes, she eagerly lays out the facts—a misstep that only intensifies his anxiety. The essay braids substantial reporting on the history and science of tornadoes with her earnest fumbling as she tries to help her kids feel secure in an insecure world.
Some of Transient and Strange’s essays hew closer to science writing—in one, she charts the scientific community’s resistance to accepting black holes—while others go more deeply into personal essay territory, excavating pieces of her youth. The sweet, quirky “Automatic Beyond Belief” ties an ancient toaster to her parents’ faith, the stability of her childhood and her predictions about what her children will remember about their younger years. The 50-page essay that closes the book, “My Eugenics Project,” is a standout. It describes Greenfieldboyce’s strategies for coping with the knowledge that she and her husband might pass a devastating genetic mutation on to their children, her obsessive quest to solve this problem and how it has affected her marriage and family.
Throughout, Greenfieldboyce doesn’t spare herself or put on a wise affect; we see and relate to her foibles and fumbling. Transient and Strange is a book that you can read as the memoir of a woman who’s measuring the shape of life at its midpoint, and also as a series of essays riffing on a range of science-related topics. Either way, it’s a thoughtful, heartfelt and idiosyncratic collection.
