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Join us! for this month's Virtual Book Club via Zoom which will discuss this year's NEA Big Read - One Book One Valley selected title "Lab Girl" by Hope Jahren.
Jahren has built three laboratories in which she's studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. She tells about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom's labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and the disappointments, triumphs and exhilarating discoveries of scientific work. Yet at the core of this book is the story of a relationship Jahren forged with Bill, who becomes her lab partner and best friend. Their sometimes rogue adventures in science take them over the Atlantic to the ever-light skies of the North Pole and to tropical Hawaii, where she and her lab currently make their home.

Email Lori Barnes at LBarnes@vailgov.com to receive an invitation to the Zoom meeting.

When Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-author with Charles Darwin on the theory of evolution, came to Colorado in 1887, he wanted an expert to guide him to alpine plant locations. Alice Eastwood (1859-1953), the self-taught high school teacher in Denver, was the best there was. She wrote a guide to the flora of the Denver area in 1890, and, afterward, began extending her field observations to other parts of Colorado and then onward to California. Eastwood became the herbarium curator for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco in 1891 where she remained until she voluntarily retired at the age of 90. Alice is most famous for her daring act of rescuing the type specimens of California plants - those that are the defining ones for a species - from the wreckage and fire of the 1906 earthquake.

Steve Ruskin is an award-winning historian of astronomy, with a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Notre Dame.

He is the author of numerous non-fiction books, articles, chapters, and reviews, including the #1 Amazon Bestseller, 'America's First Great Eclipse.'. He was a visiting researcher at Cambridge University, England, on a grant from the National Science Foundation, and is an alumnus of the LaunchPad Astronomy Workshop. He currently serves as the moderator of HASTRO-L, the long-running history of astronomy listserv, and is on the Board of Advisors for the National Space Science & Technology Institute. A native of Colorado Springs, Colorado, he occasionally writes science fiction and has also been a mountain bike guide on Pikes Peak, and a number of things in between.