“You don’t need to understand chemistry at an advanced level to appreciate the rarity of our situation,” she said.
You get the idea this is a very readable book, funny, and smart in all the right ways, with unexpected juxtapositions (pistachios and spontaneous combustion?) and a main character who doesn’t fit into any box but is wonderful in the world.Įlizabeth is not good at normal friendships but in Calvin she finds love and a kindred spirit. I will credit my father for two things: he could conjure a spontaneous combustion whenever he needed a convenient sign from God.” She shook her head. Normally pistachios are stored under fairly rigid conditions of humidity, temperature, and pressure, but should those conditions be altered, the pistachio’s fat-cleaving enzymes produce free fatty acids that are broken down when the seed takes in oxygen and sheds carbon dioxide. Are you saying-” “Calvin,” she said, reverting to her standard scientific tone, “did you know pistachios are naturally flammable? It’s because of their high fat content. What?” “It’s really hard to ignore someone who shouts, ‘Give me a sign,’ and then something bursts into flame.” “Wait. “I think my father’s talent for spontaneous combustion really made him stand out.” “Wait. Here is a sample of their conversation, and I can’t help thinking I’d like to sit at dinner with them and try to keep up. She falls in love with a fellow scientist, a man both brilliant and slightly mad, as she is. So she makes her name on the telly, teaching cookery as you’ve never known it before – as a science. Elizabeth Zott wants to study abiogenesis for God’s sake, no less than the origins of life, but that goes pear shape because she’s a woman and the very worst obstacles are thrown in her way along with endless casual misogyny. Woman’s liberation in the 1960s has never been so powerfully portrayed as in this book, where a woman is up against the male world of scientific research.
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