Servants of the Map is the title of an excellent collection of short stories by Andrea Barrett. The title story is about a young man mapping high mountain peaks in the Himalayas...but it's about more than that...and then a later story connecting to this first one gives us a view of the wife and daughters who were left back home during his journeys. Barrett is an exceptionally good writer (and I can recommend just about anything she's ever written) whose works generally deal with the intertwining of lives and scientific pursuits.
It makes great companion reading to a piece in another wonderful volume, Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering: No Universal Constants. This one is worth owning if only because the title is so very lovely. Seriously, though, it's a great collection of personal essays by women in science, and there you will find Margaret (Peg) Rees (mentioned in my previous post) talking about her journey into geology and the journeys geology has taken her on. And she discusses how the demands of fieldwork in geology affect the formation and maintenance of relationships back home.
Happy reading, everyone!
2:10:21 PM 
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