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TRANSIENT AND STRANGE

Nell Greenfieldboyce

Notes on the Science of Life

An astonishing debut from the beloved NPR science correspondent: intimate essays about the intersection of science and everyday life.

Inspired by Walt Whitman's invocation to the "transient and strange," longtime NPR science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce brings what best-selling essayist Tim Kreider calls her "bright inquiring mind and lively, drily funny voice" to the largest matters of life - birth and death, constancy and impermanence, love and aging. In personal essays both curious and wise, she describes the wildest workings of the natural world, from the echoing truth of a fetal heartbeat and the incredible leap of the humble flea to the eerie power of tornadoes and the otherworldly glint of micrometeorites. Beautifully blending explanatory science, original reporting, and personal experience, she captures the ache of ordinary life: comforting a frightened child, wrestling with potential genetic defects, confronting mortality through a parent's illness. Transient and Strange delves into the places where science touches our lives most intimately, offering resonant insights into both the world around us and the worlds within us. Nell Greenfieldboyce is a science correspondent for National Public Radio. Before joining NPR, she was a science reporter at magazines including U.S. News & World Report and New Scientist, where she received the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists. She lives in Washington, DC.

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Book Published 2024-01-16 by W.W. Norton

Comments

Nell Greenfieldboyce has a writer's respect for beauty, complexity, and mystery, and a reporter's instinctive intolerance for bullshit. Although she is never sentimental, she does harbor her idiosyncratic adamant passions: a spider that builds a web in her window, a fleck of a meteorite worn as a pendant, the infinitesimal marvel that is the flea, her parents' immortal, miraculous toaster. What hope or solace there is in this universe, and in these essays, does not come easily, or cheap - and it's all the more valuable for it.

second serial excerpt: Making Sense of Santa, as a Science Reporter and a Parent - Nell Greenfieldboyce on Reason, Science, and Metaphorical Delights Read more...

...ambitious, sometimes intimate, occasionally painful and always private - but set within the frame of a more public, scientific sensibility. Read more...

NPR Science Correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce has just published her first book, a series of essays titled "Transient and Strange". Scott Brocato recently spoke with her about the book. Read more...

Nell Greenfieldboyce discusses her new book Transient and Strange, the intimacy of the essays and the science that inspired them. Read more...

The title is borrowed from a phrase in a Walt Whitman poem. He surely would be pleased to be linked to Greenfieldboyce's display of inquiry and imagination, inevitability, and possibilities.

NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce's latest report explores her own universe... Read more...

This artful debut essay collection from NPR science correspondent Greenfieldboyce... yields unexpected insights buoyed by evocative prose. Greenfieldboyce dazzles with her auspicious first outing.

NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce considers the "Transient and Strange" of a life in science Read more...

For almost twenty years, Nell Greenfieldboyce's reporting on science, technology, and culture has charmed and enlightened her listeners. In these elegant, unforgettable essays, her inimitable voice guides us into more complex and personal territory, asking the questions that haunt us all.

In a perfect blend of science and memoir, Nell Greenfieldboyce imbues objects of study - meteorites, tornadoes, black holes, fleas - with emotional beauty. Transient and Strange is a deeply relatable account of the pleasures and the terrors of being a woman, being a mother, and being deeply curious about the universe.