Summer Reading Recommendations - Two from Lisa Wan

Recently the Library posted a video on our YouTube Channel with staff recommendations for summer reading.  Here's the "why?" behind some of those recommendations, as well as for other books that didn't make it into the video.

Lisa Wan is our Tarleton - Fort Worth Librarian.  Here are her recommendations, both of which are available as e-books in our OverDrive collection:

"A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, takes the reader into the fictional life of a Russian gentleman imprisoned in a world-class Russian hotel during the Russian Revolution.  I enjoyed the fictionalized glimpse of old world life in Russia through descriptions of the hotel life, but the real gem for me was growing to know the characters more deeply and enjoying their interactions. The book’s ending is intriguing, leaving my friends and I in disagreement about the conclusion.

I read The Only Woman in the Room, by Eileen Pollack, because I know that women still struggle to belong in primarily male-dominated fields.  Pollack’s book is her biographical story as one of the first two women to earn a degree in physics from Yale University. Pollack describes her encounters, not only with learning physics, but also with, literally, being the only woman room in a the classroom full of men.  Pollack’s unbarred description of the struggles of a female in a STEM [science - technology - engineering - math] field in the 1970s gave me perspective on the subtle prejudices women face when working in a male dominated field, yet encouraged me with her will to overcome."