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Patently Female by Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek, John Wiley, 拢17.95/$24.95, ISBN 0471023345

I FIND inventions intriguing鈥擨 particularly enjoy hearing how and why they came about, and I am often asked why there aren鈥檛 more female inventors鈥攕o I looked forward to reading this book, but I was generally disappointed.

Some stories鈥攏otably those of Teri Pall and Ada Lovelace鈥攁re well told, but many seem to be largely myth. And several inventions appear to be grossly over-hyped. Many stories appear entirely without dates, and could have happened at any time in the past 150 years.

Worst of all, the stories are told in a relentlessly folksy style, so that the technology is almost never clearly explained, and the science is frequently sloppy enough to be plain wrong, as in 鈥淐old temperature kills most bacteria鈥� and 鈥渁n atom so rich in helium鈥�.

I also feel that the continual aggressive feminism gets in the way of the stories, and I do not believe that a book like this needs a foreword, a preface, and an introduction, as well as two pages of acknowledgements, before you even get to chapter one.