“Fieldwork Fail: The Messy Side of Science” by Jim Jourdane

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Rating: 4/5 Stars

An excellent and funny book about the various ways scientists fail in their endeavours while collecting or observing things in the field. The idea for the book started as a hashtag on Twitter which then became a Kickstarter project which I was happy to back.

The public might have the view that scientists are emotionless robots that collect data out in the field. As the book shows, scientists in the field are only human and tend to do silly things like gluing themselves to dangerous animals or standing on an ant’s nest while making observations.

Yet the book is more than just a catalogue of silly things done. After laughing over a fieldwork fail, you then get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just what the scientist was hoping to do. This lets you appreciate the kind of work being done by scientists in the hopes of understanding more about the natural world.

A very entertaining book, good for laughs and for educating the public about the kind of work scientists do in the field.

Book read from 2018/05/29 to 2018/05/29