This book was interesting -- especially as a female science consultant inspired by the movie Contact and Jill Tarter's work. The details of Jill's educational and occupational struggles resonated with me. I was fascinated by the details on the SETI program and its history -- especially the struggle to keep it going. However, the book jumped around a bit much and went into what seemed like extraneous detail on many occasions. Overall, a good read, but lengthy in some places (which is why it took so long to read).

Four stars is a little generous for this competent but somewhat clumsy biography - but I prefer to round up the stars for a book that tries to give an honest and still exciting account of a woman in science of this caliber. Tarter is a fascinating figure not just in her own right, but also as a representative of a certain era of American academic scientists, and of women making their way up through a heavily male-dominated field. The kind of challenges Tarter faced in her early career are (thankfully) almost unimaginable now - but some of the challenges that she and her female colleagues still face are unfortunately not set to disappear any time soon (hi there scientist mothers, don't expect to sleep any time before tenure - and don't even think about your child getting sick and needing to be picked up early).

I have a pet peeve about biographies (and to some extent memoirs) published in the last five years - why do they all believe they need to jump around in the subject's life rather than tell the story chronologically? It seems to originate in some sort of mistaken belief that shifts back and forth will make the narrative more dynamic. To me at least, it really doesn't. But I also understand the difficulty of telling a story like this, which ultimately doesn't lead up to a great "success moment" the way so many biographies do. There's no redemption moment or happy ending awaiting the reader toward the end of Tarter's professional life, because obviously no aliens have been found as of yet. So Scoles has instead tried to make particular moments pop by placing them in an unusual order. I'm not really sure what the answer is to that difficulty, but I still think a straightforward beginning-middle-end structure would've been worth trying.