Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor

by Hali Felt

Her maps of the ocean floor have been called "one of the most remarkable achievements in modern cartography", yet no one knows her name. Soundings is the story of the enigmatic, unknown woman behind one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. Before Marie Tharp, geologist and gifted draftsperson, the whole world, including most of the scientific community, thought the ocean floor was a vast expanse of nothingness. In 1948, at age 28, Marie walked into the newly formed geophysical lab at Columbia University and practically demanded a job. The scientists at the lab were all male; the women who worked there were relegated to secretary or assistant. Through sheer willpower and obstinacy, Marie was given the job of interpreting the soundings (records of sonar pings measuring the ocean's depths) brought back from the ocean-going expeditions of her male colleagues. The marriage of artistry and science behind her analysis of this dry data gave birth to a major work: the first comprehensive map of the ocean floor, which laid the groundwork for proving the then-controversial theory of continental drift. When combined, Marie's scientific knowledge, her eye for detail and her skill as an artist revealed not a vast empty plane, but an entire world of mountains and volcanoes, ridges and rifts, and a gateway to the past that allowed scientists the means to imagine how the continents and the oceans had been created over time. Just as Marie dedicated more than twenty years of her professional life to what became the Lamont Geological Observatory, engaged in the task of mapping every ocean on Earth, she dedicated her personal life to her great friendship with her co-worker, Bruce Heezen. Partners in work and in many ways, partners in life, Marie and Bruce were devoted to one another as they rose to greater and greater prominence in the scientific community, only to be envied and finally dismissed by their beloved institute. They went on together, refining and perfecting their work and contributing not only to humanity's vision of the ocean floor, but to the way subsequent generations would view the Earth as a whole. With an imagination as intuitive as Marie's, brilliant young writer Hali Felt brings to vivid life the story of the pioneering scientist whose work became the basis for the work of others scientists for generations to come.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biography, History, Womens, Geology, Stem

352 pages, Hardcover

First published July 17, 2012

About the author

Hali Felt teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa and has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and Portland Writers in the Schools. In the past, she has reported for the Columbia Journalism Review and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. She currently lives in Pittsburgh.

Reviews

[Marie-Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never heard of Mary Tharp until I read this book. How come? I have plenty of college education and have read and studied all my life, and should have heard about here before then. The story of her life is fascinating, exciting, inspirational and sad at the same time. By reading the last chapters in the book, I was constantly thinking about how much more she could have accomplished with more acknowledgement and support of her work from the scientific community before she retired. Even though her name is not a household word, her work (a map) was included in an exhibit called American Treasures from the Library of Congress (1997). She was also recognized as one of the 4 greatest cartographers of the 20th century.
The author, Hali Felt, did a great job of researching vast amounts of primary and secondary resources, and putting it together in this story. I found this book through a GoodReads "giveaway" and is to date the best book free book I've read. I can highly recommend it. Not only do you get a look at the life of a scientist and what it takes to fund and persevere in groundbreaking research and discovery, but you also get a fascinating view of the history of oceanography and related sciences at a crucial time in their histories: the first mapping of the ocean floors, the discovery of the mid-Atlantic ridge and the genesis of the continental drift theory. A great read!

[Julia stopperan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️
Very informative!

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new addition to one of my favorite unofficial sub-genres of nonfiction--chronicles of obsessions--as well as a fresh, if problematic, take on biography and science writing, Soundings tells the story of a important, neglected, hard-driving woman who changed the way the world's population conceptualizes the planet we all live on.

Felt reverses many of her precursors' treatment of the particular scientific moment that oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp was most productive: She reinserts Tharp into the context of the revolution in geologic studies precipitated by the discovery of the mid-Atlantic Rift and, subsequently, plate tectonics--a development traditionally attributed to men she worked with. The biography is incomplete because Felt was never able to interview Tharp herself, and the cartographer was idiosyncratically private and modest. To supplement missing information, the biography is interwoven with Felt's experiences writing the book and uncovering the facts Tharp's life--a storytelling tactic usually effective, usually interesting.

One of the overarching messages of the book is that the oceans' floors have been and remain mysterious. Just as much of Tharp's enigmatic personality is hidden under waves and scrolls of old maps, the seabed is still vastly unexplored--yet crucial to environmental challenges bearing down on us.

[Tasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent book but not my 'type'. I am glad that someone has given this woman, Marie Tharp, a voice and she now gets the recognition due her. The writing was a bit irksome at times as the author puts in her own ideas of what happened in some scenes and dialogue. Felt does admit this in the intro so it is not a surprise and it is due to the fact that she did not actually have anyone to interview, all her information is gathered second hand. So, while I understand her dilemma and her attempts to work with what she has, it just didn't work well for me. Also, she seemed to shift often between present and past tense which annoyed me.

Another reason I was not enthralled was the topic itself. I did learn some interesting facts about geology and oceanography, while generally interesting, it did not hold my interest with all the details. Someone with more interest in these areas may find the book more appealing.

[Gillian Brownlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, rounded up.

It felt a little romanticized to me, but the author made it seem like Tharp would have wanted it that way. I'm always happy to read about women in science, even if knowing that they were ignored in their heyday is really depressing.

Also, her maps were incredible. I looked them up while reading this, and they are stunningly beautiful. I'm glad this book exists.

[Leigh Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

At age 28, geologist Marie Tharpe began work at Columbia University as an assistant (read: glorified secretary). By the end of her tenure there in 1982, she and her colleague Bruce Heezen had mapped the ocean floor using sonar readings and, in the process, identified "the world-girdling rift valley" that laid the foundation for proving the theory of plate tectonics. Part race-to-the-finish tale of 20th-century scientific discovery and part unconventional romance of Tharpe and Heezen, Soundings makes the overlooked story of a scientist and her work crackle with energy, as well as tackles some frustrating questions. Heezen was given credit for his discoveries, while Tharpe was often completely ignored due to her gender. The author, Hali Felt, seems to take some solace in believing that Tharpe found satisfaction in the work and may (heavy, heavy emphasis on that "may") not have needed the recognition of others. Regardless, it's a real tragedy that Tharpe died before reading this literary tribute. Felt is a playful, wildly thoughtful writer, who can extrapolate meanings about our view of the past from outdated scientific terms like "uniformitarianism" and "catastrophism," and she addresses "the ins and outs of alarm clocks, washrags and frying eggs; light tables, ink pens and smooth sheets of white paper; erasers, fathoms and final drafts; lunch and more work and breathing and cooking dinner and waiting until the last minute before darkness to turn on the electric lights" that illuminate the text with the kind of evocative details that make the story of a real life so real.

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/blogs/index.html...

[Lew Watts · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had just completed my PhD in geology in 1977, the year in which the World Ocean Floor Panorama of Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen was published, and our department was one of the first to buy it. And so, reading this fascinating story of its genesis, and of the key role played by Ms Tharp against many hurdles and gender prejudices, was a revelation in many ways. By the time I started my geological studies, plate tectonics was largely accepted, and one of the first papers I read was by Robert Dietz and John Holden from 1970, a major work which, oddly, is not mentioned or referenced in "Soundings." In fact, I found Hari Felt's summary of the major breakthroughs somewhat selective, and I wish there had been more on the (later) consequences of the discovery of plate tectonics, many of which were and still are profound. These omissions are the price to be paid for balancing science with the life story of Marie Tharp and her relationship with Bruce Heezen (who, by the way, must have been an extremely difficult faculty member to manage). What this book does well is to show how difficult it was for a woman to gain recognition for truly ground-breaking work in the 1950s-1970s—I only wish things were different today.

[Paul Mcfarland · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the latest in a number of long overdue books that recognize the women who, assisted in, shared in, or in many cases made, fundamental scientific discoveries.

Marie Tharp devoted her life to the study of the ocean floor. A region that was less understood than the face of the moon. She took strings of data obtained from scores of observations by vessels of many nations and put them together into a map. The ability to see this data at a glance on a map changed geology forever. The current understanding of plate tectonics and continental drift comes directly from the study of her meticulous rendering of this data.

Pull up Google maps and take a look at any see bed. This woman mapped 90% of what you are looking at. On top of that she until very recently – after her death by the way – got very little credit for it.

This is a very good book. It tells in great detail the life of a brilliant woman and just what “following your dream” used to entail if you happened to be born female.

I recommend this book very strongly to anyone who has an interest in science or the history of social change.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this book for book club and really wanted to like it. We all thought we were going to like it, but no one really did. Conversational tone is weird with all the scientific information, and the pseudo-fiction parts are meh.

[Judi]

Maria Tharp was a unique woman. She needed to be to work with the men who controlled the academic world in which she thrived. Soundings is her story of the sacrifices she made - both personally and professionally to do the work she was called to do.

I found this book to be both too much and not enough. I wanted to know more about how Marie worked to gain the position and notoriety she earned, what she felt about the political structures that defined her success, and how she put up with the blatant discrimination. I could have done with less of the author's tangential imaginings of scenes and sharing of personal insights. I found them distracting.

We owe so much to Marie Tharp. It's a shame that more people don't know about her. Soundings is a good introduction to her work.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hali Felt did a thorough job of researching a complicated history and scientific processes to reveal the story of Marie Tharp. Highly recommend.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story of a strong woman taking on a man’s world in the ‘50s. Oceans, geology, the art of maps, discovery, adventure and more.

[Jacki · Rating 3 out of 5]

*Check out http://www.infinitereads.com for other reviews and sundry thoughts!*

Biography readers who love discovering stories of fascinating, historically important figures should rush to find a copy of Soundings, Hali Felt's astute reconstruction of the life of Marie Tharp.

In 1948, when Marie Tharp went to work as a draftsperson at Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory, scientists viewed advocates of continental drift with the sort of skepticism usually reserved for UFO sightings. No one believed, or even wanted to believe, that Earth's continents were moving. At that time, the Lamont Observatory owned the largest collection of oceanic data in the world, including the records of soundings, a procedure that measures oceanic depth. Tharp, brilliant and independent in a society that valued neither quality in its women, came to work at Lamont having already fought a hard battle for an education in the sciences and a career. Barred from fieldwork due to her gender and relegated to drafting maps under men her junior in both age and education, Tharp nonetheless made a startling contribution to the world of earth sciences. While interpreting soundings into oceanic cartography, Tharp discovered the Mid-Oceanic Ridges, an underwater mountain range that proved the theory of continental drift to an astonished scientific community.

Felt writes much as early oceanic cartographers worked, attempting to sound the depths of Tharp's life and create a detailed picture from cold data. While historical accounts show Tharp as a self-contained and outwardly unemotional woman, the topography of her life contained mountains and valleys created by the impact of her mother's early death, her fight for acceptance in a man's world and her unorthodox relationship with Bruce Nezeen, her partner and lover, whose power struggle with Lamont's administration would turn Tharp's career into a bargaining chip. Tharp's private nature leaves Felt with a skeleton of facts she fleshes out both by using her finely tuned intuition and by encouraging the reader's sympathy and imagination.

Felt's skill revives Marie Tharp, finding the shape of an intelligent, passionate woman's personality, the political machinations of the Cold War scientific community and an underwater world where "steaming hot springs resemble ladles of consommé." Felt re-creates scenes as though they were movie montages, depicting Tharp's race to produce a map of the Indian Ocean for the scientific community. While she takes a necessary amount of poetic license, Felt's mission is not to embroider or alter Tharp's essence, but to discover it, and she succeeds in this powerful portrait of a woman so driven that society could not stop her from changing the world.


***This review originally appeared in Shelf Awareness Readers Edition. Sign up for this free and awesome newsletter at http://www.shelf-awareness.com for the latest news and reviews! This review refers to an ARC provided by Shelf Awareness.***

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marie Tharp grew up a geologist's daughter, a background that eventually found her mapping the world's oceans at a time when women simply didn't do science. Kept off the research vessels for years because of a maritime superstition about women on board, she turned the huge volumes of data generated by postwar soundings into coherent maps of the ocean, providing the basis for general acceptance of tectonic plate theory and continental drift. Content to remain relatively obscure, her name appeared but little in contemporaneous publications (even in things she actually had contributed to with her partner in science, Bruce Heezen). She is arguably therefore on a par with Rosalind Franklin as women whose contributions were unjustly overlooked. (Franklin's X-ray crystallography showed the double helix nature of DNA, but which Watson, Crick, and Wilkins published and took credit for.)

The author's task in this book is to sift through the enormous quantity of material Tharp left behind and weave a coherent narrative. Hali Felt does a good job of this up to the death of Heezen; but thereafter it feels too much like Felt is just padding out to reach a word count. Do we really need to know so much about her wardrobe? The late chapters could be excised in their entirety with no loss to the whole. As others have written, this would make a good chapter or series of chapters in another book on scientific history.

[Rrshively · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very informative book about the life of Marie Tharp who mapped the ocean floor, noticed the Atlantic rift, and influenced the scientific world to discover plate tectonics. All of the information was important, but it reads like a non-fiction autobiography which is a little more of a slog for me to read. Marie was so happy to be working on this important map work when so many qualified woman graduates in science were relegated to be nothing more than secretaries. However, she never was allowed on a research ship because a woman was considered bad luck. This from supposed scientists! She was often ignored or downplayed. Many times her name wasn't mentioned in articles describing the results of her work. She worked closely with Bruce Heezen who gathered the data on the ships. He sometimes got credit for the work they did, but both of them were sometimes ignored partly because of university department politics and competition with other oceanographers. She was skilled in both art and science which made her perfect for the job she did. This is yet another story of a woman whose contribution was ignored because of her gender. If you ever see a colored map of the bottom of the ocean with its ridges and rifts, it might be a copy of one of those she made.

[Dianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick browse through this fascinating story last night - another brillian woman of science whom we should all know. The author discovered the story of Marie Tharp while reading the wonderful end-of-year NYT obit magazine. Marie created the first complete map of our oceans' floor during the 20 years from 1948 - 1968, working with colleague and lover Bruce Heezen in the Lamont Geological Observatory at Columbia U. A quote: "When combined, Marie's scientific knowledge, her eye for detail, and her skill as an artist revealed not a vast empty plane but an entire world of mountains and volcanoes, ridges and rifts, and a gateway to the past that allowed scientists the means to imagine how the continents and the oceans had been created over time." "Her maps of the ocean floor have been called one of the most remarkable achievements of modern cartography, yet no one knows her name." This is a feast for map lovers like me.....

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the same article in the Jan 2007 New York Times as the author of this book. It sparked a curiosity that I tried to full with on-line research. Marie became a scientific hero of mine and I was angry that her role was not acknowledged in textbooks. I am so glad Ms. Felt did the research to write this book. It is clear, from the end notes, that the book was meticulously researched. Even the source of the imagined scenes is explained. While it is clear the author is not a geologist, she has done a good job of covering the historical aspects of the plate tectonic revolution. What is most important is that she clearly articulates Marie Tharp's role. It is too bad Marie's cintributions have been marginalized by most of those who have written before.

I hope someone takes on the task of writing the life of Inge Lehman, another scientific hero of mine.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I teach 6th grade Earth Science. I wanted to read this book because my students learn about plate tectonics. I have shared some of the tidbits I learned from reading this book with my students. Marie Tharp seems to have been a fascinating woman. I wish I had paid more attention to her (or at least known about her) while she was still alive. I understand that Marie did not leave much a paper trail behind to provide insight into her as a person. The author does a good job of relating the facts. I do not care for the parts where the author imagines what Marie felt like or thought at certain times. Those passages were just weird. Anyone who teaches science (any branch) or is interested in the nature/history of science or is interested in female pioneers would appreciate this book.

[Sarah Jensen]

Book Review: Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt

Introduction

In Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor, Hali Felt presents a captivating biography of Marie Tharp, a pioneering geologist and oceanographic cartographer whose contributions fundamentally transformed our understanding of the ocean floor. Through meticulous research and engaging prose, Felt illuminates Tharp’s life, her groundbreaking work, and the challenges she faced as a woman in a male-dominated field. This biography not only highlights Tharp’s scientific achievements but also serves as a commentary on gender and representation in science.

Content Overview

The narrative begins with Tharp’s early life and education, detailing her fascination with geography and science. Felt effectively contextualizes Tharp’s upbringing in the Midwest during the early 20th century, a period when women were often discouraged from pursuing careers in the sciences. The author describes how Tharp’s early experiences, including her passion for mapping and her exposure to natural landscapes, shaped her career trajectory.

Central to the biography is Tharp’s collaboration with Bruce Heezen, a prominent geologist. Together, they embarked on an ambitious project to map the ocean floor, utilizing sonar technology that was revolutionary at the time. Felt meticulously details their process, highlighting Tharp’s analytical skills and innovative thinking, which allowed her to produce detailed and scientifically robust maps. The book emphasizes her role in discovering the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and her contributions to the theory of plate tectonics, which would later have monumental implications for the field of geology.

Felt also addresses the systemic barriers Tharp faced, including gender discrimination and the struggle for recognition in a predominantly male academic environment. The narrative poignantly reveals how Tharp’s work was often overshadowed by her male counterparts, and how she navigated the complexities of her professional relationships. Despite these challenges, her persistence and dedication ultimately led to her recognition as a key figure in oceanography.

Critical Analysis

Felt’s writing is both accessible and rich with detail, enabling readers to engage with the scientific concepts without feeling overwhelmed. The integration of personal anecdotes and historical context adds depth to Tharp’s story, making it relatable to a contemporary audience. The author effectively showcases the interplay between Tharp’s personal life and her professional achievements, underscoring the sacrifices and triumphs that defined her journey.

One of the book’s strengths lies in its emphasis on the collaborative nature of scientific discovery. Felt highlights the importance of Tharp’s partnership with Heezen, illustrating how their combined expertise led to groundbreaking advancements. However, the narrative also critiques the male-dominated culture of science that often relegated women to the background, raising important questions about recognition and equity in scientific fields.

While Soundings is thorough in its exploration of Tharp’s life and work, readers might find that certain technical aspects of ocean mapping and geology could be explained in more detail. A deeper exploration of the scientific methodologies employed by Tharp and Heezen would enhance the reader’s understanding of their significance in the field.

Conclusion

Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor is an inspiring and well-researched biography that highlights the life and legacy of Marie Tharp. Hali Felt successfully combines scientific history with a personal narrative, providing a rich account of a woman whose work revolutionized our understanding of the oceanic landscape. This book is a significant contribution to both the literature on women in science and the history of oceanography.

Recommendation

This biography is highly recommended for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the history of science, gender studies, and environmental studies. Felt’s portrayal of Tharp not only honors her contributions to oceanography but also serves as an important reminder of the need for diversity and representation in STEM fields. By sharing Tharp’s story, Soundings encourages readers to appreciate the value of perseverance and the critical contributions of women in shaping scientific knowledge.

[Reading · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whew what a stinker.

Tharp seems like an interesting person, who made a significant contribution to society, and deserves more credit than she has historically gotten.

But this book ain’t it.

Felt’s prose is baffling at best, and maddeningly indecipherable at worst. She has scads and scads of dialogue, but has decided that quotation marks are passé. Any time someone asks a question, Felt seems the question mark unnecessary. This straight up makes whole sections of the book unreadable.

Tharp led a quiet life, and it sounds like she died an enigma. I sympathize with the lack of research materials Felt had, but her solution to this is to just MAKE UP STUFF and then when she gets bored she PADS out the pages with completely unrelated shit.

Several sections of this book are, to Felt’s admission, dramatized. But Felt is not a great fiction writer. These sections are jarring, and incongruous is ich the little bit we actually know about Tharp.

The worst stuff is the padding. At one point she spends FIVE PAGES just listing the items in each room of Tharp’s house. Like a grocery list, but duller. No insight, analysis, or commentary is provided. Just a list to fill pages.

At one point she spends an entire chapter recreating Carl Sagan’s time calendar idea (you know, the one where humans appear at four seconds to midnight). AN ENTIRE CHAPTER. This isn’t connected to anything. Not to sea life or the formation of the ocean floor or anything. In the last sentence Felt connects this in a weird way to Bruce’s death. Like “Bruce died here in the last second before midnight”. What? Of course he did.

Felt also loves repetition. She copies and paste’s Bruce’s obituary FIVE TIMES. Same thing. Just five times. You know, to fill out pages.

I wanted to like this book so badly, and Tharp deserves much better.

[Veronica Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Story of Marie Tharp needs broader telling and I learned much while reading this book. So I'm glad I stumbled across it. Marie finally got some of the recognition that she deserves late in life. But like Rosalind Franklin and Lise Meitner, she is known only to some deeply interested in her field, geology and in particular the floor of the ocean.
Marie Tharp discovered the Mid-Atlantic rift and with that discovery started what is the most accepted theory for Earth geology - plate techtonics. She mapped the ocean from primary sources in a way most people could understand.
The biographical and scientific parts of this book earned it 5 stars. But I often had to struggle through the authors choice of storytelling style. The author herself tells the reader:
1) "Science had never been my thing."
2) "I can take myself, act as a mediator, use my own experience with discovery and eccentricity and sadness to fill in some emotional blanks"..... "I can use my imagination and I can say this is all that I know and here is how it might have made Marie feel." ..... "I want to give her story a little palpable emotion even if it isn't hers, to try to keep her whole."...."The transformation of a facts into a scene, then, has become effortless. It is what I image simple algebra must be like for a mathematician."
Me: Nope, not true. There were times when reading and I would just think, "Good grief!!!!!!"
But the science and the history is there enough to keep me going even though the histrionics and make-believe were distracting. Therefore, 4 stars.
I wish all girls in middle or high school would read about the women that made BIG contributions to science between 1900 and 1960 when they were generally overlooked by male dominated sciences.

[Peter Aronson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four-and-a-half stars. It is in interesting to see a biography of a scientist by someone starting with no significant background in the sciences, but with a will to learn. Marie Tharp mapped the Ocean floors, starting with limited data, and some additional evidence, an act of speculative cartography and geomorphology. This work was critical in the development of the modern version of plate tectonics, but despite that, she was little known, the result of the attitude of academia in her day, both towards women and probably towards those without a Ph.D. or academic post. This is also somewhat the story of Bruce Heezen, Marie's partner (in several senses) and occasional co-conspirator.

Being (just) old enough to have taken a manual cartography class and a class of using fixed cameras to prepare maps for printing, I am astounded by the sheer amount of work that was represented by her physiographic diagrams of the ocean floors. These days we'd generate something like that using computers, but that wasn't an option then. Instead, it was done using a combination of skill, craftsmanship and informed judgement. You'd have to think about practically each stroke of the pen.

The biography is studded with little nuggets of speculation or fiction, as many important events of Marie's (and Bruce's) life. They are easy enough to identify, so I don't mind them. And sometimes the things you want to know are just not available.

I certainly found this book worth reading! But then, I'm a geographer.

[Bob Gustafson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Men are mean and cruel. They were even meaner and crueler in the twentieth century than they are now. Men are mean and cruel to one another. They are even meaner and crueler to women. Take the office in the insurance company in the 1960 movie "The Apartment" and change it to an academic department in a prestigious university. That's what this book is about. I thought that it would be about science. Science is secondary.

No it isn't. It is tertiary. The author writing about herself is secondary. Isaacson wrote about Einstein and i didn't learn anything about Isaacson. McCullough wrote about John Adams and I didn't learn anything about McCullough. I learned about Hali Felt and I didn't really care to. Now Rebecca Skloot writes a lot about the process of writing "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", but that serves the purpose of demonstrating that the Civil Rights Movement did little to improve the lives of Henrietta Lacks family, which may have been the author's purpose. Carol Kaesuk Yoon adds a long editorial addendum to "Naming Nature", but that was after she had told us about the life and work of Linnaeus. There was no reason for the autobiographical trivia that the author included.

There was some interesting discussion of oceanic cartography. Two stars.

[Kathleen (itpdx) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marie Tharp was an oceanic cartographer. She discovered the Atlantic Ridge and its Rift Valley, while sitting at a drafting table laboriously converting sounding and other data collected by others. As a woman in the 50’s she was not allowed to go on the ships that did soundings. Her discovery of the Atlantic Ridge was one of the pieces of information that contributed to the theory of plate tectonics. Marie was a fun, brilliant and eccentric woman.
Felt attacks the biography in an unusual way. She will place Marie in a time and space and then tell us about interview tapes or letters that Felt has read or listened to that provide insight into what was happening. Sometimes Felts speculates what Marie was feeling or conversations that Marie might have had. Most of the time they are OK but occasionally Felt goes too far in my opinion.
Marie’s life illustrates for me:
1) the difficulty of being a woman scientist—for instance, when her male partner dies, most of the work they were working on together is assigned to male scientists
2) how a new scientific theory meets skepticism and sometimes ridicule initially
3) the politics of research institutions

[Lana T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marie Tharp is why you learn about plate tectonics and the rift valley. I am thankful for a true and realistic presentation of Tharp. I found myself crying when I read about the Library of Congress “Treasures of America” exhibit. Albeit not one person is solely responsible for one monumental discovery, it takes a team, a cohesive effort, Felt does justice to balancing Tharp’s story. The women’s science magazines and short articles that abound paint Tharp unrealistically and only use her as a vessel to reveal sexism in science. The interviews with Tharp archived at the American Institute of Physics are an amazing primary source.
As a woman who has experience shipboard life, touched on oceanography, and is studying in the STEM field- I rather would have learned Marie Tharp’s name before Amelia Earhart.

[Sherry Scheline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this book. I was so interested in the history of mapping. This book truly takes you down a very interesting journey through history. The love story that is told throughout the pages is also very intriguing. There is enough drama in their lives even though they relatively keep to themselves. I learned so much about mapping, plate-tonics and so much more. I read it on the plane and I found myself staring out the window watching ridges and things that I had never watched. Imagine discovering things that had never been talked about or studied. Truly pioneering a new idea. You, like me may never heard of Marie Tharp, who????? When you are done though you may want to grab a old fashioned with her if she was still alive:

I did find myself wondering as I was reading 📖 why has no one ever made a movie 🎥 based on this book? I would love to watch it.

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This was a solid, informative read about Marie Tharp and her invaluable contributions to the scientific world. I wished there was a little more of Marie’s childhood in this, the base to what she would later accomplish, but the author notes that this information was already recorded before Tharp’s death so I can understand her choice to not include it.

The only “issue” I had with this were the fictional imaginings of Marie in her private moments. It’s not the fact of their existence, but the frequency. It felt random & uneven & I wasn’t sure if it really added to the book at all.

Overall, though, I did enjoy reading this!

[EdieReads7 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to give this a higher rating. Marie Tharp is an incredible woman I knew almost nothing about and this book went about showcasing her life in such a descriptive and vivid way, highlighting her struggles and what made her a unique and rare lady. But my main issue was that the writer kept inserting herself into the story and each time she did so, I felt as if she considered herself to be much more interesting than the woman she was writing about! Only 3 stars unfortunately, but ONLY because I didn’t think the author could get out of the way of her own ego. It was very distracting. Even so, I’d highly recommend this book more than it seems based on the rating…

[Rick Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well done biography of an amazing cartographer. A nuanced view of a private woman; while she was inhibited by her time period, and the restrictions placed on her, she nevertheless was able to live a good life, doing the work she loved. As Felt writes, this did feel like an intimate letter, and the author's respect and admiration for Marie Tharp show in her writing. I appreciated that she discussed at some length the barriers put in Tharp's way, but also allowed Marie to evolve, as all humans must, in her reflections on her place in the world.

[Emma Schimnowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a map nerd, this was an interesting read for me. Nonfiction is always hard for me to get through quickly with how much info is getting thrown at you but the author did a pretty good job writing chronologically, in anecdotes, which made it more absorbable. I still think it could have been shorter if the author hadn’t added so much of her own guessing/assuming/putting herself into the story. There were a lot of moments where she said “this happened to Marie so here’s how I imagine that conversation going.” It did flesh out the story/person more but also felt unnecessary at times.