Class Note 1997
Issue
September-October 2020
I really enjoyed Laura (Zachman) Jamison’s debut novel, All the Right Mistakes. The book centers on five friends turning 40 in different circumstances: lawyers Elizabeth and Sara; physician Martha, a Dartmouth graduate; wealthy homemaker Carmen, also a Dartmouth graduate; and famous tech executive Heather, the most successful of the group. When Heather writes a women’s advice book detailing what she characterizes as her four friends’ mistakes, her friends are understandably hurt. The novel explores the unique obstacles the women face as they wonder whether their lives might have been different had they followed Heather’s advice. Look for numerous fun College references throughout.
I asked Laura what inspired her to write the book. “I was visiting my parents when the idea for the book came to me. I read a news item that Ivanka Trump was writing a book about how women could architect their lives to be successful. ‘Here we go again,’ I thought. Another book geared toward telling women, not institutions or society, to change themselves (and from an author who I doubted had a perspective that would be relevant to most moms). Exhausting and irritating. But Ivanka, after all, is a person who is trying to be helpful, in her way. What if she was your friend, even your best friend? And so the idea for All the Right Mistakes was born.”
Laura wrote the book in 2016 and spent the next four years working toward publication. “It was weekends, and a fair amount of writing from the sidelines of my kids’ soccer practices.” She noted the characters reflect her experiences and those of her friends and colleagues, but the book and the women are purely fiction. “I’m probably closest to Elizabeth and Sara, because, like them, I work full-time as an attorney. But, in truth, there is a little of me in all of the five women.”
Kevin Hand’s latest book, Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space, should also be on your reading list. The book explores the science behind the search for life on water-rich moons at the solar system’s outer reaches. I asked Kevin about his interest in life beyond Earth.
“I credit the clear night skies of Vermont where I grew up and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos with really getting me hooked. One can’t help but wonder whether we’re alone in the universe when you’re bathed in starlight, looking up on a cold, clear winter night.”
While Kevin was an undergraduate, the Galileo spacecraft began returning data indicating an ocean beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, still Kevin’s research focus. “The Dartmouth physics department was great—I had the keys to the Shattuck Observatory and could go look at Jupiter, and the rest of the night sky, whenever I wanted. When I was a junior, professor John Thorstensen brought me to Kitt Peak in Arizona, where Dartmouth had time on a pair of telescopes. That was my first experience at a large observatory, working with a research-class telescope, and it was phenomenal.”
Kevin hopes to get a lander on Europa’s surface to search for signs of life. “In some ways the science is perhaps easier than the sociopolitics of getting a mission like this to the launch pad. We’ve got a great team, though, and a lot of new faces with diverse backgrounds are joining the project and that’s tremendously inspiring.”
Regarding future books, about 100 pages of science history and thermodynamics details were cut from Alien Oceans, “so that may serve as good starting material for a book I want to write about the physics of life.” (Read more about his work on page 42.)
—Jason Casell, 10106 Balmforth Lane, Houston, TX 77096; jhcasell@gmail.com
I asked Laura what inspired her to write the book. “I was visiting my parents when the idea for the book came to me. I read a news item that Ivanka Trump was writing a book about how women could architect their lives to be successful. ‘Here we go again,’ I thought. Another book geared toward telling women, not institutions or society, to change themselves (and from an author who I doubted had a perspective that would be relevant to most moms). Exhausting and irritating. But Ivanka, after all, is a person who is trying to be helpful, in her way. What if she was your friend, even your best friend? And so the idea for All the Right Mistakes was born.”
Laura wrote the book in 2016 and spent the next four years working toward publication. “It was weekends, and a fair amount of writing from the sidelines of my kids’ soccer practices.” She noted the characters reflect her experiences and those of her friends and colleagues, but the book and the women are purely fiction. “I’m probably closest to Elizabeth and Sara, because, like them, I work full-time as an attorney. But, in truth, there is a little of me in all of the five women.”
Kevin Hand’s latest book, Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space, should also be on your reading list. The book explores the science behind the search for life on water-rich moons at the solar system’s outer reaches. I asked Kevin about his interest in life beyond Earth.
“I credit the clear night skies of Vermont where I grew up and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos with really getting me hooked. One can’t help but wonder whether we’re alone in the universe when you’re bathed in starlight, looking up on a cold, clear winter night.”
While Kevin was an undergraduate, the Galileo spacecraft began returning data indicating an ocean beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, still Kevin’s research focus. “The Dartmouth physics department was great—I had the keys to the Shattuck Observatory and could go look at Jupiter, and the rest of the night sky, whenever I wanted. When I was a junior, professor John Thorstensen brought me to Kitt Peak in Arizona, where Dartmouth had time on a pair of telescopes. That was my first experience at a large observatory, working with a research-class telescope, and it was phenomenal.”
Kevin hopes to get a lander on Europa’s surface to search for signs of life. “In some ways the science is perhaps easier than the sociopolitics of getting a mission like this to the launch pad. We’ve got a great team, though, and a lot of new faces with diverse backgrounds are joining the project and that’s tremendously inspiring.”
Regarding future books, about 100 pages of science history and thermodynamics details were cut from Alien Oceans, “so that may serve as good starting material for a book I want to write about the physics of life.” (Read more about his work on page 42.)
—Jason Casell, 10106 Balmforth Lane, Houston, TX 77096; jhcasell@gmail.com