This book is like a magnificent conversation with a friend. Kowal has an eye for the uncanny, ghostly, and hauntingly ephemeral, which she leverages to address ethical and philosophical questions. She brings readers along as she tracks a hair sample collected in a chance encounter at a remote Australian railway station in 1923, which, 88 years later, appeared on the cover of Science. She turns to look at what the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner called “the great Australian silence” about the country’s settler colonial history (20). And she explains the circumstances under which she was allowed to photograph a white painted plastic statue of an early twentieth century scientist—only after it was retrieved from a curatorial sanctum inaccessible to women.

Continue reading