Eileen Pollack has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is The Only Woman in the Room.
The Only Woman in the Room
Summary
Named one of the notable nonfiction books of 2015 by The Washington Post. A bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in the hard sciences, mathematics, engineering, and computer science. In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and '70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale. There, despite finding herself far behind the men in her classes, she went on to graduate summa cum laude, with honors, as one of the university's first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics. And yet, isolated, lacking in confidence, starved for encouragement, she abandoned her ambition to become a physicist. Years later, spurred by the suggestion that innate differences in scientific and mathematical aptitude might account for the dearth of tenured female faculty at Summer's institution, Pollack thought back on her own experiences and wondered what, if anything, had changed in the intervening decades. Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped, The Only Woman in the Room is a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred examination of the social, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting women - and minorities - in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and informed book reflects on women's experiences in a way that simple data can't, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another era but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face. The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which even today they remain seriously underrepresented.
©2015 Eileen Pollack (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
All of Us, We All Are Arameans
Summary
Stuck with a plane ticket to Israel bought for her by a Polish Catholic ex-boyfriend, Eileen Pollack sets out on a hectic, solitary journey around the country, cataloging the region’s rich history, natural beauty, and troubled politics, while examining her own complicated relationship to her Jewish faith and heritage. In this darkly comic, incisive, and nuanced essay, Pollack upends the listener’s expectations as well as her own. A travel essay filled with bewilderment, outrage, humor, and faith, “All of Us, We All Are Arameans” takes us on a trip around Israel and the West Bank that few American tourists would have the chutzpah to attempt.Ploughshares, the literary magazine of Emerson College.
©2012 Emerson College (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Woman Walking Ahead
Summary
This book restores a little-known advocate of Indian rights to her place in history. In June 1889 a widowed Brooklyn artist named Catherine Weldon traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory to help Sitting Bull hold on to land that the government was trying to wrest from his people. Her efforts were counterproductive; she was ordered to leave the reservation, and the Standing Rock Sioux were bullied into signing away their land. But she returned with her teenage son, settling at Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River. In recognition of her unusual qualities, Sitting Bull's people called her Toka heya mani win, Woman Walking Ahead. Predictably, the press vilified Weldon, calling her "Sitting Bull's white squaw" and accusing her of inciting Sitting Bull to join the Ghost Dance religion then sweeping the West. In fact Weldon opposed the movement, arguing that the army would use the Ghost dance as an excuse to jail or kill Sitting Bull. Unfortunately she was right. Up to now history has distorted and largely overlooked Weldon's story. In retracing Weldon's steps, Eileen Pollack recovers her life and compares her world to our own.
©2002 Eileen Pollack (P)2017 Tantor
The Professor of Immortality
Summary
Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute for Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. But when her beloved husband dies, she is so devastated she can barely get out of bed. To make matters worse, her son, Zach, has abruptly quit his job in Silicon Valley and been out of contact for seven months.
Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student (and a former close friend of her son) might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that Zach might either be involved in or become a victim of this extremist's bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine feels compelled to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him, even as she knows she should report her suspicions to the FBI to prevent greater carnage.
©2019 Eileen Pollack (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing