Quaker Witness [Hardcover]

I have read others of Allen's series about Elizabeth Elliot -- an elderly woman living in Cambridge on the edge of Harvard, member and Clerk of the local Friends (Quaker) Meeting -- and found them rather enjoyable because of the Quaker background, the local Cambridge color, and Elliot's personal life. The somewhat stilted writing had seemed appropriate to my assumptions of the deliberate pace of Quaker life and views. But when this same tone is applied to the world of academic infighting and striving, it makes me reevaluate my confidence in her portrayal of things Quaker.

A list of just a few things that struck me as "off", compared to my own experience and observation: It seems odd that a graduate student would still be living in a dormitory after, presumably, several years at a school, as heroine Janet Stevens is; it requires *some* sort of explanation. Allen writes "the word 'prayer' ... seemed inappropriate from a science student [Janet], educated to secularism." I don't know any scientist who would say or believe this, much less a grad student with interior urges to religion. Many scientists have deep and sincere religious beliefs, and while it would be considered inappropriate to start a lecture with, say, "Jesus brought me here today to present this equation he inspired", most consider faith or lack of faith irrelevant to the value of the science produced: it's not important whether God or simply chance guided your hand to that fossil, but what the fossil says about life. (The above quote also seems inconsistent with another student's devoted Catholicism.) The cutthroat competition Allen portrays, even paranoid secrecy, among grad students is very foreign. Students are constantly bouncing ideas off each other, collaborating, helping each other out. Also, though students and non-tenured faculty do put in long hours, as Allen describes, that is as much through fascination with their work, deadlines, and sometimes the need to keep an experiment or observation going for an extended period without funds to hire more assistance, as it is desperation for advancement. The crucial piece of apparatus, the "oxygen line" which released the poisonous gas used to murder the evil professor, is described several times. While probably technically correct (though incomplete: where does the carbon come from which combines with the released oxygen?) I find it bizarre that a scientist would not also bend the ear of the unwary visitor with extensive description of *why* they were extracting the oxygen from ancient fossils (presumably to measure isotope ratios which would tell about the climate). While I'm sure there were a decade ago, and still are, departments with the resolutely anti-female attitudes of Allen's Harvard paleontology, this has hardly been SOP for decades. Incidents, nowhere near as pervasive, I heard of in the 60's and 70's were regarded as shocking, or at least tasteless, anomalies. Contrary to the near uniform shunning by fellow students that Janet suffered, in real life the woman in a largely male department is eagerly sought out, and has been for decades.

Nonetheless, this is still an engaging book, and the mystery aspect is quite well thought out.