By Meghan Rosen
Lab Girl
Hope Jahren
Knopf, $26.95
The first, tiny root that emerges from a baby plant can make it or break it.
Anchor to a good patch of ground, and the plant can thrive for decades. Set up someplace else, without enough water or sunshine, and all may be lost.
The odds of a single rootlet mooring itself to just the right spot of soil are more than a million to one, writes geobiologist Hope Jahren. “The gamble is everything, and losing means death.”