We lived on a farm, twelve hundred acres in the heart of the Kentucky bluegrass country. Meat was raised and butchered there, vegetables grown, cows milked, eggs laid, and bread baked. You are thinking: they must have had quite a staff. Yes we did; it numbered in the hundreds. What you need to know is: they all were federal prisoners, serving time for possession of drugs. The farm I grew up on was the famous Narcotic Farm, a U.S. government prison/hospital for heroin addicts. Farm work, and housework - we had "houseboys" too - was part of the cure. ... Unsupervised, I prowled where my curiosity led me. I climbed trees and rode horses. Maybe that's why I have never felt constrained by academic boundaries. I talked with whomever I chose: Kentucky drifters, Chicago jazz musicians, New York street criminals, Chinese laundrymen. Prisoners came and went and came back again; the relapse rate was 90%. And so I also learned that some problems, like drug addiction, are essentially intractable, and that any partial traction is achieved through the synthesis of multiple perspectives

At half past seven on weekday mornings, the prison ambulance, a uniformed guard at the wheel, stopped at our front door. ... The guard dropped us off at a small ivy-covered building on the campus of the University of Kentucky. With only one class at each grade level and special teachers for music, art, and gym, the Training School was the best in town. I was miserable. The work was too easy and the kids were nascent snobs. ... These kids noticed who arrived by ambulance. Their parents, and the teachers, noticed who were Jewish.

... quiet, leafy neighbourhoods; formal living rooms, drapes drawn against the afternoon sun: black maids in large kitchens.

... were not snobs. But I was miscast in my new role as a Lexington teenager. I saw everything through Narco eyes. ... For me, Lexington was a looking-glass prison, with walls of hypocrisy and conformity as strong as brick and stone. After two years I escaped to the University of Chicago, which didn't require a high school diploma. I erased all traces of my Kentucky accent, or thought I did, and didn't look back for a long, long time.

But I didn't know, or think to ask myself, what I enjoyed about it: which areas of math appealed to me and why; what stirred my imagination. Nor did I have any clear idea of a career.

Analytic number theory became my research topic because my advisor, an expert on summation formulas for divergent infinite series, had a grant from the Office of Naval Research that included support for a graduate student.

My only problem, as the due date approached, was finding a gripping book to read in the hospital. Serendipity struck: in the science library I came across 'Crystals: their role in nature and science', by Charles Bunn. All I knew about crystals was that they were pretty. I checked it out and read it with increasing excitement in my few quiet moments the next week. I'd found the answer to my unasked questions. Crystals showed me what drew me to math: geometric forms, patterns, packings and tilings; and elegant puzzles like diffraction diagrams.

For the first time, I was working in a real crystallography department, gaining a broader sense of the field and its denizens past and present.

This community of colleagues, particularly the mathematicians and crystallographers associated with Boris Delone, a leading researcher, soon became very important to her. Nor Senechal was firmly grounded in an international community of researchers that would take her overseas many times.

The girls braved the -45° cold - that merciless crossing point of the Fahrenheit and Centigrade scales [In fact -40°F = -40°C] - to trudge to their Russian schools. They learned Russian and enough other things to skip a year of school when they came home; and they made Russian friends. Moscow in those days was even more child-friendly than Holland. The streets and the subways were safe; they went to parties, concerts, and circuses on their own. Moscow was, however, less friendly to visiting adults. Social isolation, mainly, made it a divorce factory for American visitors; we divorced a few years after our return.

This monograph is the best introduction to mathematical crystallography available and is unlikely to be surpassed for a very long time.

I remembered that Northampton, Massachusetts had been the home of the Corticelli Company, which made silk thread. Surely I could find information in our local library. But no: all I found were some 1830s sericulture manuals. With a Smith colleague, I launched a town-gown history recovery project. For the next ten years, we and our students pored over local archives, reconstructed 1830s silk-winding equipment, mounted exhibits, hosted expert visitors, and even raised silkworms.

It is tremendous that Senechal has excavated this story. She offers a gripping portrait of an era and of a scientist whose complications acquire a tragic glamour. It is a cautionary tale for which we must supply the moral ourselves.