A pioneering life in the clouds: James Rodger Fleming: First woman: Joanne Simpson and the tropical atmosphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 224 pp, £25.00 HB.

After struggling to decide whether to do a Ph.D. - Simpson had married, given birth, and divorced within the space of a few years - Simpson began under Riehl's supervision. Fleming is highly reliant on Simpson's own words and reflections in those archives, and at some points, it did seem that he might have introduced more critical distance between his own and Simpson's texts. It is testimony to Simpson's character that she would consistently try to articulate the good influence of her mother on herself: that her mother always assumed Joanne would go to university, that she was well educated, and that Joanne should learn about birth control before she reached puberty, sometime in the mid-1930s. [Extracted from the article]