For those concerned about nepotism, a book that deals with friendship in academia might not be of interest. Or perhaps this is just the book you should read.

Reading this book has been intriguing. It is not voluminous, yet parts of it are dense and challenging. The book starts with the first email Trude Klevan sent to Alec Grant, back in September 2015, sharing her concern about “her lack of confidence in getting by convincingly in ‘academic-speak’ situations.”1 As a PhD student, Klevan reaches out to the far more experienced academic Alec Grant after reading some of his work, and this is the beginning of a friendship and email exchange that constitutes the core and common thread in the book, at one point referred to as “an unfinalized and open-ended conversation.”2 One might suspect that such an approach could result in a mess of incoherent text, yet it...

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