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I must confess: I struggled with this book. It took me two false starts before I was able to immerse myself in it and read to the end. The second time I put the book aside, after again getting little further than the end of the first chapter, I rued the day I had agreed to review it. I had willingly accepted the invitation, intrigued by the rich feminist promise of an autobiographical exploration of the intertwined lives of two ground-breaking social scientists, daughter and father Ann Oakley and Richard Titmuss, and an inquiry into ‘patriarchy, gender and social science’through this lens. It was not for the literary pleasure of the read that I finally returned to the text and fought my way through my initial resistance; the book does not have a compelling narrative arc, and its aesthetic qualities did not seduce me. Rather I continued with what felt like a chore out of a sense of duty, a commitment to the collective, to the discipline and the …