50books_poc | Entries tagged with science/medicine

I stopped counting books when I realised it was making reading feel like a chore. While I've read a lot of manga I realised I'd never read any novels by Japanese people, so I decided to make a special effort to do so.

Under the cut:
Meanwhile by Jason Shiga
Aya by Margauerite Aboue
The Manga Guide to Databases by Mana Takahashi
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa
Twelve Kingdoms: Shadow of the Moon by Fuyumi Ono
Harboiled and Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto

( Read more... )

seekingferret.livejournal.com

4) Death by Black Hole by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Anybody who's come across Tyson in any of his many roles probably doesn't need much convincing to read this book. He's one of the best around today at explaining complicated scientific ideas with clarity. And he has wit and a sense of humor, so his explanations don't sacrifice interest for clarity and correctness.

This volume is a collection of essays originally written for Nature magazine and edited slightly for cohesiveness within the context of the compilation. The essays are short, most no longer than 6 pages, and they're breezy and often amazingly thorough. They're full of beautiful astrophysical discoveries, made practical and relevant to an ordinary reader without cheating or cheapening out on the science.

And they're funny, full of pop culture jokes and, well, physicist jokes that I found funny. He's not Feynman funny, but he knows how to make this stuff lighthearted, though I suppose one might think that laughing at the fact that if one entered a black hole their molecules would be torn apart by tidal forces is kind of odd.

I found the few times he descended into peevishness a bit offputting. He's famously involved with the Pluto demotion not because of any discovery he made, but because he wanted to be involved. It's clear that any public misconception of scientific discovery isn't merely a problem to be fixed for him, but something which sticks in his craw and bugs him until he can try to fix it. He comes across at times like someone who can't accept figurative language.

And I found the final section of the essays, his essays on science and religion, frustrating. They were full of misstatements, misunderstandings, broad generalizations, and an apparently deep-seated conviction that science and religion are at war and have always been at war. Which, look, is not at all true. I hate to make appeals to Dinesh D'Souza, but he does a fantastic job of taking down a lot of Tyson's claims about Galileo in What's So Great About God?.

Tyson's language suggests that he thinks the world consists of two types of people: scientists and people who think the Bible is literally true in all aspects and is the only guide for life. Ignoring the fact that even the Biblical literalists can't agree on what the Bible literally means, this is profoundly and offensively dismissive to the millions of people of faith who have found a place for science in their world because it is not at all at odds with their religion, BECAUSE their religion guides them to seek truth in the world.

And it's stupid because it's so easy to come up with counterexamples to his claim that religion has never offered real truth about the world that science didn't, so easy that Tyson mentions some counterexamples earlier in his book, like the Arab astronomers who developed a meaningful astronomy built around the astrolabe in order to know when to pray and where to face. Their discovery speaks of a religious need to inhabit the world that really exists instead of the world decreed in some holy text, but Tyson doesn't credit them for this.

But despite my objections to this final section, I highly recommend the collection. The rest of it is great.

tags: a:tyson neil degrasse, science/medicine, african-american, physics

seekingferret.livejournal.com

1). Five Equations That Changed The World by Michael Guillen

This is a book I rather wish had been written when I was 13. I grew up with a decidedly similar book by Isaac Asimov, a collection of ten-page stories about important scientists that presented their great discovery in historical, social, but most importantly in personal context. It's one of the most treasured books in my collection, even though I've long outgrown the storybook approach to history. I'm pretty sure it's the book that turned me into a scientist. Asimov transformed these great scientists into heroes. He wrote of Lavoisier braving the mobs in the French Revolution to achieve scientific breakthroughs, and Marie Curie risking her own life to study radium. And despite the focus on the individual, despite the pat reductionism, Asimov kept his eye on the prize, drilling in through rote repetition the ideal of the Scientific Method.

Guillen's book, as I said, is remarkably similar in scope and style. He tells the story of five scientists: Newton, Bernoulli, Faraday, Clausius, and Einstein. And I think that's a very telling set of five names. Newton and Einstein are obvious, but the other three, while important, are not quite the household names. These are quite clearly Guillen's personal heroes. And his text is an act of beatification.

He focuses, for example, in the story of Michael Faraday's beautiful law of electromagnetic induction, on the class boundaries that separated Faraday and his mentor Sir Humphry Davy. And recalling the more memoirish elements of the other Guillen book I've read, where he describes his childhood in a working class Chicano family in California, I kept seeing the parallels Guillen was building in. And again and again, as he develops the story of these equations, Guillen spends time exploring the way the religious beliefs of these scientists shaped their thinking about scientific discovery. Family life is important, too. Loves and lost loves, brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters litter the pages. These are very intimate portraits, painted with enthusiasm and extreme care.

2)The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy

Part travelogue and part modern physics explanation, this was a hell of a lot of fun.

A few years ago, an astronomy geek friend told me of her plan to travel around the world to visit radio telescopes and write a book about it. A couple years after that, she reported to me half-crestfallen that someone had beaten her to it. Only half-crestfallen, though, because she said the book itself was terrific. This is that book.

It describes a pilgrimage (The first site visited is a California observatory known as The Monastery. The last site visited shares a mountaintop with a Buddhist temple.) to the remote sites around the world where cutting edge physics is being done in unusual places whose geography has given it value, as the ambition of our scientists has grown to the point where we need lab structures bigger than we can build. The 'labs' the book describes include mineshafts deep beneath the Earth, mountaintops high in the sky, a vast swath of Lake Baikal, the South Pole, and others.

Ananthaswamy makes the science so clear and moreover, makes it so clear why it matters. He never loses sight of the real world, of politics, economics, culture. When he visits South Africa he explores the way apartheid intersected with astronomy. When he visits Chile he shows the climate change and its associated changes in weather patterns have presented new challenges for the observatory.

And he tells the stories of the little heroes with energy and sympathy. The human calculators, many of them women who were barred from doing 'real science', who made some of the important early 20th century discoveries in astronomy because they were the ones who got their hands dirty with the data. The researchers who drifted out of doing calculations into administration and became the ones who enabled the increasingly massive instruments to be built. The drillers braving the subzero temperatures at the South Pole to allow instruments to be placed deep inside the ice. The graduate students working long, hard hours doublechecking results while their PIs present them to universal acclaim. The Edge referred to in the title doesn't just refer to the locales he visits, but also to people who have forsaken comfortable lives in academia or industry for the challenge of pushing the boundaries of our knowledge. And as Ananthaswamy stumbles to the peak yet of another mountain whose thin air makes it hard for him to breathe, you appreciate just how arduous a task they have taken on as scientists.

seekingferret.livejournal.com

48. The Secret Life of Quanta by M.Y. Han

Wow, this is a singularly unique pop science book, to my eyes. Most science writers these days write under the banner of this Brian Greene op-ed, believing that the right approach to accessible science writing is to steer clear of the math and focus on the "Wow moments", especially those provoked by the unintuitive results of cosmology and quantum mechanics. Popular science writing is too often written as if the goal is to make pot-smokers have things to discuss when they're high.

Han takes an utterly different approach. He focuses on applications and he's not afraid to dip into a little bit of simple math if it's the best way to explain why something works. The book's focus is on getting the reader to have a deep enough understanding of quantum mechanics to understand why a laser works, why an integrated circuit works, and why we think a high temperature superconductor works. I found it totally refreshing.

I found the math elementary (I'm an engineer. I've had most of this stuff several times at a much higher level), but I liked that his explanations were clear and focused on putting it in language that someone without any mathematical background could understand. He repeatedly came up with tremendously insightful metaphors and showed good restraint in not overextending his metaphors.

49. Hyperspace by Michio Kaku

I've heard so much good about Kaku that I was disappointed by this book. It comes across as an over-the-top parody of the kind of science writing I mentioned in my first paragraph.

Admittedly, it's a book on superstring theory, which poses two problems. First, the math itself is really, really hard. You can't do n-dimensional topology with a high school math education. Second, there is no experimental verification for any component of the theory, no exciting experiments to explain. So Kaku's in a difficult position as far as science writing goes. Here's this theory that has dominated the scientific establishment for two decades, and the established mechanisms for discussing a scientific paradigm with the public are not practical.

But Kaku, out of desperation or misguided enthusiasm or something, goes too far the other way. The text reads theological a lot of the time, which is not uncommon in contemporary physics writing, but which is deeply unfortunate. Some of his passages are messianic, as when he promises that knowledge of the higher dimensions may offer humanity an escape hatch for the entropic heat death of the universe. (Note that the key word is 'may'. There is equal probability that nothing of the sort will happen.) When I want theology, I um... go to religion.

He spends a lot of time developing a metaphor to Abbott's Flatland, but leaves the actual connective tissue of the metaphor missing. All of his metaphors lack a key phrase Han avails himself of again and again: "This is just a metaphor." Many of his metaphors have obvious objections that collapse them easily into meaninglessness, but he doesn't even bother to qualify them or delimit them. I'm not sure if it's laziness, carelessness, or something more conscious and guided, but it's not good science writing.

And then there's the catastrophic description of the Standard Model of particle physics. "The details of the Standard Model are boring and not very important," Kaku writes, and my jaw dropped. That is a sentence that should never appear in a serious work of science writing. It made me rage with fury one night while a friend looked at me and said, "Wow, you never get this angry."

The book's conclusion, a place I hoped for some sort of synthesis of the scattered ideas the book covers, instead is filled with unconnected musings on the intersection of science and philosophy. It's not immediately clear to me what the connection is, except that sadly I think I know what it is: Kaku's paean to string theory is about the merger of philosophy and scientific reasoning rather than the triumph of empiricist dogma he rotely salutes at various points. He is interested in string theory not because it works (at present it doesn't), but because it is beautiful in and of itself. He suggests a few pages from the end that even if it proves undescriptive, mathematicians may find value in the work done by superstring theorists. And that backwards reasoning I find shocking and depressing.

sanguinity

18. Thomas King, "The One About Coyote Going West."
(Collected in An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, 1998, among other places.)

Coyote dropping by the narrator's for tea on her way out west to visit Raven and fix up the world, but deciding to stay a little while to hear the story of how Coyote, that clever one, that tricky one, created the world.

What was the first thing Coyote created? Not the rainbow, not the moon, not the oceans (and in fact, these things were never created by Coyote at all, neither first nor later). No, the first thing Coyote created was a Mistake. The second thing she created? Farts. And while she was busy creating farts, things that Coyote was supposed to have created got tired of waiting around on her and went ahead and created themselves, her Mistake went off and started ordering a bunch of things from the Sears catalog, and Coyote.... Well, that was when Coyote decided that the world had gotten messed up and needed some fixing.

That Coyote, she's a tricky one. You've got to keep your eye on her.

And the narrator? She's a tricky one, too. ;-)

19. Dennis Martinez, with Enrique Salmón and Melissa K. Nelson, "Restoring Indigenous History and Culture to Nature."
20. Greg Cajete, John Mohawk, and Julio Valladolid Rivera, "Re-Indigenization Defined."
(Both collected in Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future, 2008.)

"There is no Indian word for wilderness because there was no wilderness." -- Dennis Martinez

The Martinez article blew me away. Martinez does a lot of work with introducing Traditional Ecological Knowledge to ecologists; this article is an easily-accessible, conversation-format introduction to those ideas. Forget the trope about Indians walking lightly on the land, leaving nothing but footprints: Indian cultures cultivated entire ecosystems, but did/do so with a very different worldview and process than Euro-Americans use to manage ecosystems. Martinez uses "kincentric" to describe the indigenous ecosystem worldview -- one cannot (and should not!) attempt to control or impose one's will on an ecosystem, but one approaches the ecosystem as an equal partner with the other entities in it. ("We are comanagers with animals and plants. We don't have the right to extend anything [such as ethics]. What we have the right to do is to make our case, as human beings, to the natural world.") In terms of restoration and conservation, the goal is not to return "wild" areas to a "natural" state, but to use pre-conquest ecosystems as reference models for workable local stable-enough ecosystems, while looking to indigenous cultures for the processes and models that encourage the development of moderately-paced, human-inclusive coevolutionary ecosystems. (That's a lot of academic buzzwords, but that's because I'm trying to summarize. The article is pretty much buzzword-free.)

And if that isn't enough awesome for you, there's a ton of examples here of indigenous comanagement practices from Northern California through Alaska; discussions of how ecosystems, cultures, and languages cannot be preserved separately from each other, nor through documentation, but must be conserved in situ (and that includes doing things like developing viable economies in rural communities so that young people have the option to learn from elders); and discussion of how to bring non-Native rural people into the ecological framework Martinez proposes, in order to help them maintain and develop their ties to the land.

The second article is a wide-ranging conversation between the authors about re-indigenization, which Mohawk defines as envisioning the world in a "postconquest, postmodernist, postprogressive era... the re-biodiversity, the recultural diversity, the rethinking of the earth as a living being." Quite a lot of the discussion centers around contrasting currently dominant institutions and practices with indigenous institutions and practices, with a special emphasis on the biases and faults of the dominant systems, and some discussion of how those systems might be leveraged, used, or revamped toward re-indiginezation. This article/interview didn't hit me with the awesome the way the previous one did, but I suspect that's more a function of me than a function of the article -- I'm already familiar with a lot of the critiques in here, and don't feel much hope that re-indigenization on a broad scale is possible. But then, part of my lack of faith is based in the fact that these critiques aren't widely understood, and the remedy to that is to talk about these things more, not less, eh?

All said, I want to get my hands on this anthology.

(additional author tags: Cherokee, Canadian. O'odham, Crow; Rarámuri; Anishinaabe, Métis. Pueblo; Iroquois; Andean.)

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

An extremely readable and fascinating book by a neuroscientist (Ramachandran) and a science writer (Blakeslee), about using case studies of brain-injury patients to examine how the brain works. (Ramachandran was born and raised in India, but now lives in the USA. Blakeslee is a white American.)

Ramachandran’s speculations on the cause of phantom limb pain from amputated limbs produced a cure which works extremely well for some (not all) patients. But considering how intractable the condition usually is, that’s a remarkable achievement. His cure— which succeeded in some cases where medication and surgery failed— consists of a box with a hole cut into it, and a mirror he bought for five dollars…

Even if you’ve read other popular works on the brain and cognition before, this should be of interest to you, as even when it seemed that Ramachandran was going over familiar territory, he went so much more in-depth that even topics I thought I was already well-acquainted with became completely new. A lot of popular science either over-simplifies too much and doesn’t tackle the questions it raises, or else is too technical to be easily followed by a layperson. This book was easy to read but dug into the deeper implications of its topics nearly every time. Ramachandran at times reminded me of This American Life’s Ira Glass in his ability to ask not just the obvious follow-up question, but the much less obvious and more revealing follow-up to the follow-up.

His enthusiasm for his field and the possibility of doing extremely low-tech experiments in it is contagious and charming. (A number of his experiments require nothing more than a human volunteer, a pencil, a table, a box, a mirror, and an undergraduate hiding under the box.) I also enjoyed his sense of humor: he’s evidently friends with Francis Crick of DNA fame, who is apparently a fervent atheist, and uses Crick as an example any time he mentions atheism, as in (from memory), “It would be interesting to see if stimulating the temporal lobe could also cause atheists to experience a sense of oneness with God. Perhaps I should try it on Francis Crick.” I am an atheist myself, and this cracked me up. He also has a hilarious take-down of the more unlikely theories of sociobiologists in the endnotes to one chapter. Don’t neglect to read the endnotes, there’s great stuff in there.

I thought this book was extremely entertaining, thought-provoking, and educational. My one possible warning is his use of the phrase “normal people” (both with and without quotes) to mean people without brain injuries. Given the context, I’m not sure that would be considered pejorative, but I’m mentioning it in case it is. If that’s not a dealbreaker, I highly recommend the book.

View on Amazon: Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

sanguinity

(Maybe if I do a bunch of mini-reviews, I'll have a chance of catching up?)

51. Keith Black, MD, Brain Surgeon: A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles.

This one works best, I think, if you think of it as an extended dinner table conversation. The writing style is somewhat clunky, but the man does have good stories to tell, and I learned quite a bit about brain tumors, brain surgery, cancer treatment, cancer research, and the various concerns one weighs when deciding whether to cut or not. (Which sounds as if it might be dull, when I list it out like that. Except that it's very much not.)

52. Michael Cunningham & Craig Marberry, Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats.

Oo. Lovely photos of women in their church hats, interleaved with reminisces from the women themselves about... the hats, their families, their churches, their communities. Lots of handsome photos, lots of gorgeous moments from people's lives. Go look.

53. William L. Iġġiaġruk Hensley, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow : A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People.

"Alaska is my identity, my home, and my cause. I was there, after all, before Gore-Tex replaced muskrat and wolf skin in parkas, before moon boots replaced mukluks, before the gas drill replaced the age-old tuuq we used to dig through five feet of ice to fish. I was there before the snow machine, back when the huskies howled their eagerness to pull the sled. I was there before the outboard motor showed up, when the qayaq and umiaq glided silently across the water, and I was there when the candle and the Coleman lamp provided all the light we needed."

Memoir of a Native Alaskan activist and politician who was instrumental in the preservation of the Native Alaskan land base. I would be hard-pressed to sum this up, but the first half is a very engaging depiction of Hesley's childhood community and its lifestyle, while the second half is the stressful emotional rollercoaster of trying to make sure that Alaska's newly-created state government, in combination with the federal government, didn't claim all of Alaska's land for themselves, corporate interests, and non-Native immigrants. There was a lot of cool and interesting stuff in here, but a lot of it you get just a glimpse of -- Hensley has had a very rich life, and one book isn't nearly enough to discuss it all.

technocracygirl.livejournal.com

This one was a bit of a surprise. I've been interested in epidemics and epidemic agents, and so when I checked this one out of the library, I wasn't expecting to write this up here. I knew Alibek was a defector from the Soviet Union, and that he had been very high up in the bioweapon hierarchy, so I assumed he was a white Russian guy.

Assumptions are dangerous. Ken Alibek is an Americanization of Kanatjan Alibekov, and he is a native of Khazakastan. He doesn't talk much about being different from the rest of his colleagues, but it's still really easy to pick him out in his platoon graduation photo. It may be that he was just that good, so he didn't picked on, or he was studious enough not to notice too much, or he just didn't care to talk about institutionalized racism in a book about his work. He does mention that his daughter got teased in school. Not much, because it was a company town, and her father was known to be the head of the lab complex, but enough to read between the lines and see some not-good times for Mira.

Alibekov himself did his level best to be a New Soviet Man, and succeeded at that beyond what he expected. He was on the top levels of the Soviet hierarchy for biological and genetics work, well-respected by his peers and subordinates, and the second-highest ranked Khazak in the Soviet military. Of course, he and his brains earned all of this by engaging in illegal weaponization of biological agents.

If you like this sort of thing, it's absolutely fascinating. However, I know that it's nightmare fuel for others, so I won't go into details about it. I just love the fact that I stumbled upon a PoC book by accident. (There's also a PoC main author on my current ebook, Smallpox and its Eradication, but since it's one out of five main authors, I won't review it here.)

Current Mood: cheerful

kate_nepveu

I'd heard people speak highly of Neil deGrasse Tyson's science writing previously, but it wasn't until his Daily Show appearance (and sequel) that I made reading something by him a priority. Death By Black Hole: and Other Cosmic Quandaries seemed like the best place to start.

( cut for length )

The ninth and tenth volumes of Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist continue to be excellent. These contain an arc of consequences from volume 4 (the Lab 5 arc and associated developments), which are exciting, emotional, and surprising. And, to my joy, include much more in the way of characters acting collaboratively, which was a thing that annoyed me about the original anime. I only disliked one thing, where I felt that drama overrode logic in the timing of a revelation, but it was minor. Read them together, as volume nine ends on a cliffhanger, but definitely read them.

Originally posted to my booklog.

* * *

Not for the challenge, but possibly also of interest: The Rabbi's Cat 2, by Joann Sfar, set in 1930s Africa, graphic novel collection of two stories, the second of which the author states was deliberately written as an anti-racism story. I didn't like this as well as the first, but I still enjoyed quite a lot of it.

sanguinity

42. Thomas Fink and Yong Mao, The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie.

The first third of this slim volume is the history of male neckwear, including such factoids as how the terracotta army turned necktie scholarship on its ear, what the first verse of Yankee Doodle is about, and that while the Duke of Windsor's characteristically large knot can be emulated with a so-called Windsor knot, the Duke himself wore padded ties. (That last makes me snicker every time I repeat it; I keep wanting to make a joke about him stuffing his tie with kleenex.)

From there the book goes into a fast overview of knots in the topological sense (in which we learn that the four-in-hand is a buntline hitch), and a prose description of the authors' definition of a "legal" necktie knot. (Much to my disappointment, the eighty-five knots in the title are not a cataloging of all the possible ways to put a knot in a tie, but all the possible ways to build a "respectable" knot, something you might be willing to wear to a job interview. In this case, "respectability" includes somewhat-arbitrary limits on a knot's symmetry and maximum size.) For those who are frustrated by prose descriptions of mathematics, the mathematical details are included in an appendix; for those who do not want to deal with the formal mathematics, the formal mathematics has been placed well out of your way in the appendix.

And then we get to the knots themselves. All eighty-five possible knots are described in notation and diagrams, and the history of the most-aesthetic few in each class (as defined by the mathematics) is discussed. Throughout this section there are many photos of famous people wearing neckties, but unfortunately, the particular knot used in any given photo is almost never identified. While reading all these detailed descriptions of the final forms of the twenty-odd most popular knots, I very much wanted side-by-side standardized photos. (Mostly because I doubt. Are they really as distinctive as all that?)

All in all, it's a readable little treatise that demonstrates how one can define a solution space for a not-so-abstract problem. Back in my pure-math combinatorics days, I could see handing this off to someone who was trying to get a vague sense of what math "looks" like to mathematicians (or, similarly, for those who wanted a sample of what mathematicians "do"). It could also be nice browse-through for trivia hounds. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if its most frequent usage was as a coming-of-age gift for a young person who was learning to tie his or her first necktie.

seekingferret.livejournal.com

4) Burndive by Karin Lowachee is a nifty little space opera. It is strangely titled, for a book that has very little burndiving. Burndiving, it is suggested early, is some sort of future term for hacking computers. Its main function in the plot is to serve as the mechanism by which people can hide information from each other.
( Read more... )
5)The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is somehow the first Toni Morrison novel I've ever read. This will be changing shortly. If this is her debut novel, and one she criticizes sharply in her Afterward for a variety of technical flaws, I can't wait to read the more polished Morrison.
( The review continues )
6) Time Traveler by Ronald Mallett. Dr. Ronald Mallett here tells the story of his life's journey toward some significant theories in modern general relativity. Supported by his single mother and grandparents after losing his father at age 10, he quested after a time machine with a singular passion that is pretty amazing. In the process, he became one of only a few African-American physics Ph.Ds and a full professor at a major research university.
( The review continues )

coraa.livejournal.com

The Pluto Files, by Neil deGrasse Tyson

I got this book because I saw Tyson on The Daily Show, talking about it, and the whole interview made me grin ear to ear, like a loon. (You can watch it here, if you like.) It's relatively rare that I watch an interview on a show like that and actually want to go get the book, but I did -- immediately. And I'm really glad I did.

The Pluto Files is about 'the rise and fall of America's favorite planet' -- it charts the history of Pluto's discovery, and its special status to Americans. (Pluto was the only planet discovered by an American, and, of course, there's the cartoon dog, named shortly after the planet's discovery.) And then, of course, the complicating factor of the discovery of other Pluto-like icy bodies, which threw into question: was Pluto really a planet at all?

At the heart of the book is a question: what makes a planet a planet? Apparently this question didn't have an actual answer for a surprisingly long time -- effectively, a planet was the set of things we called planets. This was more or less fine when the state of astronomy and astrophysics was such that we weren't aware of the other things out there... but that changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, what with the Hubble Space Telescope and the various unmanned probes.

Much of the book is about this debate: what makes a planet a planet? When the other icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune were discovered (the Kuiper belt objects), the question became: if we find another icy body as big as Pluto -- or bigger -- do we call it a planet, too? What if we find a bunch of them? Will we cheerfully up the number of planets to ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty? (Indeed, at least one Kuiper belt object was found that was bigger than Pluto; if Pluto was a planet, then Eris definitely was a planet, too.) Or does the presence of a wide variety of Kuiper belt objects, much more similar to one another than to the rest of the planets, mean that Pluto isn't really a planet at all? Indeed, the famous 2006 vote to de-planetize Pluto wasn't actually about Pluto at all, something I hadn't been aware of: the vote was to ratify the first formal definition of a planet, and that definition didn't include Pluto.

But the other key topic of the book was the intersection between culture and science. Several people, scientists among them, argued for a cultural definition of 'planet' that could keep Pluto under sort of a historical grandfather clause. In other words, the argument was that Pluto is a planet because 'planet' has more to do with public opinion and historical tradition than scientific definition. And this part of the book included all kinds of fascinating things: songs about Pluto, letters from elementary school students (in the interview, Stewart says, "You got some hate mail about this decision, didn't you?" and Tyson laughs and clarifies: "Hate mail from third graders."), explorations of the effect that nearly eighty years of the Disney dog had on perceptions of Pluto's status, descriptions of the various 'funerals' for Pluto.

One of the things that I really liked about it, too, is that Tyson doesn't pretend neutrality. He's clear from the beginning that his opinion was that Pluto wasn't a planet, and the book is partly an argument for that opinion. I liked that it was straightforward in its biases, and that's part of what made it so entertaining and so... not-textbook-like.

This book was, as far as I'm concerned, a rare find: a pop science book, accessible to practically anyone, but still written by an expert in the field; a book that is informative and funny and opinionated and absolutely delightful. Highly recommended -- and I'm going to track down more of Tyson's books soon.

kizmet-42.livejournal.com

http://www.artofstrategy.info/

Possibly not the average book for this challenge, but I got the lead from the Freakinomics blog.

John Nash of The Beautiful Mind is probably the best known mathematician who worked on game strategy, but it's beyond one man's work. The Art of Strategy gives the clueless (such as myself) some clear examples of various theories and then gives a more in-depth explanation. I find the writing clear and informative, even if the math is far over my head. I've enjoyed it tremendously.

sanguinity

...So. Far. Behind. Also, these numbers are annoyingly all out of order. What I'm calling "book 18" I finished yesterday; what I'm calling "book 19" I finished in October. Ergh.

18. Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World's Food System.

Wide-ranging, engaging analysis (from a systems perspective!) of the global markets in food, their control by a relatively small number of corporate giants, and the effect of that control on both farmers and eaters. Little explosions of connections kept going off in my brain while I was reading: Oh, so THAT explains that! I found myself wishing it was not a library copy so that I might highlight to my heart's content (and I am not normally one who reads with a highlighter in hand).

( Food Sovereignty and Illusory Choice )

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in Michael Pollan's work, or in issues of obesity, starvation, free trade, and other issues of food justice. Patel also maintains a related website -- stuffedandstarved.org -- with updated news, educational articles, resources, and action items.

19. Sonia Shah, The Body Hunters: How the Drug Industry Tests Its Products on the World's Poorest Patients.

Also very good. I've delayed reviewing so long because I wanted to a decent summary of the content, but that was not happening. ( In which I try to summarize, anyway )

In the end, Shah is not so much against pharmaceutical testing as she is against the hypocrisy and mythologizing that often surrounds pharmaceutical testing. When a company says that an experimental protocol should be permitted because it is "for society's benefit," will the society that bears the burden of the experimentation also be one of the societies that benefits from the resultant drug? Is the societal good available in the here-and-now, or is it available in "some speculative future when prices fall, or poverty ends"? Will the new knowledge actually benefit a society-at-large (e.g. a treatment for a previously untreatable disease) or does it benefit only corporate shareholders (e.g. a replacement drug for a soon-to-expire patent)? Do the designated ethical gatekeepers for medical experimentation have conflicts of interest? Unfortunately, as Shah documents, the pretty rhetoric about societal benefits often doesn't match the observed realities.

In her conclusion, Shah sums up with a discussion of the phrase "due to ethical concerns":

It's hard to imagine anyone talking about indentured labor, or oil spills, or corporate embezzlement as not being possible "due to ethical concerns." Those things are simply considered morally wrong and socially illegitimate, and are punishable by law. But when clinical researchers deceive patients, exploit their poverty, or divert scarce resources away from their care, it isn't considered an unalloyed bad. The main business of medical research -- improving health, saving lives -- overshadows it. The exploitation and human rights violations are just side effects.

We have two options, as Shah sees it. We could "mothball the mythology" that surrounds drug-testing, the mythology that frames the exploitation and human rights violations as "side-effects", and hold the drug industry to the same moral standards that we (try to) hold other self-serving industries to. Or we could demand that drug companies and medical researchers live up to the myths, and hold them accountable for actually doing the mythic work that they claim to do. The latter would require a political movement, Shah is well aware. In the meanwhile, she asserts, we need to find ways to do medical experimentation fairly.

puritybrown.livejournal.com

45: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
On instantaneous decision-making and the ways in which it can be better than carefully-thought-out rational choices, as well as the times when it can go badly wrong. Interesting and entertaining, with some solid insights into the ways in which prejudice works; sometimes a bit glib, though, and frankly not quite substantial enough to justify its length. I think Gladwell is better at article length than book length.

46: Burma Boy by Biyi Bandele
A novel about a 13-year-old boy who enlists in one of the Nigeria Regiments during the Second World War and is sent to fight the Japanese in Burma. Frequently very funny; equally often horrific and tragic. Very well-written and utterly gripping.

47: The Girl from HOPPERS by Jaime Hernandez
I enjoyed this more than the first volume, Maggie the Mechanic, which was just all over the place, but even though this volume's considerably less scattershot in approach, it didn't always click with me. There are some stories that I adored, and others that just didn't work for me. Hernandez is a superb artist, there's no denying that, but his way of telling a story is somehow a few angles off from what I seem to expect, which leaves me feeling confused a lot of the time. Still, I'm glad I read it.

alias_sqbr

3: Gawande, Atul - Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

(found via this comm) I have a feeling I would have enjoyed this more if I was any sort of medical proffesional, but I still found it interesting. The straightforward logical way he goes through the different causes and issues around surgical error was refreshing and made his points clear and irrefutable. While I found it less entertaining than, say, James Herriot (I don't read alot of medical books, I don't have much to compare to :)) the little stories about peoples lives were engaging and felt very true.

4: Jackie Huggins- Sister Girl: the writings of an Aboriginal activist and historian

This was great. I have a long rambly review here written late last night just after I finished it, but in short: a collection of essays and interviews on a wide range of topics relating to her experiences and research as an aboriginal woman and activist, mixing personal experience with history, politics, anger and advice. I am really glad I read this, and am very grateful to

fire_fly for recomending it. I think any australians on this comm should definitely check it out, and am pretty sure non-australians would enjoy it too (I think it's good to get a different perspective on these things), especially the interview between the author and bell hooks.

Also, I'll briefly mention a failed attempt: "My Place" by Sally Morgan, whose main flaw is that it's an autobiography and I hate autobiographies (I have to remind myself of this every few years) I only got a few chapters in but I've heard it's quite good!

Current Mood: chipper

oyceter

Tyson, Neil de Grasse - Universe Down to Earth
The book is like Tyson-the-lecturer distilled, although it cannot quite get across just how charismatic, funny, and, above all, clear he is. Sadly, I've clearly forgotten all my basics of physics, but the book has a brief refresher. Though Tyson's field is astronomy and the book has chapters specific to astronomy, other parts are just good background. (more)

Butler, Octavia E. - Clay's Ark
It's the near-distant future, and society has deteriorated so that there are walled cities and gangs running amuck outside. Blake and his two daughters, Rane and Keira, end up being kidnapped, but not by the normal suspects. Instead, they've been kidnapped by a group of people infected with a strange organism from outer space. (more)

Winston, Sherri - The Kayla Chronicles
This is a very small book, and I had to be in the right mood to feel up to Kayla's voice, which is snappy and slangy and very fun. I was a little irritated that the main plot is mostly "Oh, I can be feminist and wear heels too!" as I felt the nuances of social expectations and gender roles and etc. weren't fully explored, and that the book took the easy way out with Rosalie's hardcore, "you're not a feminist unless you're like me" line. (more)

Tyson, Neil de Grasse - Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandries
This is a collection of essays Tyson wrote for Natural History, and it ranges from grumping at astronomical movie gaffes to light spectrum analysis to how exactly a black hole would kill you. (more)

Smith, Andrea - Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
I am not even covering half of what I found exciting about the book, but the core of it is how Smith reads what is normally read as racial or cultural violence as sexual violence. Just... *flails* READ THIS. (more)

Min, Anchee - Empress Orchid
Overall, I think this could have been a fascinating reimagining of a powerful woman who worked her way up despite the system, as well as a sharp critique of that system, but instead, the emphasis on Orchid's love life and the decision to stay firmly in her first-person POV undermines the retelling. (more)

Sunee, Kim - Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home

I always find it hard to critique memoirs when I find myself disliking the character of the author. Sunee writes very well, but it's a literary fiction first-person-POV present-tense style that I tend to dislike, and that coupled with existential angst really threw me off. Despite some angst about her unknown Korean heritage and her distant adoptive family, most of the book is actually about Sunee's successive unsuccessful love affairs and her search to find a family for herself. (more)

Whoo! I hit 50! And there are three books from this year by POC that I haven't written up yet!

Current Music: 無法阻擋 - 阿杜

oyceter

Gawande, Atul - Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
As noted in the subtitle, this is a book about bettering performance in the medical sphere, though Gawande's findings can be applied to more general situations as well. He covers hand-washing compliance in hospitals, medical professionals and legal executions, the standardization of child-birth, the increasing rates of success for medical procedures in the battlefield, and many other topics. (more)

Yang, Sunny - Hanbok: The Art of Korean Clothing
I think this is a fairly basic introduction to the history of Korean clothing from the Three Kingdoms (57 BCE - 668 BCE) through Westernization (~1800s). It's hard for me to tell, given that I know zero about Korean clothing outside of what I've seen on kdramas. Yang gives a brief history of Korean to contextualize what was going on with changes in clothing, though I am somewhat wary of its scholarly accuracy, given Yang's prose and attitude in the rest of the book. (more)

Liu, Marjorie M. - The Last Twilight
Doctor Rikki Kinn is treating what looks like an outbreak of Ebola in the Congo, but she soon gets tangled up in something much bigger. Enter Amiri the cheetah shapeshifter from Dirk & Steele, who is returning to Africa for the first time since being kidnapped by the Consortium. (more)

Gawande, Atul - Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
I ran to get this after I finished Gawande's Better. I think I may like it a smidgen better than Better, even though this is an earlier book, but most of that is simply subject-matter preference on my part. Both books are very well-written, compulsive reads. (more)

Lee Kyung Ja, Hong Na Young, and Chang Sook Hwan - Traditional Korean Costume
I think the only bad things I can say about the book is that none of the samples have dates (I particularly wanted to know for the eyeglass cases and the rubber-soled shoes), that it only covers Joseon (as expected, given the fragility of clothing), and that it has no little cloth samples (some day...). Other than that, this is a costume nut's dream. (more)

sanguinity

28. Nathan McCall, Them

"Gentrification" of Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward (Martin Luther King, Jr.'s old neighborhood, and the site of his grave), from the perspective of residents who didn't want to be gentrified. I've been talking about this book a lot---it does a really nice job of illustrating the cultural divides and power differences between them (a neighborhood's black long-time residents) and them (the affluent white newcomers). Plus, it's a good read. (Or rather, a good listen---I caught this one on audio.)

McCall is coming to town this week to do a reading, and I'll definitely be going. Portland's Albina district (our single historically black neighborhood) has been gentrifying, and I'm very curious to see who will and won't show up for this reading, and what they will say...

29. Pauline W. Chen, Final Exam

I found this one through a book review by Atul Gawande, and there are a lot of similarities in style -- more-or-less discrete essays that employ a mix of personal reflections and historical context, each rooted in the experience of being a surgeon and yet still of broad societal interest. Unlike Gawande's books, however, Chen's book has a strong theme: dealing with death.

Chen details her first encounter with death as a medical student dissecting a cadaver in anatomy lab, then progresses through her first official pronouncement of death, her inculturation as a resident to ignore dying patients, the first patient she killed through error, the sense of false immortality that she developed as a transplant surgeon, her creeping sense of sometimes doing harm by trying too hard to prevent a patient's death, and eventually culminating in learning a little of how to be helpful when a patient and his family is facing the patient's impending death.

It's an emotionally honest and compelling read. It would be a lie to say that parts of the book aren't upsetting---death isn't a particularly pleasant subject anyhow, and she's cringingly honest about her reactions. Yet, there is something that can be comforting about looking at death head-on, and that comes through clearly here.

rydra_wong

A handful of reviews, the shortness of which should not be interpreted as value judgement -- in many cases, they're so short because the books reduced me to flaily incoherence.

Edmundo Paz Soldan, Turing's Delirium

A cool Bolivian cyberpunk/political thriller - I suspect many William Gibson fans will love this - with an acute take on political corruption, and more than a a dash of Kafka. I particularly liked the fact that one key character, investigative cyberjournalist Flavia, merely happens to be (in her "real" life) a teenage schoolgirl.

Caryl Phillips, Cambridge

I previously only knew Phillips's work as an essayist, but this novel is searing. The first half of the book is told in the voice of Emily Cartwright, a young Englishwoman (who Jane Austen would have recognized, if not admired), who is sent by her father to visit his West Indian plantation. It's one of the most extraordinary feats of literary ventriloquism I've come across lately, a masterclass in unreliable narration, even before the second half of the book (narrated by Olumide/David Henderson, the slave re-named "Cambridge") reveals the story under the story.

Sonia Shah, The Body Hunters: testing new drugs on the world's poorest patients

This is a short, pithy and hard-hitting exploration of the issues (medical, moral and political) involved in the boom in research studies using patients in developing countries. It got well-deserved praise from The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The New England Journal Of Medicine, and I'd say it's a must-read for anyone with an interest in what the Big Pharma companies are doing (which includes those of us who are dependent on their products).

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

That rare rare thing, a novel using second person apostrophe, a story told to an un-named (and clearly increasingly nervous) "you". It handles intense topics with cool irony and impeccable control, as narrator Changez relates his journey from the Princeton student recruited by top firm Underwood Samson to the bearded radical scholar sitting at a cafe table in Lahore talking to an American stranger. I adored it.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night

Clinical psychologist Gobodo-Madikizela relates her prison interviews with Eugene de Kock, one of the commanding officers of apartheid's death squads, in what may be one of the great non-fictional confrontations with the problem of human evil, to be filed next to Hannah Arendt and Gitta Sereny and Ron Rosenbaum. It's a slim, readable book -- Professor Gobodo-Madikizela wears her erudition lightly, giving a clear and concise explanation of Emile Fackenheim's "double move" at one moment, and throwing in a wry reference to The Silence of the Lambs at the next -- with hard and complex intellectual implications about evil and the morality and politics of forgiveness, which she explores with the same clarity. I read this more than a month ago, and I think I've barely begin to process it - I want to re-read it and argue with it and maybe spend a few years thinking about it. It feels like my brain exploded and my ears are still ringing ...