Serendipity, chance and the anatomy of discovery in Happy Accidents

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

Serendipity is a constant throughout our lives. Whether it is the tragedy narrowly avoided or the good news received at just the right moment, its unexpected gifts and arrows have the power to delight, to terrify and to change our world. For who hasn't had the course of their existence altered by a moment unlooked for, a circumstance not considered? But for all of serendipity's capacity to change our moods and our lives, is it not, on some level, merely a means by which to explain the strange oddities that chance sometimes throws up? Is it not an evocation of some external force to explain a lack of vision? The absence of the mental clarity to consider all that lies before us? Whatever its implications, it lies at the heart of this fascinating history of medicine from Mr. Mayers.

Of all the industries that have been redefined over the last two centuries, few have experienced more change, and more advancement, than medicine. As late as the 19th century, doctors were little more than priests when it came to their capacity to heal. They had a handful of steadfast remedies with which they could attempt to mend the broken, but their knowledge of the human body was about as poor as their comprehension of the world around them. Germs and diseases had yet to be discovered, let alone studied. And curatives were often as poisonous to the patient as the affliction. Comprehension of the world and all its forces was so poor that, even when radiation was discovered at the turn of the 20th century, it was thought to be beneficial, even therapeutic. It wasn't until cancers began to erupt from these applications that the true cost of playing with such fundamental forces was revealed. Ignorance, creating assumptions, creating dogmas, until those dogmas were shattered in the face of hard truths.

But as dark as the 19th century may have been for medicine, the 20th was a revolution. Where prior centuries had been a wasteland of discovery and understanding, treatments for cancer, Tuberculosis, bacterial infection, heart attacks and high blood pressure all became widespread. Even the mysteries of the brain were, to some degree, conquered with drugs that successfully fought numerous strains of mental illness. In les than a hundred years, the doctor's toolbox expanded from prayer and good fortune to hundreds of possible remedies for any of a host of formerly lethal conditions. But just how did these magnificent discoveries eventuate? Were humans suddenly smarter, more intuitive, more understanding of the human form and its connection to the broader world, or were there other forces at play?

A persuasive argument for the virtues of screwing up, Happy Accidents is an engaging adventure through the slap-dash, serendipitous world of medicine and the discoveries that have shaped its last hundred years. Morton Mayers, himself a medical doctor, divides his chronicle up into sections, each of which sheds light upon the fundamental workings of the heart, the cell,the circulatory system, the blood and even the brain. His intent is not so much to give his readers a refresher on high-school biology, though he does this admirably, as to illuminate the anatomy of the breakthroughs, the circumstances that surrounded the key insights that not only pulled back the curtain on the innerworkings of these systems, but that lead to revolutionary cures that have restored life to the terminal and sanity to the doomed. In each case, from antibiotics to antipsychotics, from Lipitor to Lithium, he exposes a startlingly clear pattern of ignorance that was dispelled by happenstance, leading to awareness and, finally, to solutions.

Underpinning Mr. Mayers' work here is the understanding that humans invariably operate based on a collection of assumptions that become, in their certainty, unhelpfully dogmatic. X should not work on Y because of Z. But of course, truths are only true until they are proven false. The sun revolved around the Earth until it didn't. The Earth was 6,000 years old until it wasn't. Emotions stemmed from the heart until they didn't. Certainty; giving way to puzzlement in the face of contradictions; forcing the forging of newer, better certainties; starting the process all over again until perhaps something like knowledge is possessed. However, given the discomfort of living in constant doubt, we like certainty. We cling to it and we are damned by it. For it blinds us to the discoveries, the connections, that would be obvious to us if we were willing to try everything rather than being dismissive out of hand and waiting for random chance to drop fortunate outcomes into our laps.

But as wonderfully as the author constructs this argument, and as much knowledge as he drops on the reader during its repeated demonstration, his proscriptions for its rectification seem inadequate. Mr. Mayers levels an accusatory finger at everyone, from big pharma to big government, to explain why this age of rapid discovery has slowed, why fewer treatments than ever are being discovered. And perhaps he is right to blame these forces interfering with good research. However, Happy Accidents is nothing if not a book about the narrow mindedness of humanity, of how we have to practically be smashed over the head with a gong before we see what's before us. And so crediting serendipity for the golden age of medicine and then blaming institutions for its end seems, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, blind to the possibility that we have plucked all the low-hanging fruit. We have made most, if not all, of the simple discoveries that it's possible for chance to gift to us, that what remains are more systemic discoveries that will require open minds and collaborative efforts to achieve.

Happy Accidents is a dense and deeply rewarding adventure through the human body and the men and women who reduced it from mysterious phenomenon to a highly complex machine that we've gone a long way to explaining. For this knowledge alone, a must read. For those intrigued by happenstance and randomness, no disappointment will be found within these pages. But for those looking for solutions to the intriguing problems posed here, the answers will have to be sought out elsewhere. (4/5 Stars)

The intersection of genetics and will in the fascinating The Sports Gene

From The Week of November 25th, 2013

Even if human civilization wasn't already driven by the desire for commercial success, the answer to the question of what makes certain people successful would transfix humanity. We are all, to varying degrees, creatures of gifts and opportunities, ideas and pivotal moments. So why do some of us rise to the top while others of equal talent and ability slump into obscurity? Fortune surely plays a key role here; after all, the chaotic clashing of wills that defines the modern, competitive environment, is bound to spit out some who triumph as a result of being in the right place, at the right time, to gather up the pieces left behind by their bested betters. And yet, there are too many examples of successful individuals who have honed their bodies, and trained their minds, to achieve the improbable that lady luck's beneficence, be it circumstantial or genetic, cannot be the determining factor. Well, then, what is it? David Epstein investigates.

Though organized displays of feats of human skill are nearly as old as we are, the last hundred years has seen an explosion in competitive sports. The rise of the modern world, and all its expanding wealth, has fuelled the professionalization of what was, as late as the early 20th century, a largely amateur field, with men and women laying down their burdens to perform their talents for curious audiences eager to see the best that man had to offer. Now, thanks to televised broadcasts and corporate sponsorship, almost every conceivable pursuit of athletics contains a golden pot of wealth and prestige just waiting for the victor to claim it.

This yearning for status and income has thrown professional competition into overdrive, creating specimens of human skill and power unimaginable a century ago. These supremely toned machines have shattered records that scientists and experts thought unbreakable. But more than that, they've spurred a curiosity about why some athletes are better than others. CO2max and the 10,000-hour rule, the sprinter gene and fast-twitch muscles have all entered our lexicon as we probe at the heart of the human body in its highest, present-day form.

From Jamaican sprinters to Finnish skiers, from Kenyan runners to Scandinavian pole-vaulters, The Sports Gene is a fascinating, non-dogmatic exploration of the intersection of mind and muscle, genes and success. Mr. Epstein, a track-and-field athlete in his not-so-distant youth, eschews the Gladwellian approach to social and sports science, refusing to hail any given talent as the root of all athletic triumph. Instead, he gathers up all the various threads that might play a role in finishing first and attempts, in an open-minded way, to weigh them by their significance. In this, he takes fewer chances than the Gladwells and the Lehrers of the world, but he also profoundly reduces the odds of misleading his readers by oversimplifying what is inherently an extraordinarily complex system, extreme achievement.

Though Mr. Epstein devotes much more time to his investigation than he does to his pontifications, his conclusions do surface from time to time and seem, on the whole, reasonable and agreeable. The author rejects the notion that any one virtue lies at the heart of physical success; rather, it flows from the fusion of natural talent, mental fortitude and a great deal of practice. Certainly, there are athletes whose physical gifts outstrip these other components, individuals who rise on account of having won the genetic lottery, but it's equally clear that some among the genetically average have prospered thanks to an iron-willed desire to win. In this, we come to better understand both sporting success generally and generational athletes specifically. For when genetic gifts are married to a well-trained mind, there are few barriers left to ultimate success.

the Sports Gene could have been more opinionated. It could have attempted to dig more deeply into the truly exceptional amongst us, but we cannot call these flaws or missteps. For the work's virtue is in mixing together the small and the famous, the modest and the showy. It is a celebration of how success comes in simply too many forms to be so blithely defined by those who cynically set out to reduce thousand-dollar questions into ten-cent answers. For this, we all should be grateful.

An excellent and enlightening journey through the extremity of the human form... (4/5 Stars)

The neurological mechanics of reading revealed in Proust and The Squid

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

Of the many gifts with which evolution has blessed us, none are as consequential as humanity's ability to adapt. Our physiological capacity to endure the cold and the heat, the dry and the damp, the grim and the barren, have ensured the continuance of our species, but even these achievements pale in power next to the might of neuroplasticity, the ability of the human brain to literally re-program itself in response to the necessities of the individual. In the event that areas of the brain are damaged, malformed, or even underutilized, neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-task its other regions in order to regain necessary skills. It is a wonder that has saved and empowered humanity countless times, and yet, little did we know the critical role it has played in our capacity to read. Maryanne Wolf explains in her engaging work.

Without the written word, we would not have civilization. It's a grand claim, and yet, there can be little arguing it. After all, the written word has been, throughout our history, the most stable means by which to transmit information from generation to generation. Oral traditions served admirably well in the many millennia prior to the advent of alphabets, but such a means for knowledge transfer is highly unstable, subject to misremembering and misinterpretation, not to mention genocide. More than the accumulation of knowledge, though, the written word has given us complex mathematics with which we've built up a world capable of delivering us to the stars. A substantial achievement for something that does not come naturally to the human brain.

From signs to messages, from magazines to novels, we read every day, largely without conscious effort. And yet, in Proust and The Squid, Ms. Wolf argues that this fundamental element of our daily existence is, to us, an unnatural process, one that we have trained ourselves to perform. Drawing on her own research, as well as work from neuroscientists and linguists, she describes how reading is an outgrowth of the brain's capacity to recognize patterns and to extract meaning from them. This evolutionary talent, no doubt the result of the necessities of survival, is, in the reader, cultivated, over some 2,000 hours of intense training, into a system by which the individual can associate shapes with letters, letters with sounds, and sounds with language, creating a closed, linguistic circuit that allows us to not only communicate with our fellows but to imbibe knowledge from the troves of information left to us by the countless members of humanity who have come and gone.

Proust and The Squid is more than a rumination on the mechanics of reading, however. It is an examination of the many manifestations of this talent, how languages based on alphabets and hieroglyphs make different neurological connections, and how these connections can sometimes go astray. The most famous of these maladaptations is dyslexia, a disability Ms. Wolf has clearly studied at length. For these disabilities, and the social and emotional price they exact upon their sufferers, inject passion into the author's work here, transforming it from a thing of pure science to something of a call to arms, to understand and to eliminate such challenges.

While Proust and The Squid is, at times, fascinating and inspiring, it is plagued by a troubling narrowness of perspective. Ms. Wolf uses several admittedly potent statistics correlating reading with personal success to argue that it is a talent that must be cultivated for a full and informed life. But this advocacy seems to run completely counter to her fundamental premise, that reading is an unnatural cultivation of a neurological system that isn't designed to actualize it. Is it truly possible for reading to be so profoundly important when it is clearly not intrinsic to our natures? Is it not possible that reading is, rather, the most obvious means of knowledge transfer for the present? Ms. Wolf is alarmed by the propensity of our newest generation to immerse themselves in a world of touchscreens rather than books. And yet, touchscreens seem to be far more in line with the brain's natural visual systems than reading is. Perhaps, in the future, we will discover other means of knowledge transfer that are more efficient than the laborious programming of alphabets.

In this vein, that Ms. Wolf completely ignores those who read through listening is deeply disturbing. Entire industries have been created to service the many communities that either prefer or depend upon audiobooks for learning. In fact, I read Proust and The Squid as an audiobook because I lack a visual means to consume it. By Ms. Wolf's logic here, I too am cause for concern because I've chosen another way to learn. The author's alarmism over new technologies is a rejection of the very glory that gave us reading in the first place, our ability to adapt. Trust seems in order here, not dismay.

An interesting read, but one that is far more interested in providing encouragement to the dyslexic than it is in recognizing and mitigating its author's own lack of foresight... (3/5 Stars)

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A fascinating, educational takedown of atavistic thinking in Paleofantasy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

While most of us look forward to the hope of tomorrow, its implicit promise that life will continue to improve, there are some for whom progress, in all its forms, is anathema. For these unchanging few, the world as it was is how it should be today, a place where man lives in harmony not only with the land but with himself and the countless generations that preceded him. There is value in this philosophy; after all, it is within our nature to be reckless, to adopt both technologies and social systems with an eagerness that defies both prudence and patience. The instinct to fall back, re-group and re-trench is one that should be cherished as inherited wisdom. But sadly, too often, this becomes an excuse to eschew progress, to continue forever as we were, out of some outmoded deference to tradition. This is not wisdom. It is wishful thinking. And that truth Marlene Zuk makes wonderfully clear in this engaging examination of humanity's past.

There can be no doubt that man is getting fat. As machines increasingly take up the burden of manual labor, and as our food continues to be charged with fats and sugars, there seems little hope for the expanding waistlines of humans the world over. Dieting offers some recourse to slimming down, but selecting the right one from the sea of options can be both daunting and aggravating. And even then, often the diets fail to yield the desired results. While most accept this as a fact of both existence and genetics, others see it as an outgrowth of a deeper problem. After all, if humanity has lived one way for hundreds of thousands of years and then, over the span of no more than a few millennia, suddenly revolutionizes every aspect of his traditional existence, from food to running, from society to population control, is it not possible that our physiological ills, from cancers to obesity, are outgrowths of this radical change? Evolution is surely too slow to make the adjustments we need to harmonize with our modern, agricultural, technological environment.

Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist, begs to differ. Deploying examples of notable evolutionary changes that have required only a few thousand years to become mainstays of human genetics, she strongly goes to bat for evolution, arguing that the proof of its swiftness lies in the very creatures with whom we share a planet. Insects, for instance, require sometimes only 20 generations to adopt or discard fundamental traits. Translated into human years, this would represent a mere five centuries, well within the window of time with which humanity has lived the very agricultural lifestyle that is supposedly so harmful to all and sundry. Perhaps the problem is within our minds and not within our pasts.

Adopting a lighthearted tone that does little to damage its credibility, Paleofantasy is an excellent takedown of the atavism that underpins fads like the Paleo Diet. And it is the thinking that is Ms. Zuk's target, not the diet itself. For such dieters are basing their assumptions of the effectiveness of their methods on what they consider to be scientific truths about humanity and evolution which the author argues are patently untrue. Throughout these 300, breezy pages, Ms. Zuk systematically disassembles the contentions of these paleoists, leaving little doubt in the minds of all but Paleo's most staunch supporters that, whatever it is, whatever it does, it is not scientific. Which takes us to the work's subtle but enduring theme.

Just because we can reason our way to a sensible conclusion doesn't mean the conclusion is right. On the contrary, history is littered with ironclad frameworks of logic that proved to be completely false, eugenics being both the most obvious and the most supposedly scientific example. Science, nay life in general, is strewn with false positives whose truths either contain so much beauty, or so much obviousness, that they simply had to be right. In fact, this is the very reason why science exists and is so important to the human endeavor. For if our instincts and our guesses were correct far more often than they were wrong, then we wouldn't need the scientific method to understand the truths around us. We could simply arrive at them through reason. This is clearly not the case.

This is not some mean-spirited polemic seeking to ravage the spirits and the hopes of those seeking answers. If it were, it would be no better than those it aims to discredit. No, it is an attempt to warn people that wanting to believe something is true doesn't make it so. And on the way, it is an excellent introduction to evolutionary biology, its fascinations, its glories and its frustrations. Excellent and engaging work... (4/5 Stars)

An explosive and engaging The Year Without Summer

From The Week of September 2nd, 2013

Civilization is so massive, so ubiquitous, with its cities and monuments, its billions of souls and countless technologies, that it is easy to forget the degree to which its existence is poised on the razor's edge. We, its builders, had to be born on the right planet, orbiting the right star, inhabiting the right region of the galaxy. We had to come along at a time in Earth's evolution in which our natural predators had mostly died out, their remains spending millions of years being converted into fossil fuels for us to exploit. We had to avoid ice ages and killer asteroids, global plagues and seismic catastrophes. In other words, we had to be incredibly lucky. And yet, we do not think of it this way. For us, civilization is a permanent blessing conveyed upon us by the generations who came before us and passed on by us to those who will efollow. This is folly, a truth wonderfully demonstrated by William K. Klingaman's excellent work.

When, on April 10th, 1815, Mount Tambora erupted, sending millions of tons of superheated rock, gas and other debris into the atmosphere, no one could have conceived of the consequences. Even observers of this once-a-millennia explosion assumed it to be little more than guns being fired at distance. And yet, not only would tens of thousands of people parish as a direct result of this colossal eruption, but millions more would be threatened by its long term impact on the climate. For in launching 55-million tons of sulfur-dioxide gas into the stratosphere, the Tambora event supplied the fuel for the creation of sulfuric acid light enough to disperse throughout the atmosphere, helping to reflect sunlight, that would normally make it to the ground, back into space.

This triggered an episode of significant global cooling which, over the coming months, not only robbed the world of a warm summer but lead to the failure of crops and harvests necessary to feed millions of humans in the northern hemisphere. In Quebec, snow would be reported falling as late as June and as early as September, a dire circumstance experienced throughout Europe and North America. In time, conditions normalized and the climate settled back into a more typical disposition, but not before igniting apocalyptic fears and scientific fascination that would drive the former into the arms of faith and the latter out into fields and labs where they could begin to discover just what had happened to the world in that fateful year.

An excellent primer on volcanic eruptions and a disturbing reminder of our incredible dependence on the vicissitudes of the climate, The Year Without Summer is an entertaining and innovative work of popular science. Mr. Klingaman draws upon the surviving letters and works of temporary figures to describe the awful, summerless conditions that lasted, to some degree or another, for three years. But while first-hand observation forms the core of this account, the author has liberally supplemented it with not only scientific explanations of the Tambora eruption but detailed accounts of the other factors, like the solar minimum, that may have exaggerated the impact of the volcanic event.

It is impossible to read this work, however, and not be deeply affected by the tenuousness of our existence. The Tambora eruption lowered global temperatures by no more than two degrees. And yet, this was sufficient to kill off harvests and, thus, send millions of humans scrambling for food. And this in a time in which the human population was a mere fraction of what it is today. If such an incident was to occur now, hundreds of millions might well starve to death. Volcanos and earthquakes, comets and asteroids... These are dangers over which we have absolutely no control. And yet, we live as though we do, not only by reproducing in unsustainable numbers but by choosing to live in the center of most of our world's most dangerous zones. Only the powers of denial can be sufficient to keep us from completely surrendering to the fear of what may well come at any moment.

This is not perfect work. Mr. Klingaman would've done well to discuss in more detail the inner workings of volcanos at the expense of some of the internal lives of early Americans. Moreover, he might've done well to speculate on the impact the weather had on the politics of the period, but these are very minor quibbles in what is otherwise a rewarding and sobering read.

Fascinating work... (4/5 Stars)

The devastating history of eugenics chronicled in War Against the Weak

From The Week of July 8th, 2013

Though the question of what we individually owe to our fellow man is the pressing, sociological issue of this new, global civilization, there's an equally important debate to be had. What do we owe the least fortunate among us? From the mentally ill to the physically deficient, millions of people never receive a fair shot at a successful life. Is this merely a necessary outgrowth of a democratic, capitalist system, that some of us simply will be left behind, or is this inequality a consequence of poor ethics and poor morals? Perhaps, some day, we will have answers to these questions. Perhaps one will help solve the other. But until that day, we have only our past actions to go by. And where misfits are concerned, this is decidedly grim, a truth relentlessly demonstrated in Edwin Black's thorough examination of eugenics.

A scientific movement that grew out of nineteenth-century revelations of the remarkable role evolution plays in the advancement of life on Earth, eugenics is an ethical framework that argues for the purification of the human species through proper breeding and genetic engineering. Popular in the first half of the 20th century, it was originally confined to agricultural and horticultural fields before being seized upon by scientists and philosophers as a means by which to eliminate human malformations. After all, would the world not be better if disabilities from Spina bifida to blindness could be erased from the gene pool? Imagine the benefits to society if it, and its people, could be relieved of the costs of caring for those who, because of some genetic deficiency, cannot care for themselves.

However innocent the origins of this view of humanity's future, eugenics soon took on a sinister air, made all the more obvious with hindsight. For how could the enfeebled and the disabled be trusted to remove themselves from the gene pool? Would it not be prudent for society to sterilize them as a means of assuring that such genetic mistakes would die out with them? Armed with scientific funding from powerful, turn-of-the-century trusts, an American organization set out to lobby state legislatures to pass sweeping laws that would make commonplace the forced exclusion of deficients from the gene pool. Drawing on biased, reprehensible science, the American Breeders Association became a haven for racial purists who disseminated their ugly conclusions not only throughout North America, but to a receptive Europe eager to have its white, Nordic superiority re-affirmed by sham science. Of these new, European adherents, none were as enthusiastic as the group of German scientists who would go onto play key roles in Hitler's attempted extermination of the Jewish population, participating, in the name of eugenics, the worst crime in modern history.

A lacerating account of the history of eugenics, War Against The Weak is a shattering examination of one of organized science's darkest hours. Mr. Black, who possesses a first-class mind for research, has not only assembled an authoritative account of the attempt by a small group of humans to play god over the future of an entire species; he has brought to light, with color and compassion, the many thousands of souls who suffered at their hands. For the eugenics movement was not a victimless crime. It was not simply a foolish idea rooted in a series of unfortunate misapprehensions. It was a systematic attempt to strip groups of innocent people of their basic human rights, passing judgement on them in a manner that is both abhorrent and obscene. From the American Breeders Association's first steps into the arena of public policy, through to the unimaginable Holocaust into which it eventuated, the work reveals the corporations and the actors, the governments and the bodies that sought to destroy the individual freedoms we all hold so dear.

Though the work's most obvious quality is its exceptional thoroughness -- Mr. Black presents the reader with pages and pages of sources that must have taken years to organize and compile --, its most enduring virtue is the manner in which it exposes us to an inescapable truth about the human mind, that it is unavoidably biased. Shaped by its social, cultural and economic environments, and hardened by personal experience, it favors conclusions it likes and ignores those it finds unpleasant. In this, it creates for the individual a narrowed view of the world that, while agreeable to the individual's sensibilities, is colored in the extreme. We now know, thanks to the work of both social and scientific crusaders, that the physical, intellectual and emotional differences between the races are at best negligible. And yet, seeking to find an explanation that justified their distaste for the tide of non-white, non-Nordic ethnicities flooding into their homeland, these eugenicists created pseudo science, convinced receptive governments of its voracity, and then implemented a program of social engineering criminal in its intent and tragic in its scope.

War Against the Weak has its blind spots. For all its rigor, Mr. Black's account is nonetheless a polemic against eugenics. He has no time for seemingly any argument in its favor. Given eugenics' costs, this is understandable, though, regrettable. We should be able to have a debate about what society owes the individual. We should be able to have discussions about the blessings of genetic engineering. But these are areas now profoundly poisoned by the sins of our past, certainly where the author is concerned.

An absolute must-read for anyone even mildly interested in science, justice and human nature... (5/5 Stars)

The history and science of that most desired part of the female anatomy in Breasts

From The Week of June 3, 2013

As much as we'd like to think that humans are creatures of the mind, empowered by intellect, shaped by morals and fired by curiosity, we are still driven by the base desires for what we can see, touch and taste. We can create the most complex technologies and philosophize at length over the finest points of Aristotelian logic, we can implement free-market economies and devote our days to the beauty of the printed word, and still we are consumed by food and sex, by shelter and family, by kisses and caresses. Perhaps this is well. There is, after all, a great deal of joy and comfort to be found in the treasures of fleshy, epicurean delights. And yet, these same excitations have the power to consume us, to reduce our grand intellects to the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of all else. Of these temptations, few hold the power and the objectification of the female breast, a truth expanded upon in Florence William's eminently engaging exploration.

Throughout recorded history, in carvings and sculptures, in song and story, we have celebrated the breast. It has been a source of nourishment and obsession, of critiques and signalling, of pleasure and frustration. It comes in a dizzying array of forms and sizes, a symbol of sufficient power as to warrant the creation of taboos in its name. But what is the breast made of and why has it become such a potent symbol of womanhood?

From the academic controversies that have swirled around its origins to the medical research that has revealed its vital role in the nourishment of newborns, Ms. Williams attempts to not only answer these questions, but to provide this most fetishized part of the female anatomy with some entertaining context. Beginning with its uniquely omnipresent manifestation in human women and ending with a sobering analysis of the ways in which it acts as a dumping ground for toxic chemicals that have accumulated over the lifetime of its host, she investigates, in Breast, its form and function, its social impact and its medical mysteries, all in an attempt to better understand this object of so much cultural attention.

Alternately humorous and chilling, Breasts is no fluffpiece masquerading as literature. There is no titillation here, nor is there any moral posturing. It is a serious and sincere attempt to determine the value and the purpose of the breast, to record its history, to measure its trends and to predict, in some limited way, its future. Drawing upon dozens of interviews and almost as many personal experiments with diet and environment, Ms. Williams sifts years of data and research into an eminently readable chronicle that leaves the reader as informed about the breast's physiology as he is about its augmentation. To have reduced such a mountain of information into such a digestible and engrossing product is, to say the least, a triumph.

While readers will be no doubt entertained by the vicarious glimpse of the breast-augmentation industry, Breasts is strongest when it stands firmly on scientific ground. Ms. Williams familiarizes us with fat and milk glands, with estrogen and other hormones. But most importantly, she enthusiastically joins with those researchers who have sounded the alarm about the way in which our modern world has disturbingly played with and reprogrammed the female body, tricking it into maturing earlier and earlier. These trends suggest devastating consequences for women in the future, exposing them to a host of savage cancers that have the power to rob them of good health and good fortune. Her call to arms, for increased regulation of these damaging chemicals, is heartfelt and level-headed. There's no wailing here, no rampaging feminism masquerading as popular science. Ms. Williams is calm, clear and thorough in a manner that should inspire plaudits.

Women's health is a fraught field in which to wade, one that contains as many opinions as it does curatives, as many clarion calls as it does conflicts. Breasts won't avoid drawing criticism. But that its purpose is clear, its motives pure and its conclusions eye-opening ought to earn it a place of prominence, even amongst this challenging crowd. (4/5 Stars)

the legendary errors of some of our greatest minds in Brilliant Blunders

From The Week of June 3, 2013

Insight is a fascinating and complicated power. For while it enables us to make incredible leaps of understanding in everything from science to faith, from the domestic to the metaphysical, it also communicates the false impression that we are somehow special, that such leaps are, for those who experience them, an inevitable outgrowth of intelligence. Insight, in reality, is a moment as rare as it is precious, a brief glimpse of an endgame that may or may not be true. It is not a gift from god. It is an extrapolation of our understanding and experience of the world and, as such, potentially contains within it all our biases. Some scientists and thinkers have seized upon these moments to advance human understanding. Others have seized upon them to confirm their prejudices. Distinguishing one from the other is an almost impossible task, a truth laid bear in mario Livio's inventive piece of non-fiction.

From genetics to physics, from the fundamentals of our world to the underpinnings of reality, fields of human knowledge and endeavor have been advanced by geniuses, men and women who, in training their powerful minds upon difficult problems, have moved them from the unknown and uncertain to the understood and the accepted. But while these individuals have made immeasurable contributions to their fields, success also breeds arrogance, a sense of self-belief that shoulders aside modesty and humility to alter the genius' personality to such that the truth more often gives way to the truth that makes sense to the genius in question. No one has the market cornered on the right way, or the right idea. Rather, these notions come to us slowly, painstakingly and even sometimes accidentally, and, in doing so, confirm our own sense of self-image, a reality that distorts the scientific method.

Harnessing examples from Darwin to Einstein, Brilliant Blunders demonstrates this premise clearly by setting forth six scientific figures, each of whom laid claim to a revolutionary idea and whom, later, laid claim to an equally serious blunder. From the notion of blended inheritance to the triple helix, from the denial of radioactivity to the agitation over the Cosmological Constant, Mr. Livio not only deepens the reader's familiarity with the most famous ideas of our famous thinkers, he sets forth how they arrived at their most infamous errors. Arrogance certainly plays a role. For once one is celebrated for one idea, why not be celebrated for another? But Mr. Livio makes clear that most errors arise from the desire of brilliant minds to compel the world and the universe to make sense, to be reducible to mathematical equations that are as beautiful as they are fundamental. Not only is this often not the case -- the world appears to resort to klugy solutions as often as it does to elegant ones --, this also presumes that the thinker is operating from a correct premise which is rarely the case.

Though Brilliant Blunders is at its best illustrating flawed ideas that have fallen before the power of truth, it's perhaps most effective in demonstrating just how errors arise. The line between self-belief and pompousness is thin at the best of times. For geniuses, that line is microscopic, owning to the fact that they don't expect to have their intelligences fail them or their instincts mislead them. Naturally, this leads to brilliant minds holding onto their flawed notions far more stubbornly and pugnaciously than anyone else would. For they've invested too much of their sense of self and pride in being right, in being the one who comprehends before all others. Even Darwin and Einstein, who come off here as quite humble, fall prey to this nasty trick of the mind.

Brilliant Blunders is not without its own flaws. Everyone errs. Everyone has false conceptions of the world. Cherrypicking the misconceptions of giants of science and collecting them for all to see and remember seems, at times, almost cruel. But these men are dead now, their legacies enshrined in textbooks and museums. Whatever damage done to them here is inconsequential, especially considering that it allows Mr. Livio to exemplify the price of arrogance and confirmation bias.

An engaging, entertaining read... (3/5 Stars)

Technical brilliance and corporate imbecility in Dealers of Lightning

From The Week of May 13, 2013

As much as corporations have helped to create and empower our modern world, supplying it with pools of labor and capital to bring products to our markets, they are no wiser than we are. Despite their fortunes being inextricably linked with being able to predict what's next, they cannot escape the biases, doubts and cynicism that befall us all. How is this possible? Because, while corporations possess far more intellectual might than the individual, they often fail to channel that might in any kind of productive way. Having emerged as a result of innovation, they become machines for printing money, not machines for making bets on the future. Some corporations escape this trap, but most invest in harnessing the next generation of companies, bringing them under their own umbrellas and praying that this infusion of innovative energy keeps them relevant for just a little while longer. But while this strategy works in the shortterm, the piper must eventually be paid. Few demonstrations have made this point more eloquently than Michael Hiltzik's history of Xerox Park.

Birthed in the first wave of technology firms that spawned companies like IBM and Eastman Kodak, the Xerox Corporation was a mid-century American titan. Its copiers ruled offices the world over, reducing to mere moments jobs that had once taken people hours to complete. Their brand became so ubiquitous that its name became synonymous with copying, a reality that will embed Xerox in the cultural consciousness for as long as the culture has documents to copy.

Flush with profits, Xerox could easily afford to make bets on the future which is what it did in 1970 when, in what was then just becoming the Silicon Valley we know today, it created Xerox Park, a research and development lab staffed by the first generation of computer scientists who had actually been exposed to these hulking machines while in university. Helmed by healthy egos and powerful personalities, Park became a theatre of experimentation that not only nursed key inventions like Ethernet which, even today, empowers networked computing, it created laser printers and personal computers, early models of the machines that would soon transform our world. This remarkable tide of innovation would culminate in the Xerox Star, a 1981 office product that married a personal computer with a graphical interface that could be manipulated with a mouse. The Star would also prove to be park's downfall, a grossly expensive commercial failure that heralded the mainstream arrival of IBM, Microsoft, Apple and the rest of the corporations that executed the technological revolution.

Packed with riveting characters and corporate dysfunction, Dealers of Lightning is a tour de force. Mr. Hiltzik, an American journalist, vividly captures not only the dawn of the mainstream computer age, detailing the early versions of the technologies that are so commonplace today, but the egos and the jealousies, the intellects and the foibles, of the men and women who created it. All this while painting a devastating portrait of Xerox's corporate culture, one which completely blinded the company to the reality that it held the intellectual keys to virtually every vital component of modern computing, keys it frittered away out of foolishness and ignorance.

The work is narratively driven by the young minds at Park. Drawing upon interviews and personal recollections of the principals who participated in human civilization's most glorious revolution, Mr. Hiltzik animates a host of fascinating characters who range from the irascible to the humorous, from the artistic to the introverted, capturing at once their brilliance and their frustrations. For in as much as these recent college graduates of the flower-power generation were churning out the technologies of tomorrow, their efforts seem to have been blocked at every turn by a company that understood them as poorly as it understood the future.

This leads us to the work's most effective theme. For while the quirks and the rivalries that characterized Park's geniuses are interesting enough, Dealers of Lightning is fundamentally about the abject failure of Xerox's corporate culture. Mr. Hiltzik convincingly describes Xerox as a company that had long-since parted ways with the notion of being a company about technology and had become a company about making money. He details how its fleet of managers focused on making sure the money faucet was stuck open, that this was their only concern, a reality that understandably doomed the company to a most appropriate irrelevancy. For no corporation that squandered the foundational technologies of our generation deserves to be the steward of information technology, a mantle Xerox thoughtlessly sacrificed for the sake of riding the gravy train until it ran out of track.

One would expect, then, that Dealers of Lightning would be a stinging indictment of Xerox. It's not. The blunders and the blindness so wonderfully depicted here is at least 30 years in the past, far too long for there to be any rawness to these wounds. Instead, this is a work of warning in the form of an epitaph to Xerox's cultural relevance, that it isn't enough to simply hire smart people and set them loose on the problems of tomorrow, that one must embrace change or die. No amount of money can help a corporation avoid this fate.

Outstanding work... (5/5 Stars)

The remarkable, collaborative effort to put man in space in Rocket Men

From The Week of April 29, 2013

We all endeavor to inject life with meaning, to ensure that, after we are gone, we will be remembered as more than just a single link in a near-infinite generational chain. For some of us, this legacy is rooted in concrete notions of meaning:the rearing of children, the writing of books, the holding of public office. Such deeds cannot easily be forgotten. But for others, meaning is found only in less tangible locales, in ideas of achievement, of philosophy, even of freedom, concepts so ethereal as to be dismissed by our concretists who can only endow meaning in what they can hold.

And yet, this would be a narrow view. For while the concretists keep our world moving, the dreamers inspire us to heights of accomplishment and understanding that their contemporaries could have never fathomed. They accelerate, sometimes literally, the progress of civilization towards its enlightened endgame. There is no higher legacy. And that much Mr. Nelson demonstrates in his excellent history.

The 20th century's relationship with the rocket was one of moral and technological complexity. Originally born centuries ago in Greece and China, this awesome assemblage of violent propulsion took modern form in the fertile mind of a German scientist who, in the 1930s, had his dreams funded by a Third Reich seeking a means to defeat a pugnacious and physically isolated Britain. This destructive partnership produced the V-2, a machine of terror that launched from Germany and France and landed explosively amidst English industry, seeking both to cripple and subjugate that nation. This advancement was so notable in its day that, when the Second World War ended, those scientists and their families and fellow rocketeers were secreted away from a defeated Germany, protected from charges of war crimes and relocated to the American south to kindle a new dawn in military technology.

That dawn, though not without its consequences, kickstarted a revolution in 20th-century technology. For the powerful rockets, developed for the US military, not only made possible a whole range of satellite technologies, they bore aloft, for the first time, man from the planet upon which he evolved. In the early days, these missions were quick and dirty, barely controlled flights through near orbit of largely symbolic value. But as time advanced, and with efforts focused by a president's vow to land on Earth's only moon by the end of the 1960s, man finally left Earth orbit and joined the stars, planting a flag on the moon and, in doing so, igniting the imaginations of generations to come.

A history of both the rockets and the men who built and flew at their behest, Rocket Men is a sublime and exhilarating work of non-fiction that both inspires and enthralls. Drawing heavily from the personal accounts of astronauts and engineers from NASA's space program, it is, at times, an oral history of the Apollo program, one that documents deeds of already famous and well-chronicled men in a manner that is as refreshing as it is unbiased. For there is no lionization here. Mr. Nelson certainly admires the dedication of the 400,000 souls who worked to send these precious few into space, but he's equally willing to acknowledge not only their faults, but the early faults of NASA which saw the Apollo missions conducted with a substantial degree of disorganization and disunity.

Despite the rhetorical strength of Rocket Men's first-hand accounts, Mr. Nelson's effort to step back and adopt a wider, more historical view is equally potent. The reader is furnished with a brief but thorough summation of the Soviet rocket program that raced the United States to the stars. Moreover, he is filled in on historical details such as how the defeated German scientists found themselves working in Alabama, how that transition took place and what became of it. Finally, he is blessed with a broader view of NASA's cultural impact on the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when American power, excepting the Vietnam War, seemed endless.

Rocket Men is not a perfect history. But for a brief mention of the means by which women were senselessly disqualified from the Apollo program, Mr. Nelson pays almost no heed to the rampant sexism of NASA during this period. Moreover, he dispenses with the rocket's pre-20th-century history with a few casual paragraphs about the deeds of past civilizations. A harsh marker would certainly characterize these as unforgivable omissions from a work such as this. But one senses that Mr. Nelson was more interested in the taste and feel of Apollo, the enormity of the rockets that powered it, the complexity of the systems that nourished it and the exceptional natures of the men who populated it, a reality which makes these omissions understandable if regrettable.

A riveting history of an inspiring era that makes clear all that America has lost in turning away from its dangerous and difficult manned missions. Excellent work... (4/5 Stars)

Human folly and the power of Malaria clash in Shah's The Fever

From The Week of April 1, 2013

From trees to tigers, from eagles to kelp, evolution has shaped our world for billions of years. Without it, Earth would be little more than a volcanically active water world with a few single-celled organisms listlessly occupying various oceanic vents and superficial pools. There would be no other life, nothing to revel and no one to do the revelling. It is, then, a necessary driver of permanent change. But for all that humanity would not exist without evolution's many gifts, it also presents some problems. For what worked to create us can just as easily work to create things to kill us. Evolution was not a means to our end. It is a means to the development of life. And for all that we may have outpaced our fellow species on the race to intellect, we have not, and never will, corner the market on the right to exist. This is made chillingly clear in Sonia Shah's sweeping biography of a most pernicious and persistent disease.

For nearly half the lifespan of the human species, Malaria has infected our world. Generated from pools of stagnant water in which mosquito larvae happily grow, this crippling illness spreads from these humid nurseries in the saliva of female mosquitos who, with every successful attack upon a living target, inject Malaria's devastating payload into the bloodstreams of their unwitting victims. From there, the disease spreads to the liver, a base from which it can, over the next few weeks, cause havoc to its host, lashing it with debilitating fevers and headaches which, if sufficiently severe, can be fatal. Even if malaria was self-aware, though, it would not care about these consequences of its existence. For its only purpose is to exist. And this it achieves by infecting the blood of the host, blood which is then slurped up by other mosquitos eager for a meal.

So what can be done about this? Ever since humanity has had the tools to battle disease, it has been fighting Malaria. But though there have been soem successes in creating medicines that armor uninfected hosts against Malaria's impact, there is, as yet, no vaccine. Worse yet, some of the agents developed to fight Malaria have strengthened the disease, bestowing it with teeth it once did not require. Failures in the medicinal front have turned inquisitive minds to the prospect of chemically eradicating Malaria's delivery system, the mosquito, efforts that famously culminated in the widespread application of DDT, a wonder insecticide that soon proved to be a poison chalice. Hopes remain for a vaccine, but until then malaria persists, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives a year.

Depicting the pathological, sociological, medical and evolutionary histories of Malaria and its impact on the world, The Fever is a stark account of ingenuity and failure. Ms. Shah weaves a terrifying tapestry of Malaria's causes and effects, a dismaying portrait matched only by her tragic, and at times shocking, account of humanity's calamitous attempts to eliminate this most effective infectious disease. Tales of failed drugs, boastful promises and arrogant assumptions culminate in a truly disturbing portrait of the degree to which humanity leaps before it looks. For so eager are we for cures to the afflictions that trouble our days that we are willing to apply them before we fully understand their consequences, a hastiness that has lead to unimaginable ecological damage.

As much as Ms. Shah's account reserves its most effective blows for these failures, it is equally free with praise for the low-tech methods we've developed to fight Malaria. From mosquito nets to the draining of the stagnant pools that are malaria's breeding ground, the disease has been forced to retreat from many parts of the world. Unfortunately for the impoverished, however, most of these retreats have occurred in the developed world, causing Malaria to be, much like AIDS, a problem experienced by others, elsewhere.

The Fever might well have done with some first-hand accounts of Malaria's impact, the better to exemplify Ms. Shah's arguments. Nonetheless, it is a riveting demonstration of how little we actually control our world and how much we rely upon systems like evolution, that are far older than us, for defenses against the threats that live and grow across Earth's ecology. Wonderfully edifying... (4/5 Stars)

The cultural and medical histories of Rabies engagingly explored in Rabid

From The Week of March 25, 2013

Viruses reek havoc upon the human mind. For not only do they have the power to starve it of resources, reducing it to an unintelligent sludge, they can attack it through fear, divesting it of all rationality and making of its host an exceedingly soft target. Despite the innate difficulties of battling a scourge one cannot see, however, many of these viruses have been brought to heel, their effectiveness muted by science. And yet, some remain to haunt us, some that refuse to have their claws so easily clipped. Mr. Wasik and Ms. Murphy marvellously documents the most infamous of these vehement holdouts in his excellent chronicle of Rabies.

For all but the last few centuries of its existence, humanity has been blind to the threat of viruses. Its conceptions were limited to what it could taste, touch and feel. So while the species had soem understanding of what was harmful to its health, it could not even imagine the ecologies that lingered beyond the vistas of human vision. And yet, something had to be there. For tribal man could see quite well the consequences of contracting deadly viruses, chiefly, the loss of their companions felled by nothing more than the sudden onset of ill health.

First with the ancient Greeks and then with the Arabs, this understanding began to evolve, but not before superstition had taken hold. Before we knew why, we knew how. And in the case of Rabies, this was particularly apparent. For one had to but wait a few days after being bitten by an enraged subset of mostly friendly animals to feel the deadly consequences: the nightmares, the fear of water, the sleepless nights, the creeping death.

Devils and demons were conjured up to explain such violent and terrifying punishments. And yet, few of these could imagine the truth, that Rabies was a most insidious virus, a chain of genetic information with the singleminded goal to propagate, to spread, to consume. Eschewing the most conventional routes of pathogen's (the blood stream), it attacked the nervous system, inching its way up to the brain which, defenseless against its ravages, succumbed to that most straightforward kind of madness, the bite, a most expeditious method of passing copies of itself on to the next, inviting target.

From the characteristics that made it legend to the scientists who reduced it to mere mortality, Rabid is an entertaining journey through the history of Rabies. Penned by a veterinarian (Murphy) and a journalist (Wasik), it competently mixes humor with fact to create a most edifying illumination of a genetic sequence that, though relatively rare, particularly within civilization, has nonetheless had a profound impact on our conception of horror. The authors contend that the myths that gave birth to vampires, werewolves and zombies were all heavily influenced by our fear of the bite which does not merely emanate from our distaste for pain, but from something far more elemental, an aversion born of memories written into our heritage.

Rabid has its stumbles. It makes almost no attempt to advance our understanding of Rabies' genetic properties. Moreover, it seems, at times, much more concerned with its cultural impact than its medical one. But these are minor gripes in what is otherwise a thoroughly engrossing read that winningly captures the full might of science, particularly its capacity to isolate a problem, reduce it to its component parts and to deduce, through trial and error, a method of rectifying it. Here, this is particularly exemplified in the time the history devotes to Louis Pasteur, the famous French scientist who, in addition to discovering germs, took a largely successful swing at Rabies as well, reducing it from a fearful unknown to a problem that could be vaccinated if not cured. This, along with an intriguing comparison of how the East and West conceive of Rabies' primary carriers, allows Rabid to easily overcome its drawbacks.

This is eminently consumable work. And yet, for all its lightness, Rabid possesses sufficient depth to leave the reader's knowledge of the world of viruses significantly advanced. Most satisfying... *4/5 Stars)

Words of wisdom and prophecy from a magnificent mind in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

From The Week of March 18, 2013

True genius is a rare and precious thing. For its scarcity stands out like a diamond amongst the rough, allowing its light, in the form of its opinions, its theories, and its understanding, to be taken seriously by a world that largely believes in authority and that holds a deep admiration for exceptional people. Yes, there is certainly great wisdom in the thoughts and beliefs of ordinary folks, but these notions have no platform, no popular basis from which to spread through the culture. This is not a problem for geniuses who, in their celebration, are given a soapbox from which to speak to the world of what they hold dear. Though just such a soapbox was used sparingly and with humility by Mr. Feynman, it was also used powerfully and effectively by one of the 20th century's most extraordinary minds, a truth revealed repeatedly in this collection of his essays.

The son of a uniform salesman who passed on a life-long curiosity for the world and its many, mysterious systems, Richard Feynman was a key physicist in his discipline's formative century. One of the many minds to follow on from the golden generation of Einstein and Bohr, Heisenberg and Wheeler, he left school to work on the Manhattan Project -- holding the distinction of being one of the few scientists to witness the first Trinity test with the unguarded eye -- before going on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for his contributions to the advancement of Quantum Electrodynamics. Between these remarkable milestones, he made singular contributions to a dozen aspects of theoretical physics. Today, however, he is remembered best for envisioning and conceptualizing nanotechnology, imagining a world where computers, both quantum and conventional, would facilitate an immeasurable leap forward in human society.

A legendary talker, notable for his unusual deployment of English, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out collects a series of speeches and interviews Mr. Feynman gave over the span of his career. From Japan to Italy, from anecdote to commencement address, he expounds upon not only the moments and insights that brought him renown, but the life experience's that reveal him to be a man of brilliance and humility. From the hilarious absurdities of government censorship during the Manhattan Project to the passionate exhortation for nanotechnology, Mr. Feynman manifests, here, as an exceptional, ordinary man, a profoundly human creature with an otherworldly understanding of the universe.

For all of Mr. Feynman's physics, though, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is most evocative when it speaks to the great man's philosophy. Holding up doubt as the key virtue of the scientific mind, he laments the thoughtlessness of religious believers who accept as truth something they haven't tested. Nor do they wish to test it. Theirs is literally a senseless belief, one that manifests from a mind unschooled in the scientific method. In this vein, Mr. Feynman exhorts his fellow man to doubt everything. For it is only through testing those doubts that one can find truth. Nothing, no theory, no notion, no matter how farfetched, should be dismissed out of hand. For to dismiss anything without testing its veracity is to be no better than those who believe thoughtlessly in dogma. It is to trust what one feels, not what one knows to be true.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is not without its darker moments. Mr. Feynman's anecdotes, playful though they may be, expose the powerful skein of sexism that ran through academia for all but the final few years of the 20th century. He manages, even here, to be charming. Even so, he is representative of the paternalism of his time, a white man in a world that, by and large, only recognized and appreciated the contributions of white men. This is a sin that should not be forgotten, a sense of personal entitlement that not only runs counter to the core philosophies detailed here, but that destructively ignored the talents of millions of women and and individuals from other ethnicities that could have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of science.

This is mesmerizing work, not only for its pleasing voice but for what it teaches us about science, philosophy and the Good Life Outstanding in spite of its occasional missteps. (4/5 Stars)

How Pleasure Works tells us virtually nothing about...wait for it...pleasure

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Of the various fundamental motivations that stir us to action, few are as essential and as wide-ranging as pleasure. For it is this desire to experience joy and reward, happiness and satisfaction, that compels us to achieve our dreams. Without it, life would be a dreary exercise, a plodding monotony that would culminate in nothing more elevating than the completion of ones tasks. It is pleasure that activates our passions and drives our needs. It is pleasure, and its pursuit, that make us more than what we are. And this is a truth championed in Mr. Bloom's brief and troubled exploration.

From food to sex, from competition to gender, pleasure has captured the human mind for thousands of years. It enlivens our days and makes of our nights realms of anticipation and glee into which we all wish to plunge. But what is the essence of pleasure? And how does it manifest? Mr. Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University, draws upon the theory of Essentialism to answer these basic questions. From the whys that underpin why people will pay more for a celebrity's dirty clothes than for their clean ones to why boys and girls distinguish themselves before the broader culture sorts them out, he argues that human pleasure is derived from our understanding of the world, both in its categorization and in its structure, and that everything from why we drink bottled water to why we believe in spiritualism can be traced back to how we perceive and comprehend our world. Peppered in amongst this philosophical journey are fun facts about how humans relate to the world, tidbits that lend focus to the author's broader arguments.

However much How Pleasure Works may be convincing to scientists and philosophers, there can be no doubt that is a disaster as a piece of literature. Mr. Bloom possesses a lively voice that finds little difficulty in switching between hard science and soft anecdote in order to maintain the attention of his readers. In every other respect, though, he fails miserably in both his attempt to entertain and his attempt to built a case for his argument. Large swaths of this all-too-brief excursion into the roots of human pleasure are unimaginatively surrendered to anecdotal science, singular events that will be familiar to anyone that has consumed the news in the last ten years. To anyone that has cracked a book on popular science in that same timeframe, though, they are not only uninspired and repetitive, but deeply suggestive of cherry-picked circumstances deployed here to support what is, in every other respect, the ephemeral notion that human pleasure is connected to a metaphysical view of our world. In this, the reader is left feeling chilled by the absence of a genuine demonstration of the author's own research which is almost nowhere to be seen.

Mr. Bloom is a deeply accomplished individual, a man whose achievements must be respected. But in the wake of the disgrace of characters like Jonah Lehrer, men who not only read sweeping, societal conclusions from scientific data, but take dicey shortcuts to do so, we must be wary of books that use anecdote to draw conclusions about human nature. We must have higher standards. For How Pleasure Works reads like a cheap attempt to earn a little coin from the credulity of those seeking answers, none of which will be found rooted in what is clearly more of a philosophical text than an empirical one. If we do not demand more, this is what we will get, 150 pages of one man's half-hearted attempt to say something profound.

Thoroughly disappointing... (2/5 Stars)

Temple Grandin's exquisite, moving examination of Animals in Translation

From The Week of February 25, 2013
Humans trust most what they can see, touch and taste. For ones senses not only provide a means by which reality can be verified, they grant us the opportunity to distinguish the advantageous from the punitive, the pleasing from the painful. They are the filters by which we come to understand our world. Sadly, though, like any useful tool, relying too much on our senses can be dangerous, welcoming us into a kind of dependence that causes us to discard any piece of information we do not comprehend. We hear birdsong, but do we understand that it conveys information? We see pollution clouding our skies, but do we investigate the damage it causes? We re-shape the earth, but do we consider the domino effect this has on the climate and the species who share it with us? No. We blunder forth, our reliance on our senses having programmed into us an arrogance that all-too-often leads us to our doom. Rarely has this ignorance been so winningly demonstrated than in Ms. Grandin's charming and fascinating examination of animal behavior.

Autistic long before the condition was even notionally understood, Temple Grandin grew up in a world she did not understand. The world that we take for granted, the world that seems so orderly and obvious to us, was, to her abnormal brain, a chaotic mess of stimuli and distraction which not only made little sense, but kept her from maturing alongside her peers. However, what Ms. Grandin lacked in sociability with humans she more than made up for with animals, creatures whose motives and actions seemed comprehensible to her in a way that the rest of us either dismissed or took for granted.

Harnessing this fondness, Ms. Grandin embarked upon a career working with animals of all stripes. From healing to killing, she has spent 30 years watching their behaviors, experiencing their emotions and sussing out the bent of their thoughts. And in this she has made some wonderful discoveries about what triggers their rages, what sooths their spirits, and what defines their desires. These personal experiences, along with her extensive research into the creatures she's devoted her life to, are gathered together to reveal an animal world that is hardly the two-dimensional game of predator and prey that we see, but a universe of emotions, experiences and talents that are not only beyond human ken, but human capacity as well. This is a world of dogs and horses, cows and cats, that seems all-the-more obvious for this journey.

animals in Translation is mesmerizing work. Peppering her chronicle with facts about the creatures most familiar to us, Ms. Grandin needs only 300 pages to convince the reader that the animal kingdom is a rich and diverse world defined as much by motive as genetics. From the subsonic vibrations of elephant communication to the complex emotions of horses, from the sexual violence of roosters to the brutality of dolphins, she captures an environment of routine and mystery, of power and death, that is as far from the fluffy and the cartoonish as it's possible to get. Though she devotes considerable time to numerous other creatures, dogs feature here most prominently. From their bites to their mysterious abilities to sniff out our seizures and our cancers, Ms. Grandin uses their minds and their attitudes to reveal to us a world that has to be studied without biases, without blinders, to be properly understood.

The work is not without its flaws. To someone who has not experienced autism, the validity of Ms. Grandin's theory, that this condition helps the human to think more like an animal, is unclear. The author provides examples of how animal and autistic behaviors overlap, experiments whose results are admittedly quite striking, but these conclusions are largely drawn from anecdotal data. This is a problem also apparent in the parts of the work that concern animal behavior. Here, Ms. Grandin uses personal experiences, along with those of her acquaintances, to exemplify her contentions about the work-ings of the animal mind. It may well be that anecdote is the easiest means by which the author can convey her decades of accumulated knowledge to the reader. If so, it is certainly successful. But it does leave some doubt as to the scientific veracity underpinning her conclusions.

Notwithstanding its personal nature, Animals in Translation is a captivating adventure through the minds of creatures who, for some of us, are not only our friends but our sustenance. In this, it is as revelatory as it is enlightening. The animal mind will never be thought of the same way again. )& # ((4/5 Stars)

The Internet's creation chronicled in the fantastic Where Wizards Stay Up Late

From The Week of February 04, 2013
Once in a great while, the course of human history is upended by a transformative event, an incident, an invention, an intercession, that leaves an indelible mark upon the world. These events are all-too-often tragic in origin, calamities of war and disaster that just as easily claim the lives of the innocent as the impure. But regardless of their tone, they are rare enough that they attract not only the inquisitive attentions of the passingly interested but the expert lenses of the academically engaged as they attempt to better understand, or better preserve for posterity, something that might not soon come again. Of all such events, none may mean as much to as many as the creation of the Internet. And yet, on this topic, history is oddly quiet, especially when compared to the endless volumes penned about the Second World War whose consequences, for most of us, have long since faded into memory. With charm and rigor, Ms. Hafner and Mr. Lyon correct this notable wrong with their edifying tome.

Born of the dreams of visionaries, not as legend has it from the efforts of the US military to maintain communications during a nuclear attack, the Internet began life in the early 1960s as Arpanet, four relatively simple but extraordinarily expensive computers networked together by genius, high-speed telephone lines from AT&T and a great deal of prayer. A public-private partnership between ARPA, a government agency under the aegis of the US military, and BBN, a pioneering technology firm, Arpanet was constructed to both push back the boundaries of science and to prove that the ideas upon which it was based were not only sound but brilliant.

Until Arpanet, terrestrial communications technologies had been mostly stagnant since the creation of the telephone system in the first half of the 20th century. Satellites had been launched into space, but telephone calls were still being routed through manual switchboards labored over by an army largely comprised of women. By inventing the idea of information as packets, by sending those packets of information in bursts that would maximize the use of the telephone lines over which they were traveling, by creating a universal language by which computers the world over could understand one another, and by cementing the protocols by which networked computers could cooperate and communicate over a network, the scientists working on Arpanet laid down every fundamental component of what would eventually be the Internet. these systems and protocols are still used today, long after most of their inventors have lapsed into obscurity, their stars forever outshined by Facebook and Amazon, Apple and Google, none of which would have existed without the inventiveness and the altruism of men who sought to create something bold and new.

There is no doubt that Where Wizards Stay Up Late is an excellent history of Arpanet. Ms. Hafner and Mr. Lyon not only deliberately and intelligibly illustrate the technologies that underpin the Internet, they patiently walk the reader step-by-step through its shoestring creation, chronicling the frustration and the wry humor of every failure along with the satisfaction and the triumph of every success. But even if their chronicle was a pile of dross, not even worth the paper it was printed upon, it would have done a wonderful service. For without reading this engaging work, who can claim to name the inventors of the Internet? We know Zuckerberg and Page, Jobs and Gates, Joy and Allen; these men are rich, cultural giants who have been the most visible shepherds of our technological revolution. But what of Roberts and Licklider? What of Baran and Davies? What of Metcalf and heart? Without the aid of a Google search, do we know them? Do their names burn across our cyberspace sky? Hardly.

This is shameful. Our culture has become dangerously dependent upon the notion of celebrity. We believe so much in stardom, in the idea of the great-man theory of history, that we assume that those who either shunned the spotlight, or who never felt its beneficent caress, were unimportant, afterthoughts on the stage of human development. But time and time again we're proven wrong. Household names are not so because they are necessarily important. They are so because they are either lucky, charismatic, or good at spreading word of their achievements, little of which has anything to do with merit. This is what makes Where Wizards Stay up Late such a triumph. For it seeks not to mythologize, to canonize, or even to uplift. It adopts the same sober but inquisitive tone used by the dedicated and creative men who empowered one of the largest transformations in human history. May they never be forgotten.

This is first-class work. At times technical, but this is by no means an impediment to its enjoyment. One of the worthiest reads this year... (5/5 Stars)

The race to unearth the secrets of Venus revealed in Chasing Venus

From The Week of December 31, 2012
No matter how far we advance, our search for scientific knowledge and spiritual understanding will never end. For while we can explore the depths of our oceans and search out life among the stars, we can peer into the heart of atoms and measure the heft of galaxies, we will never solve all of the universe's mysteries. To do so, we'd become like gods, so far removed from our human shells, our biological brains, that we would no longer be who we are today, creatures driven by a desire to know, by a need to see, by the thirst to compel the enigmas of our world to surrender their secrets. As much as any other characteristic, this is what defines us, a fact made all the more apparent by Ms. Wulf's engaging micro history.

The brightest planet in our sky, Venus has, for millennia, captivated humanity. Endowed with divinity by various faiths and recognized as an enigma by others, its eccentric orbit has caused it to be identified as both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, positions it occupies at various points in the year. In more recent times, astronomers even bestowed upon it an Earth-like atmosphere, speculation that flowed from a strange, visual effect, seen from Earth, when Venus eclipses the sun. Only Mars has prompted more astronomical and astrological musings, though, even here Venus outstrips its red brother. For its unusual cosmic dance with Earth allows those of us in the present to better understand human cultures of the past which associated Venus with the number eight, the number of years that separate the two ends of Venus' once-in-a-century transit.

For centuries, this was all Venus was, a heavenly object made sacred by a lack of scientific understanding. But when human society rose out of the ashes of Middle-Age ignorance to embrace the Renaissance of science and discovery, Venus became not only a point of study, it was recognized as the key to fathoming the distance of Earth from its sun. By measuring Venus during its stellar transit, astronomers could calculate the stellar parallax, providing a conclusive answer to one of the outstanding questions of the Copernican era. There was just one problem. Venus only eclipses the sun only twice every 105 years. Should weather or circumstance conspire to thwart the efforts of astronomers to take measurements from this transit, they would have to come back eight years later and try again. And should they again be defeated by misfortune, they would be long dead before they would ever again see its like.

In Chasing Venus, Ms. Wulf chronicles the most pivotal of these transit cycles, the 18th-century pairing which, first in 1761 and then in 1769, allowed astronomers to take the stellar parallax. Introducing her readers to the scientific minds of the day, the author describes the extraordinary efforts of various European scientific societies to dispatch their best and most adventurous minds to key points on the globe where the observing of Venus' transit would be most advantageous. But while the harrowing journeys of these mostly brave men provides the backbone to Ms. Wulf's history, her examination of Europe and its politics during this time grants it its punch. For while scientists and astronomers agitated with their royal governments for the funds and the indulgences to execute this rare and intricate endeavor, their needs and desires were utterly eclipsed by the agendas of the monarchs of Russia and Britain, France and Germany, powerful men and women who not only controlled the fates of millions, but used this astronomical oddity to advance the dignity of their kingdoms. This two-tiered perspective allows the novel to operate on scales both individual and imperial, local and global, without losing any of its poignance.

There's no question that Ms. Wulf's work is buoyed by the remarkable efforts of now forgotten men, scientists who braved Siberian winters and equatorial summers to better understand their world. The sheer amount of thought, planning and effort that these individuals invested just in the hope for clear skies and good readings is inspiring. Today, it takes only hours to fly anywhere in the world. We need not brave tempestuous seas and their ruthless pirates, we need not be subject to unknowable diseases and the whims of royal governments. And yet, this achievement meant more to them than it does to us even though it is easily within our grasp. However, for as much as the material sings, Ms. Wulf's contributions are up to the task of reminding us of our past and the giants who characterized it. As excellent as it is expeditious... (4/5 Stars)

A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel

From The Week of November 12, 2012 Insight is a strange and mysterious quality. As unquantifiable as love and as elusive as freedom, it comes and goes as it pleases, subject to no man's whim. It cannot be summoned. It cannot even be channeled. It is a blessing that is as quick to leave us as it is to come to us. Such characteristics would normally bestow a bad reputation on just such a force. And yet, so welcomed are its truths, so treasured is its warmth, that we plead for its caresses, considering ourselves fortunate to have spent time in its luminocity. For insight brings enlightenment, knowledge that can alter the future and change the lives of millions. That is a power that should be respected, not quibbled with. Ms. Sobel demonstrates in her short but edifying biography.

Of all the giants who contributed to the ignition of the scientific revolution, none stands higher than Nicolaus Copernicus. A 15th-century son of Poland who spent most of his life as a canon in the Catholic church, he is responsible for early astronomy's most central insight, that the Earth, rather than be the fixed point around which the universe turned, was merely one world orbiting one star in a much greater, sun-filled cosmos. This shattering revelation not only ran counter to the scientific understanding of the time, it deeply undermined the most fundamental conceit of Catholicism, in particular, and Christianity in general, that Earth was the crown jewel of the home of life in the universe and that the star-filled heavens were simply that, the heavens in which god, his angels, and those most worthy human souls resided.

Though Copernicus, unlike Galileo, largely escaped Church sanction for holding such heretical views, this was merely a sad twist of fate. For Copernicus only published his revolutionary work in the months prior to his tragic death, after which he was safe from the narrow minds of the men who would seek to judge his genius. Here, Ms. Sobel reconstructs those final few, dramatic years of Copernicus' life, imagining his homelife, sketching out his duties and pondering the blockades that might have stood in the way of the publication of a book that would eventually transform the lives of untold millions. In this, she channels jealousies and suspicions, loves and secrets, to reconstruct a life the likes of which comes around but once in a century, a life that only a few of us will be blessed to touch.

Though A More Perfect Heaven is far from a thorough biography of Nicolaus Copernicus, it is a read as smooth as it is moving. Ms. Sobel foregoes a dry recitation of the accepted facts of her subject's life and, instead, revivifies him with a small play sown neatly into the heart of her otherwise non-fictional chronicle. Reasoning out who the man might've loved and feared, protected and conflicted with, she animates his central genius with a series of scenes that concern his final months. In this, she rescues him from both the dryness of history and the remoteness of legend. She gives us a man with needs and flaws, with troubles and torments, a man who was as certain of his scientific conclusions as he was concerned about the consequences they would have on a world enshrouded in the darkness of ignorance.

Much of this is supposition, but the author sandwiches her play with enough biography to grant her version of events the sheen of plausibility, perhaps even probability. Time has a habit of eroding the truth of the way of things. The passage of five centuries has a habit of obliterating them altogether. This is, then, a welcome snapshot of one of the most critical moments in our recent history, one that we will look back upon for as long as we have science.

If you are looking for a well-rounded biography of Copernicus, look elsewhere. Ms. Sobel leaves off much of the detail that would have characterized his every day life. However, if you're interested in the ways and means of early scientific insight, and how that insight might affect the minds of 15th-century humans who knew only faith and war, then look no further. Charming work... (3/5 Stars)

The Signal And The Noise by Nate Silver

From The Week of November 5, 2012

Though human progress relies on several critical pillars in order to function, none are more vital to the survival of the species than predicting the future. For it's only through the reasonably accurate anticipation of what's coming that we have any notion of how to act. The world around us is rife with data: dark clouds that presage rain, the approaching roar that announces an oncoming car, the rot that decays our food. If we were suddenly unable to use these data to draw logical conclusions based on past experience, we'd be dead in short order, felled by an inability to understand, to know, to make an educated guess. It's not a quality often valorized; we're rarely stripped of our predictive powers, a reality that leads us to take its virtues for granted. But this blindness has not stopped Mr. Silver from properly identifying it as a key aspect of progress and change. He explains in his captivating treatise.

From meteorology to poker, from elections to personal relationships, our world runs on guesswork. There are simply too many unknowable variables involved in the interaction of an ecosystem with the seven billion souls it shelters. There is no way for us to possess all of the information necessary to understand all. Thus, ever since we've been endowed with the powers of intellect, we've used a clumsy combination of guesswork and past experience to anticipate the future. But this is a deeply flawed model of deciding how to act. For we are, all of us, profoundly ill-equipped to be objective about ourselves and our world. We place far too much emphasis on our own actions, our own positions in the world, for our memories and our predictions to be trustworthy. But what if we could harness the understanding of the masses? What if we could eliminate errors of bias by using the average of the many to correct for the skewed and skewable beliefs of the few? Could we then have a reasonable expectation of a true future?

Perhaps, but correcting for bias is only half of the equation of understanding. The rest is rooted in the reality that, though we cannot know all the variables, we can grasp some of them. We can tease out of our world statistics that reveal some of the laws that underpin our actions in the micro and the universe in the macro. And we can use these statistics, along with what we know of ourselves and our fellows, to build models that can finally begin to conceive of our we act as a whole.

Mr. Silver understands this truth. A self-described math geek and a lover of baseball and poker, his youth was marinated in stats, stats that, if they could only be plugged into a broader matrix, could be made to reveal knowledge of how certain systems function. Armed with such information, one could reasonably maximize one's opportunity to win at all manner of endeavors, from trivial games to consequential bargaining sessions. For one would not need to waste time with bad strategies shaped by desperation and ego masquerading as intuition. One could simply possess a superior comprehension of the game and play within that framework, never descending to the muddy realm of unquantifiable speculation. After dabbling in the numbers of baseball and poker, Mr. Silver applied precisely this logic to the prediction of American elections. The result? A nearly flawless scorecard in the last two presidential races, an astounding level of accuracy that flirts with the magical until one absorbs the lessons in his wonderful book.

From sportsbetting to weather prediction, The Signal And The Noise walks readers through the worlds of statistics and of predictive modelling, illuminating the revelations of all manner of far-flung disciplines that all of us rely upon but few of us respect. But though it bestows upon us a welcome understanding of how parts of the world function, its truths are far more profound. For this is nothing less than a tome on how humans think and act, on how we can harness that data to our individual and societal advantage, and how we ought to couple that data with our scientific understanding of the universe to see more clearly where we are going. But in order to do this, we must relinquish our biases, all of them. We must reject the pretty fictions we cling to in order to ground ourselves in this shared reality. For to do anything less is to give up the exercise entirely. It's to reject the objective world for a subjective one, one in which there are no universal truths, one in which story supplants hard data. And though this might have been acceptable a century ago, when we lacked the tools to gather these data, we no longer have any excuses. Understanding is out there. We've merely to embrace it in all its definable glory.

For the degree to which it educates and philosophizes, illuminates and ruminates, this is one of the year's best reads and arguably one of the humblest books I've ever read. As profound as it is exquisite.. (5/5 Stars)