The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett

Fun, light, short.

The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
Alan Bennett
2007
Available from Amazon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon

Amazingly, dumbfoundingly good for 468 pages. The ending (pages 469 - 636) feels perfunctory and workman-like, but the first 468 pages are incredible and make the book definitely worth reading.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
2001
Available from Amazon

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007 - Richard Preston, Editor

Twenty-eight interesting science essays, picked out by Richard Preston, author of The Wild Trees, which is also an excellent book.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007
Richard Preston, Editor
2007
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Free Culture – Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig explains why copyright as it exists today undermines American culture, values, and creativity. He lays out the history of copyright in various fields and the recent (past 30 years) sudden expansion of copyright. He talks about possible solutions that could protect creators’ rights while allowing the explosion of creativity (both commercial and non-commercial) made possible by new technologies. This is not an apologia for college students downloading music, though he does discuss how we got to rampant downloading and he does point out the ludicrous magnitude of punishments for downloading. Worth reading – valuable background for understanding the current copyright fights. I hope we legislate something half so elegant as he suggests.

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
Lawrence Lessig
2004
Available from Amazon

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep – D. T. Max

An account of prion diseases, among them mad cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and fatal familial insomnia (the family of the title). This book provides lucid explanations of interesting diseases and lays out their frightening implications. It discusses the animal husbandry and butchering practices that spread prion diseases, and it talks about how conflicts of interest within departments of agriculture encourage lackadaisical responses to disease outbreaks. I learned, for instance, that there have been four identified cases of mad cow in the US (the last in April 2006). There is every reason to believe that this is just the beginning.

I was surprised to learn that “prion” refers to one particular protein encoded by a gene on Chromosome 20, rather than a larger class of infectious proteins. The prion protein can fold in two different ways, one healthy and one not, and apparently it can be mis-coded, resulting in heritable forms of prion diseases. Reading the book, I was frustrated that I couldn’t understand how one mis-folded protein could cause different strains of disease. For instance, sporadic CJD, which arises randomly, has a different disease progression than variant CJD, which is caught from cows. Perhaps my confusion is well-founded – the author in his acknowledgements thanks Gary Taubes, “the author of a famous take-down of Stanley Prusiner”, one of the Nobel Prize winners for prion discoveries. Luckily for us, Slate has re-printed the takedown and also printed an update when Prusiner won his Nobel prize. I can’t tell if the science is valid or not, but Taubes (and also Wikipedia) suggests that the prion protein may not cause these diseases after all.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep
D. T. Max
2007
Available from Amazon