Science on Trial - Marcia Angell

I would not have thought it was possible to feel sorry for Dow Corning with regards to the silicone breast implant cases of the 1990s, but Marcia Angell's book made me feel just that. Angell is the former executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine - i.e., not a chemical company shill and not a dummy. She discusses the epidemiological evidence that shows no increase of autoimmune diseases, cancer, or any other systemic problem in women who have received silicone breast implants. And yet massive judgments were entered against Dow Corning and the company was driven bankrupt. Dow Corning's lawyers must have felt they were in cuckoo-land.

Completely fascinating reading.

Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case
Marcia Angell
1996
Available from Amazon

Autism's False Prophets - Paul Offit

An interesting book about the vaccines and autism controversy: how it began, what the bad science was, where the conflicts of interests were, how the public health community inadvertently stoked it. I previously recommended another book by Paul Offit, Vaccinated, about Maurice Hilleman's vaccine research.

I was convinced there was no relationship between vaccines and autism before this book, but I think the book lays out the evidence in a compelling way. And the author points out that one of the tragedies of the vaccine/autism controversy is the attention and funding it draws away from the search for actual causes and treatments for autism.

Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
Paul Offit
2008
Available from Amazon

It's All Too Much - Peter Walsh

I picked up this book after seeing it recommended on Cool Tools. I really liked it. I'm a pretty organized person to begin with, and I like organizing books so I read them for more ideas. But there was still good stuff in here. (Some of my previous favorites: Getting Things Done by David Allen, and Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern.)

The two biggest ideas for me: 1) The amount of space you have to store stuff dictates how much stuff you can have. So, if you have 1 shelf for DVDs, and you have more than 1 shelf's worth, you need to get rid of some, rather than find more space for DVDs. 2) You don't have to hold onto a thing in order to keep the memories. Plus I found his tone really inspirational. I have been cleaning like mad.

It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff
Peter Walsh
2006
Available from Amazon

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog - Kitty Burns Florey

I never learned how to diagram sentences, going through middle school in the 1980s, by which time it had fallen out of favor. But I always wished I had learned how to diagram sentences - it sounded fun! So I read this book. And I learned that diagramming sentences was fun, for the right kind of kid, which, let's face it, I probably was. But it also had it's flaws, and tree diagramming of sentences is now the in-thing. Which actually looks much cooler - more logical.

I didn't learn how to diagram sentences, but I got a little bit of the flavor from this book. And the author is funny and well-read. She has excellent side notes in the book - well worth reading. My favorite one lead me to read an essay by Mark Twain called Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. Boy howdy, you did not want to be a writer who Mark Twain thought was an idiot. Now I have to go read some Mark Twain (which I haven't read since middle school in the 1980s). Seriously, check out the Mark Twain essay. Even my very skeptical, non-grammar snob husband thought it was funny.


Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences
Kitty Burns Florey
2006
Available from Amazon

Traffic - Tom Vanderbilt

Roads that seem safer lead people to drive more recklessly, which makes them, on balance, less safe. The author examines this idea from a variety of points of view: vehicle design, human psychology, traffic engineering. This book has changed the way I drive for the better.

At the very least, you should read the introduction, titled something like: Why I Became a Side-Zoomer, and You Should Too.

Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
Tom Vanderbilt
2008
Available from Amazon

Battlestar Galactica

If you are not watching this, you have got to start. Dumbfoundingly good.

A couple of years ago, my husband asked me if I wanted to watch the Miniseries, and I was like, Ha ha ha, good one. So he watched it alone. And after he was done, I asked "Who was the woman with the short blonde hair working on the fighter jet?" He said, "That's Starbuck." And that was enough for me. Try the miniseries, if you don't like it, you're only out a couple of hours. And if you do, you'll be thrilled. I don't know anyone who doesn't like it. An amazing ensemble cast, great writing, characters, and plots, great production values.

The show is produced and written by former Star Trek writers who were interested in writing a show that had a more realistic view of life in space than Star Trek. The producers talk about how Star Fleet (in Star Trek) is all spic-and-span, how everyone has the "Star Fleet walk" with their chests out and their shoulders back. They thought that when you're on a real naval vessel at sea for months, things aren't always in tip-top shape, people get stir-crazy, things break. They wanted to show that side.

Make sure you start with the Miniseries, and don't miss Razor (after Season 3).

Battlestar Galactica
Miniseries from netflix
Miniseries from Amazon

We Bought A Zoo - Benjamin Mee

Benjamin Mee was living his dream life in the south of France, when his sister mailed him a real estate listing for a run-down zoo with a note attached: Your dream opportunity. He, his mother, and three of his brothers and sisters work for 2 years to buy, restore, and open the zoo. An interesting look behind the scenes at a business I'd never really thought about.

Mee is an engaging writer, with interesting material. The second day they owned the zoo, his brother runs up to the house yelling "Big cat on the loose! This is not a drill!" One of the leopards has escaped, and they have to figure out how to safely get him back, with bad equipment (they have to reinforce a tiger house that evening to have a place to put him) and missing equipment (they have no functioning dart gun, so if things go bad, they will have to kill an animal).

I've always been kind of uncomfortable with zoos - I haven't liked seeing the animals caged - and I was interested to learn the justification behind zoos (conservation of species, engaging the public in conservation efforts, providing funding for conservation efforts). I don't know that I'm entirely comfortable with them, but I feel better now.

I liked learning about the difficulties in rehabilitating a run-down business. The Mees appear to now have a successful zoo, but it was only possible because the BBC produced a four-episode mini-series on them. Without that, they would have made a heroic effort re-fitting and improving the zoo, then not made enough money the first year to keep running. I'm glad Mee wrote this book, because I think it will help keep people coming to the zoo. I'm pulling for them to succeed.


We Bought A Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals that Change Their Lives Forever
Benjamin Mee
2008
Available from Amazon

How To Get Your Kid To Eat...But Not Too Much - Ellyn Satter

A friendly, calm approach to dealing with mealtimes from a registered dietician and clinical social worker. I picked this book up off a friend's shelf because my one-year-old stopped drinking milk when I stopped giving her bottles, and I was stressed out about it. I came away realizing that I had to chill out. I can't make her drink milk, so the best thing for me to do is get out of the way.

Ellyn Satter is most famous for the idea that the parent is in charge of deciding what, when and how your child eats, but your child is in charge of whether and how much. This division of labor sounds reasonable and natural, but I'm discovering how far I'd gotten away from that, and how much fretting (and short-order cooking) I was doing in order to make sure my children ate enough (however much that is).

I'm a big advocate of eating what you want and trusting your body to know what the right thing is. So I was cautious about working from a book that might advocate imposing external controls on your own or your children's diets. I thought Satter stayed far away from standard diet advice and did a nice job discussing what you can control as far as weight is concerned and what you can't. Her views felt sensible and centered, not rigid.

I strongly recommend this book if you're having food battles with your child or if you're stressed out about their eating.

How To Get Your Kid To Eat...But Not Too Much
Ellyn Satter
1987
Available from Amazon

Second Nature - Michael Pollan

I really enjoyed this book. It's an incredibly literate and thoughtful discussion of gardening, of gardening as metaphor, and of our relationship to the natural world. When I first opened it, I thought it was going to be just like The $64 Tomato (which lists it in the bibliography), but it turned out to be far more reaching than that. Pollan talks about different cultural approaches to gardening - the European version versus the American version, the colonial American version versus the modern American version - in a way that is eye-opening. He talks about the relationship literary greats like Emerson, Thoreau, and Shakespeare had to the natural world, and how their writings affect our cultural views.

I only recommend books that I like on this blog, but some are four-star books and some are five-star books. This is a five-star book. I want to buttonhole everyone I know (especially, but not only, gardeners) and say: You have got to read this book.

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
Michael Pollan
1991
Available from Amazon

Scrubs

Funny and good-hearted.

We're on about Season 5 of this, and every time I watch it I think, I should really add this to my blog. And I always think the review should be "Funny and good-hearted."

Scrubs
Seasons 1-6 available. Season 7 comes out in November.

Season 1 from Amazon or Netflix

Banana - Dan Koeppel

A surprisingly interesting look at bananas - part natural history, part US history, part banana husbandry and biotechnology explanation. Did you know every banana you see in the supermarket is genetically identical? They're all a variety called the Cavendish banana. And if a disease threatens the Cavendish banana (and it does), it will wipe it out completely. In fact, this happened 50 years ago, when Panama disease wiped out the Gros Michel variety that was at the time the only variety sold in the US, and banana companies replaced it with the Cavendish.

Interesting stuff about banana husbandry - the Cavendish banana is completely sterile and only reproduces asexually. Other edible bananas (not eaten in the US - often only grown by small African or Indian villages, where they are the primary sustenance) are only marginally fertile - 1 seed for every 10,000 bananas. This makes traditional breeding very difficult, and so the banana may require biotechnology to be saved.

I had no idea the US government intervened on behalf of banana companies, much as it now does on behalf of oil companies. Come to think of it, I am pretty naive about US government intervention - I stupidly thought it was motivated by morals and ethics, rather than by moneyed interests.

A fun book - now I'm on the lookout for unusual banana types. I tried the baby bananas sold at my supermarket - they were sweeter and creamier than regular bananas. I liked them a lot. Now I'm hoping to find more exotic bananas - especially the Lacatan variety grown in the Phillipines.

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World
Dan Koeppel
2007
Available from Amazon

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - Deborah Madison

My other favorite cookbook (besides How to Cook Everything). We cook mostly, though not exclusively, vegetarian, and I love this book. Encyclopedic, and Deborah Madison has a knack for breaking down a class of recipes into its constitutent parts. She explains the different steps involved in all stir-fries, for instance, so you can riff on the theme.

Ten years ago I bough Madison's book, The Greens Cookbook, on the advice of a friend who said it was the one vegetarian cookbook he could cook from for meat eaters and they would not feel disappointed. But I found The Greens Cookbook too fiddly - because it is based on a restaurant, the recipes all have 20 ingredients and 9 steps. Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is much more friendly to the home cook. You can do fiddly stuff if you want, but you don't have to.

This book is a real boon if you belong to a CSA and have to figure out, like I do this week, what will I do with a whole mess of corn, tomatoes, tomatillos and edamame?

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Deborah Madison
1997
Available from Amazon

Kitchenaid 7-Cup Food Processor KFP10

A friend asked what food processor I bought and was I happy with it. So here's my answer.

I bought the Kitchenaid KFP710 at Target.

On the plus side:

• It's a Consumer Reports Best Buy.
• It costs $90 - which I appreciated because I wasn't ready to commit to a $200 appliance I wasn't sure I would use.
• It's easy to clean. (I had a Cuisinart briefly 10 years ago, and it seemed hard to clean the feed tube on that brand.)
• It works great.
• You can wash everything in the dishwasher (except the base - duh).

On the minus side:

• It's a 7-cup bowl, and sometimes I wish I had a bigger one. Of course, it's not like I have counter space for a bigger one. And I'm definitely glad I'm not trying to store extra food processor bowls, which some of the more expensive models come with.
• They don't make extra blades for it (which they do for the 9- or 12-cup models). It comes with a metal chopping blade and a disk that does grating and 2mm slicing. Now I'm used to it and those blades work well for me, but initially I wished I had a disk that did 4mm and 6mm slicing. 2mm slicing is pretty thin for something like carrots.
• It doesn't have a little insert bowl for chopping small amounts of things - but honestly, I can't think why I would want that.
• Parmesan cheese is too hard for the grating blade - it just ends up pulverizing it, rather than shredding it. And if I recall, it sometimes sounded like it was laboring to deal with the Parmesan cheese. I just went back to grating Parmesan by hand. I never tried grating mozzarella in it, but I suspect it might have a hard time with that as well, because of the smooshing aspect.
  
• The blades are freaking sharp. Kind of terrifying. I cut my finger on the grating blade early on and it gave me great respect for the blades. Because I have kids, I actually store the blades in a plastic box on top of the cabinets (along with my Microplane grater which I use for Parmesan cheese). I would definitely not store them in a drawer that you have to fish around in. Of course, sharp blades means it works better - you just have to be careful.

I especially like the food processor for

• slicing greens (kale, chard, cabbage). If I do it by hand I end up with big chunks. With the food processor, the texture of my dishes is much improved, plus it's fast.
• grating zucchini or carrots
• making salsa
• mixing together cold butter and flour for the beginnings of pie crust, hot cross buns, other breads
• chopping onions, though if I just have 1 onion to chop I typically do it by hand.
  

Kitchenaid 7-Cup Food Processor KFP10
Available from Target

How to Cook Everything - Mark Bittman

Like the Joy of Cooking - only hip. I love the Joy of Cooking (I have the 1975 edition), but I find I use it almost exclusively for baking. The main dishes are too heavy or bland or roasted for my taste. How to Cook Everything has a much more modern feel - it has stir fries, and curries, and pad thai, and Italian food. Encyclopedic (as one would hope), with great illustrations to explain techniques, hundreds of useful lists, variations of many basic recipes, and an accessible tone. Mark Bittman speaks so highly of food processors in this book that I bought one, and I've been using it like mad. I love his section on bread and pie crusts - I'd never made either one before in my life - and now I feel pretty competent. My new favorite cookbook - I've been using it for several months.

If you look on Amazon, you'll see several books on this theme: How To Cook Everything: The Basics or How to Cook Everything: Vegetarian. My understanding is that these are just subsets of the main book, so just get the main book.

You should also check out the New York Times for Mark Bittman's excellent column, The Minimalist, and his blog, Bitten.

How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food
Mark Bittman
1998
Available from Amazon - a new edition comes out in October

Interlibrary loan

Can I just say a word in favor of interlibrary loan? I love it. What an astonishing thing that I can get a copy of any book, published any time, in print or not, for free at my local library. I try not to buy books until I've read them (or else how will I know they're worth keeping around?), and interlibrary loan means I can read anything I want. My local library offers interlibrary loan; yours probably does too. The books I request mostly come from the local university and community college libraries, but I've had books shipped to me in North Carolina from Arizona. What a great service. Support your local libraries!

Curious Cook - NY Times - Harold McGee

Harold McGee is the author of the encyclopedic book about the science in the kitchen, On Food and Cooking. He writes a regular column for the New York Times called The Curious Cook. Two of my recent favorites are one about heat and one about cold. I learned a fantastic trick in the column on cold - you can make ice cream by putting the ice cream mixture in a ziploc bag and putting the bag in a bowl with ice and salt. Shake the bag a couple of times over the course of thirty minutes, and presto! Icecream with no icecream maker. Apparently 4H groups have been using this trick forever, but it is new to me, and I am so excited.

Unfortunately the Times doesn't provide an RSS feed for The Curious Cook - so you'll just have to keep your eye out for it. It seems to appear the first Wednesday of the month in the Dining & Wine section.

The Curious Cook
Harold McGee
The New York Times Dining & Wine section - 1st Wednesday of the month

Beautiful Boy - David Sheff

An amazing book by a father about his son's addiction to methamphetamine. I picked it up out of professional interest as a substance abuse counselor, and I will be recommending it to clients in the future. I thought David Sheff did a fantastic job of explaining both addiction and what it's like to love someone with an addiction. Plus he's a great writer. Next I'm going to read his son Nic's book Tweak.

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
David Sheff
2008
Available from Amazon

It's Not the Stork - Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley

A wonderful book about where babies come from for kids 4-8. Entirely done in cartoon-style illustrations, with age-appropriate descriptions of bodies, babies, and sex. With my three-year-old I just narrate the pictures - there are too many words to read them all aloud, though she'll grow into the text. Buy this early and read it yourself, so that you're not stumped when your child asks some unexpected sex question.

Thanks to my friend Dan for recommending this.

It's Not the Stork: A Book about Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends
Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley
2006
Available from Amazon

The $64 Tomato - William Alexander

A nice gardening memoir. It doesn't exhort you to go out and grow all your own food, and it has a nice balance between what's great about gardening and what's tough. Also has an excellent short (well-chosen) gardening bibliography in the back. It inspired me to want to grow more vegetable, but kept my feet on the ground about the difficulty involved.


The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
William Alexander
2006
Available from Amazon

Flotsam - David Wiesner

An extraordinary children's book.

Winner of the Caldecott Medal (awarded each year to the artist of the best children's picture book), and boy are you glad you didn't have a picture book in the running the year this book was published.

Flotsam
David Wiesner
2006
Available from Amazon

A Map of the Child - Darshak Sanghavi

I read this book a couple of months ago and didn't recommend it because I was bothered by a couple of science errors, but I have since thought about it often, so I think it's worth recommending in spite of my original hesitation.

Sanghavi is a pediatric cardiologist who has seen some stuff, and he talks about children's illnesses from the perspective of the doctors who treat them. He covers some of the same ground as Atul Gawande and even, surprisingly, Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi. But there is additional interesting material here. The section I have thought most about is one where he writes about the first case of child abuse he saw as a doctor.

Just to get it off my chest, here are the science errors that bugged me. 1) He says that the US swine flu vaccination program on 1976 caused an epidemic of Guillain-Barre cases. And while this is a common accusation, I've read a convincing account elsewhere (unfortunately I can't remember where) that this the association is spurious. 2) He refers to celiac disease as an allergy, when it is actually an intolerance - there is no histamine reaction in celiac disease.


A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body
Darshak Sanghavi
2003
Available from Amazon

Phantoms in the Brain - V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee

Ramachandran is a neurologist at UC San Diego who studies how unusual clinical cases help us understand normal brain functioning. He has done some fascinating work on how mirrors can help people with phantom limb pain resolve that pain. His book gave me an appreciation for how hard the brain is working to construct a seamless illusion of the world around us and continuous sense of self. The book really shines when Ramachandran is exploring interesting clinical cases, and so the last couple of chapters, which are more speculative, drag a bit. But all in all, a really fun book.

I searched out this book after seeing Ramachandran's work mentioned in an Atul Gawande essay, The Itch, which appeared in the New Yorker. You might start with the essay to see if you're interested in the subject matter - I think it's fascinating.

Phantoms of the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
1998
Available from Amazon

Don't Think of an Elephant - George Lakoff

If you are a liberal you must read this book. George Lakoff is a linguist a UC-Berkeley, and he writes about why conservatives have been so successful in the US in he last 30-40 years. Conservatives have thought about their values, invested in think tanks to spread their ideas, and shaped the debate for decades. So when George W. Bush talks about "tax relief", Americans have a cognitive frame that jumps immediately to their minds. The cognitive frame is all about how taxes are a burden and wasteful and how anyone who wants to offer you "relief" from them is a good guy. And this frame appears because conservatives have spent 30 years hammering these ideas home in ads, press pieces, media appearances, white papers, and so on. Liberals think that conservatives have just hit on a good slogan, but Lakoff explains how that isn't just so - conservatives have worked hard to make the slogans resonate. And liberals need to do the same thing now. We need to invest money in think tanks, see the building of liberal infrastructure as important, clarify our values, and get our ideas out into the public, all so that our two word slogans will resonate in the same way, so we can make the world a more just and kind place.

Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives
George Lakoff
2004
Available from Amazon

(Not That You Asked) - Steve Almond

Laugh out loud funny, a collection of essays on random topics - Kurt Vonnegut, reality TV, Republicans, the author's sexual coming of age. Sometimes the book reminded me of Anne Lamott's work - the self-deprecating, political, wry writing of Operating Instructions - though Steve Almond is more political, more outrageous, and less religious. Light and funny.

(Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions
Steve Almond
2007
Available from Amazon

American Nerd - Benjamin Nugent

A surprising book. I expected it to be a guy memoir - funny, self-absorbed, autobiographical. But it is much more academic than that, while still being very readable. Nugent traces the history of the nerd stereotype - where did it come from, how is it represented in popular culture, where there nerds in the 18th century (yes, Mary Bennett of Pride and Prejudice was one). He reflects one what nerds get from their distinctive obsessions, like Dungeons & Dragons or Society for Creative Anachronisms. And he uses his childhood experiences and those of his childhood friends to illuminate the subject. I found it an interesting and sensitive discussion.

American Nerd: The Story of My People
Benjamin Nugent
2008
Available from Amazon

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Another in the list of books taking industrial agriculture to task (like Michael Pollan's previous book The Omnivore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, both of which I also recommend). This book deals more directly in science than either of the other two. The first section talks about "The Age of Nutritionism" - what we do and don't know about nutrition and how the gaps in our knowledge have impacted both nutritional recommendation and our eating habits. The Age of Nutritionism. The second section discusses industrial food production, how that impacts our diet, and how it appears to impact our health. The third section discusses Michael Pollan's particular recommendations for eating, which are summarized on the front of the book: "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." An excellent book.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Michael Pollan
2008
Available from Amazon

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown - Charles R. Morris

Prescient analysis of the impending credit crisis. At times a bit technical - I had to think very hard to understand all the financial machinations - but really interesting. He is pessimistic about the immediate economic outlook but has ideas about how the financial system can be righted over the longer term.

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
Charles R. Morris
2008
Available from Amazon

Vaccinated - Paul A. Offit

Like reading about the life of your grandfather, if your grandfather happened to have a hand in the development of vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, pneumococcus, meningococcus, and Haemophilus influenzae type b. An account of the life of Maurice Hilleman, a leading vaccine researcher and ultimately head of the Merck Institute of Vaccinology. This book also provides a succinct discussion of the development and use of vaccines, their public health impact, and surrounding ethical questions.

An amazing fact I didn't know: In the early 1960s measles killed 8 million children every year. It still kills 500,000 children a year.

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases
Paul A. Offit
2007
Available from Amazon

Snake Oil Science - R. Barker Bausell

An analysis of the science behind complementary and alternative medicine written by the former director of research at the Univesity of Maryland's NIH-funded Complementary Medicine Program. This is a fascinating book to read if you have a chronic medical condition and try, from time to time, to find something to treat it. It explains how the placebo effect and its cousins - reversion to the mean, natural history, and so on - trick us into believing that ineffective treatments are effective. This book is also a great reference for scientists, especially social scientists, trying to design good studies and evaluate the quality of published works. It will make me a much more skeptical, and reasoned, consumer of the science press and medical treatments.

Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine
R. Barker Bausell
2007
Available from Amazon

Diary of a Real Estate Rookie – Alison Rogers

Alison Rogers quits her job as a real estate journalist to get a real estate license and start flipping property. It doesn’t work out how she planned, and she ends up being a regular real estate broker in New York City. I don’t know anything about real estate, so this book was interesting as an insight into what realtors do, how they make money, what service they provide. She’s a chatty, friendly guide to the business.

Diary of a Real Estate Rookie: My Year of Flipping, Selling, and Rebuilding and What I Learned (The Hard Way)
Alison Rogers
2007

Available from Amazon

Better - Atul Gawande

Another excellent book from Atul Gawande. I especially liked the essay on the difficulty of getting doctors to wash their hands consistently and how people are trying to fix that problem. Also, the essay on childbirth practices, which made me more understanding about the high US Cesearean rate and gives a fascinating history and effects of the Apgar score. Also the essays about medicine in India and medicine in Iraq.

Gawande writes regularly for the The New Yorker (where these essays first appeared) and occasionally for New York Times op-ed page. Here are a couple of interesting ones: on contraceptive effectiveness and on infection control checklists. I know they both sound boring, but check them out.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
Atul Gawande
2007
Available from Amazon

Complications - Atul Gawande

I would read anything Atul Gawande writes. He's a great writer with great subject matter - being a surgical resident at a Boston hospital. Look for his regular contributions to The New Yorker, where these essays first appeared. Particularly interesting are his essays on learning medicine and on uncertainty in medicine - in both cases these are ethically loaded problems, because in medicine you practice on real people.

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imprecise Science
Atul Gawande
2002
Available from Amazon

Cool Tools

Every day a new blog entry with a recommendation for something cool. They suggest all kinds of things - books, web sites, techniques, actual tools. I've found some great stuff here. Some of their recent suggestions that I've tried, or already been using, or thought fascinating: Breathe Right Nasal Strips, Radio David Byrne, ACME Workhorse Bags.

Cool Tools

Overtreated - Shannon Brownlee

Areas of the country with more MRIs, surgeons, and ICU beds have higher rates of MRI scans and surgery and more days in the ICU. Big surprise. What really is a big surprise is that they also have worse mortality statistics. They spend twice as much on healthcare in the last year or so of life, but their patients die sooner. Partly this is because receiving medical care is dangerous - the longer you're in the ICU, the more often you have surgery, the more likely someone is to make a mistake.

This is another fascinating book analyzing the American healthcare system. It claims that a third of what we spend (a third!) is unnecessary. She takes the system to task for not using evidence to guide treatment and for not doing the studies needed to generate the evidence. She talks about how the managed care fad of the 1990s damaged doctor-patient relationships and ultimately increased healthcare spending. She suggests ways to reform things (mostly by making changes to Medicare that would trickle through the non-governmental insurance system). Her arguments will change how I interact with the medical system - less visits to specialists, much more emphasis on family practice, more attempts to understand the evidence for various treatments and use older, less expensive, but equally effective options.

Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer
Sharon Brownlee
2007
Available from Amazon

Vaccine – Arthur Allen

A tome, but it reads like a Tom Clancy novel once you get past the endless discussion of the early history of smallpox. Skip ahead to about 1900, and learn about vaccine development, the triumphs and disasters of vaccination programs, the current controversies over autism. Fascinating.


Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver
Arthur Allen
2007
Available from Amazon

The Perfect Scent - Chandler Burr

A riot. Funny and fascinating. Chandler Burr describes a year in the development of two scents: Coty's Sarah Jessica Parker Lovely and Hermes's Un Jardin Sur Le Nil. He is a great guide, dissecting what is PR and what is not and laying out the interactions between creative directors and perfumers.

Every five or ten pages he descends into purple prose. On the first page of the introduction he writes: "In the deep-cobalt summer sky, the cloud of aerosolized filth from the Paris traffic hovered in the blue air", and I almost closed the book. I'm glad I didn't, but, seriously, I've never seen a deep cobalt sky. Maybe this over-done writing is an occupational hazard of writing about perfume. You're trying to describe something so ethereal. And Burr is lyrical about perfume, both the good and the bad. On the Olsen twins' perfumes: "two scents that smell like car exhaust on Tenth Avenue, scents with no persistance, no sillage, no beauty, and no reference to anything expect its creative team's attempting to ride some vapid pop cultural pulse." On Hugo Boss Elements: "A cologne most appropriately worn by electrical appliances. It should be called Eau de Refrigerator Condenser Coil." And on the positive side, on Rose Poivree by The Different Company: "the perfume Satan's wife would wear in hell (it is an exquisite scent, a combination of rose and smokey fire."

What I liked best is 1) learning about the perfume industry and 2) learning about the real art behind perfumes. I don't wear any perfume - almost all scents give me a headache. I once made a boyfriend wash his head under a tap at a gas station bathroom on the New York Thruway because I couldn't stand the smell of the Flex Conditioner he had used. But I want to take this book to the department store and smell every single perfume he talks about.

I have also read, and highly recommend, Chandler Burr's previous book: The Emperor of Scent, about a maverick scientist named Luca Turin. Also, I recommend Luca Turin's book: The Secret of Scent, which discusses his theory of olfaction. And I'm looking forward to rading Luca Turin's book of perfume reviews, Perfumes: The Guide.

The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York
Chandler Burr
2008
Available from Amazon

Green Porno

This is too good to miss. Isabella Rosellini explains bug sex lives. Man, she is amazing.

Green Porno at the Sundance Channel

Moneyball – Michael Lewis

Why are the Oakland A’s one of the best baseball teams in the US, while their total payroll is second from the bottom? What do they know that other teams don’t? I don’t care about baseball at all – I’ve watched one baseball game in my life – but this book is fascinating. The A’s hired economists to analyze player statistics and figure out which statistics contribute most to winning games. Some of the canonical baseball statistics turn out to have little predictive value – like Runs Batted In – and other times the economists need to develop new statistics to capture the right information. The A’s lead is decreasing as other teams pick up their tactics – Bill James, the father of baseball arcane now works for the Boston Red Sox. But this is a great read, even if you know nothing about baseball or statistics.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis
2004
Available from Amazon

Mother Shock - Andrea J. Buchanan

I read this book when my first child was about 5 months old, and I thought, "Thank God, all new moms feel as crazy as I do, and in basically the same ways." It made me feel connected to all the other mothers out there. Plus it has dead-on analysis of the transition to motherhood. I would recommend it to any new parent struggling to adjust. I'm re-reading it now, with an almost 3-year-old and a 9-month-old, and it reminds me of the insanity at the beginning. And I think, "Thank God that is all behind me, but I still have something to remember it by."

Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It
Andrea J. Buchanan
2003
Available from Amazon

Mutants – Armand Marie Leroi

An unusual combination of historical accounts of people with physical anomalies and the modern genetics and molecular biology that help explain the anomalies. Obviously originally published in Britain and not re-edited for the American audience, it still has British spellings and phrasings that occasionally cause the reader to stumble, but also sometimes add charm.

It starts off a little slow – I thought it was going to be all historical accounts, and I wasn’t up for that. But it quickly turns fascinating. For instance, there is a condition called Kartagener’s syndrome characterized by impaired sense of smell, male infertility, and reversal of all the internal organs – the heart is on the right of the chest rather than the left. These symptoms all result from defective cilia on the surfaces of cells. People with defective cilia can’t move mucous out of their lungs and sinuses properly, leading to chronic sinusitis and bronchitis, leading to impaired sense of smell. Sperm use cilia to move, so if the cilia are defective, the sperm are immotile and the man is infertile. And, early in embryonic development, a set of cilia set up a standard pattern of beating right-to-left, creating a gradient in a signaling molecule that the body uses to determine right from left. With no cilia, there is no gradient, and the embryo randomly chooses which side is right or left for the development of internal organs. So actually half of people with Kartagener’s syndrome have a normal arrangement of organs, even though they have no cilia.

Leroi is an engaging writer, with an interesting whimsical style. About the X and Y chromosomes, he says: “[They] are physically ill-matched: the first is large, the second small. The remind one of those apparently odd couples – a large matronly woman and a small dapper man – that one sometimes finds among professionals of the Argentinian tango.”

You may not want to read it if you’re pregnant. Or you’re trying to get pregnant. Or you have a two-year-old who likes to find and discuss the pictures in your books. Also, the cover has images of people with genetic anomalies, which meant I only read the book at night after the kids were in bed.

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body
Armand Marie Leroi
2003

Available from Amazon

Friday Night Lights - The TV show

I don't give a rat's ass about Texas high school football, but I love this show. Great characters, amazing acting, interesting photography and story lines. Read this review by Sarah Mosle from Slate.com - she is far more eloquent on the subject than I am.

First Season and Second Season available from Amazon
First Season and Second Season available from netflix

Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems - Richard Ferber

An incredibly helpful book for addressing sleep problems. I was nervous about getting this book, because Richard Ferber is demonized in some child-rearing circles (notably the attachment parenting/Dr. Sears camp) as being unnecessarily mean to babies. The original version came out in 1985, and I can’t speak to the tone or content of that, but the 2006 edition is fabulous. In the preface, Ferber talks about how he has become identified with the cry-it-out method, which he regrets because his intention in writing the book was to provide an alternative to endless crying.

I found the book kind to babies and helpful for parents. He gives clear step-by-step instructions on how to alter sleep schedules and discusses how to solve sleep problems if you co-sleep (an omission from the first edition that he notes in the preface). He shows an excellent way of charting your child’s sleep so you can see what is going. He also discusses bedwetting, night terrors, and nightmares and covers sleep problems up through the teenage years.

Previously I recommended Marc Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, but the bloom is off that rose. Weissbluth is helpful for two things – excellent charts of the average amount of night and day time sleep at different ages, including the 10th and 90th percentiles, and guidance on noticing when your child is tired. But the book is incoherent, says the same thing over and over, gives you 100 pages on why sleep is important (well, duh), and doesn’t provide clear instructions on changing sleep patterns. It’s worth getting from the library for the charts and the sleepy signs though.

The only problem I have with Ferber’s book is that his charts of how much sleep kids need at different ages seem way off – they seem to track with the 10th percentiles from Marc Weissbluth’s book.


Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems: New, Revised, and Expanded Edition
Richard Ferber
2006
Available from Amazon

Clone - Gina Kolata

An interesting account of the history of cloning, from the 1930s to the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996. A bit overwrought at the beginning, probably because it was written so soon after Dolly was born - Kolata and her subjects seem to think cloning is the most important story of the previous 20 years. But fascinating nonetheless. As always, Gina Kolata is excellent at explaining science - I learned a lot about genes, biology lab techniques, and reproduction. Plus she has great characterizations of the main players.

Clone: The Road to Dolly, and the Path Ahead
Gina Kolata
1997
Available from Amazon

The Final Days - Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

I bought this book 15 years ago after watching Oliver Stone's movie Nixon. The movie portrays Nixon as frankly unstable - drunk, depressed, out of touch with reality. I wanted to know if that was an accurate portrait or if it was just Oliver Stone's embellishment. It turns out to be accurate. I must have read this book 10 times, and it's fascinating every time. It is a comprehensive depiction of the White House over the year or so before Nixon resigned, not a reporter's eye view like All the President's Men.


The Final Days
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
1976
Available from Amazon

All the President's Men - Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

A totally gripping account of uncovering the Watergate story from the reporters who did it. Fascinating to read from our post-Watergate perspective - knowing how it turns out and knowing the excesses of governments since. It's not a comprehensive account of Watergate, instead you follow the reporters as they learn tiny new facts and place them in context. And sometimes it is hard to realize what is shocking or inappropriate, because we, the readers, know worse things are coming. But fascinating as a portrait of a time, an administration, a newspaper.


All the Presiden'ts Men
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
2005 (originally published Jun 15, 1974, before Nixon resigned)
Available from Amazon

Identical Strangers – Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein

At 33, Elyse Schein learned she had an identical twin who she had never met. She meets the twin and they set out to learn about their past and why they were separated by the adoption agency. In the process, they become friends with each other. Written in the voices of both Elyse and Paula, I found them sometimes grating, but their story is incredible. I can’t conceive of the heartlessness that would lead mental health professionals to separate twins “for research purposes” and then lie to them for 35 years. It is shocking that these women (and the other separated twins) are still denied access to the records of the study in which they were unwitting subjects.

Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited
Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein
2007
Available from Amazon

Getting Things Done – David Allen

My favorite book for organizing your paper/information life. His central idea is keeping information in your head distracts you and makes you less efficient. You need to have a system that you can trust to capturing all the information you need to remember. Great ideas about how to process all the information coming in, manage to-do lists (for starters, you need more than one), track information associated with particular calendar dates. I was pretty organized to start with, but this has made my life much better. The method has been adopted by various online geeks, who refer to it as GTD, so there is tons of ancillary information and discussion at places like 43folders.com.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
David Allen
2002
Available from Amazon

Code Version 2.0 – Lawrence Lessig

Dense, interesting and informative. The Internet and cyberspace allow ever larger portions of our lives to be controlled by computer code. Lessig asks how law should respond to the new control and lack of controls made possible by code. If computer searches can be made totally burdenless, does the Fourth Amendment still prevent them? How should we regulate privacy? How should we regulate intellectual property? Does it matter that private companies (rather than the government) are controlling many of these areas? And what are our options as citizens for affecting the way the legal situation develops? This last topic is especially interesting as it clearly informs Lessig’s decision to turn his attention from questions of electronic law to questions of systematic corruption in the political system.

Make sure to get Version 2.0 of this book, released in 2006, rather than the original entitled Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and published 1999.

Code Version 2.0
Lawrence Lessig
2006
Available from Amazon

The Yiddish Policeman's Union - Michael Chabon

A murder mystery set in a world where after World War II Jews settled in Alaska rather than Israel.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union
Michael Chabon
2007
Available from Amazon

The Mere Mortal's Guide to Fine Dining - Colleen Rush

A suprisingly fun read with everything you need to know about how to eat in extremely fancy restaurants. It has a great chapter on wine - finally I can read a wine label.

The Mere Mortal's Guide to Fine Dining: From Salad Forks to Sommeliers, How to Eat and Drink in Style Without Fear of Faux Pas
Colleen Rush
2006
Available from Amazon

Flu - Gina Kolata

In 1918, the flu (the flu!) killed between 20 and 100 million people worldwide, but most people have never heard of it. This book covers what that plague was like, the possibility of it happening again, and flu research up to today.

Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic
Gina Kolata
2001
Available from Amazon