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