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