Should I Be Tested For Cancer? - H. Gilbert Welch

Read this book!

Seriously, read this book. Buy it, or borrow it from the library and then send they author H. Gilbert Welch some money.

The full title of this book is: Should I Be Tested For Cancer? Maybe Not and Here's Why. A totally fascinating, important exploration of the benefits and drawbacks of cancer screening.

Back in November, there was a huge brouhaha when the US Preventative Services Task Force recommended that women between 40 and 50 not have routine screening mammograms. And people who were outraged about this kept saying on the radio that screening mammograms cut your risk of dying from breast cancer by one-third. This book explains the science behind that claim (and more). It turns out, with no screening mammograms, 3 women in a 1000 will die of breast cancer between 40 and 50. With screening mammograms, 2 in 1000 will dies. So, yes, screening mammograms cut the risk of dying from breast cancer by one-third. But that difference happens for 1 in 1000 women. And in exchange for that, 1000 women have to have 10 mammograms, half of them will have a positive screening mammogram at some point in the ten years, a large portion of those will have further invasive testing, some will be treated for cancer that would never otherwise have caused them symptoms, and some will have significant complications from the cancer treatment (maybe even including death). And it's not clear you actually reduce the overall death rate. If 1 in 1000 women doesn't die of breast cancer, but the overall death rate remains the same, have you actually done anything useful?

The benefits of cancer screening are far more modest than we have been led to believe, and the risks of screening are not minor. But various groups benefit from cancer screening (doctors are never sued for suggesting a screening; radiologists are thrilled that mammograms are recommended for half the population for half their lives; hospitals get to look like they're doing something for the community, while at the same time promoting their services).

I will question far more thoroughly future cancer screening suggested by my doctor. Starting with the freaking Pap smear for cervical cancer. I learned that once you've had 2 or 3 normal Pap smears and are over age 30, the recommendation is to get a Pap smear every 3 years. So why have I been getting a Pap smear every year? What is up with that? Who wants to get a Pap smear every year if there is no benefit?

While I'm here, check out the US Preventive Services Task Force website.

And read this totally compelling rant by Barbara Ehrenreich, about how mammography and breast cancer awareness has supplanted feminism, providing a way for institutions and people to signal that they care about "women's issues", without actually having to do anything useful.

Should I Be Tested For Cancer? Maybe Not and Here's Why

H. Gilbert Welch

2004

Available from Amazon

Dreams from my Father - Barack Obama

Totally fascinating. Amazing.

A friend had recommended I listen to this on CD. Obama reads it himself, and he won for a Grammy for it. I ended up reading it because I don't spend enough time in my car to get through the CD in a reasonable time. But I would love to go back and listen to it.

It's incredible to see Obama's history, especially knowing where he is now. The difficulties he had to navigate, the complexity of his life. He wrote this in 1995, before getting into politics, so it feels less polished and packaged than campaign memoirs do. And I'm amazed at how unsentimentally he's able to write about his past - about issues he was struggling with, about actions he is now embarrassed by. I know I couldn't be so dispassionate about my own history.

The book has greater resonance than just the story of the man who became President. It talks about identity formation and group connection and finding one's way in the world.

Plus, wow he can write.

Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama
1995, 2004
Available from Amazon

Talent Is Overrated - Geoff Colvin

Geoff Colvin makes a compelling argument that what makes people really good at things is deliberate practice. He systematically tears apart ideas of "talent" or "gifts", and points out how everyone who is good at something got that way by working really hard at it. The people we think of as prodigies (including Mozart and Tiger Woods), got that way by starting practicing younger, and with better teachers, than other people did.

Colvin goes beyond this to explain how we can apply deliberate practice ideas to all sorts of areas (sales, management, whatever we do). It's freeing, in a way, because we can choose to become good at whatever we want. It just takes careful thought and dedicated effort. I had to take a break from reading this in the middle, because I was overwhelmed with the thought that I could be excellent at whatever I wanted. And what did I want to be excellent at?

When I go back to doing counseling, I'm going to put these techniques into practice as a therapist. Getting regular feedback (like every session) from clients, working on particular areas of practice, examining what I do with an eye to getting better.

Talent is overrated: What really separates world-class performers from everyone else
Geoff Colvin
2008
Available from Amazon

How We Decide - Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer is one of the writers who clearly has more intellectual horsepower than me. And since I think of myself as pretty freaking smart, I'm impressed when I read his writing. This book is fascinating. He talks about what current neuroscience tells us about how our brains make decisions. Are our rational minds more sensible than our emotional minds? How do we make decisions under stress? When should we go with our gut instinct, and when should we think a decision through intellectually? He describes really interesting case scenarios: how did the fire jumper who invented the escape fire (in the face of an oncoming firestorm) do so? How do excellent poker players understand who is bluffing and decide when to bluff themselves? How do excellent quarterbacks make decisions about where to throw the ball?

I'm going to apply the lessons he describes here, and I'm going to make better decisions as a result.

How We Decide
Jonah Lehrer
2009
Available from Amazon

The United States Constitution - Hennessey and McConnell

A graphic version of the US Constitution. Covers the content and history of the Constitution in a readable and fun fashion.

I've never read a graphic novel, and I'm a really verbal person. (No visualization skills whatsoever.) But I found the drawings incredibly witty and illuminating. I'm going to start seeking out graphic books, because the pictures were an equal partner to the words and made the book much more fun to read.

The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation
Jonathan Hennessey and Aaron McConnell
2008
Available from Amazon

The Billionaire's Vinegar

Just fun. A book about a wine forger (who even knew such people existed?), and about fine wine in general. It's nice to read something with so little consequences for once. Because while the wine forger is clearly a jerk who should go to jail, I can't work up much sympathy for the millionaire's who allowed themselves to be defrauded by him.

The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine

Benjamin Wallace

2009

Available from Amazon

1-2-3 Magic - Thomas W. Phelan

My favorite discipline book for kids. Just awesome. It says at the beginning that you don't have to be a saint or a psychologist to use it effectively, and thank goodness for that. Some other discipline books require you to think quickly on your feet and come up with a plan, and I just can't do it under emotional pressure. But this technique works great for my kids. It has worked when my 2-year-old used to hit us, and it works now with my 4-year-old provoking the 2-year-old or just whining. It makes me a better parent.

1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12

Thomas W. Phelan

2004

Available from Amazon

The Magician's Book - Laura Miller

This book made me want to read more literary criticism. Or more literature in general. I wish I were half as smart as the author, or could speak so thoughtfully on a subject.

I read and re-read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child. At some point, someone clued me in to the religious symbolism, and while it didn’t relate to me, I still loved the books. I even kept reading them as a kind of comfort food as an adult. Then a couple of years ago, I read comments about them by Philip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials trilogy), and he talked about the sexism, racism, and elitism in the books. Also about the disturbing view of religion and God (how God functions to punish people in the books, how death is presented as better than life). And I thought Pullman was so on the nose that I couldn’t read them anymore in good conscience. So I was really excited to read a book about Narnia from someone who had also loved them, and also was a skeptic. I was not disappointed.

Laura Miller divides the book into three sections. In the first, she talks about why the Chronicles of Narnia work for children. She talks about the magical writing and the way children approach the books. I thought her observations were dead-on. Then she talks about the problems with the books – the sexism, racism, and elitism that Philip Pullman identifies. She doesn’t pull any punches, but she also observes that if we judge writers by contemporary standards of conduct, we can’t read much great literature. In the third section, she talks about how Lewis’s life influenced his writing of the Chronicles, his friendship with Tolkien, and the context in which the books were written.

One of the unexpected pleasures in this book is reading about what other famous writers think of the Chronicles of Narnia, like Neil Gaiman (Stardust, among much else) and Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is also a wonderful book).

I feel so much better educated for having read this discussion of the Chronicles of Narnia. I’m planning to re-read it (and them).

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
Laura Miller
2008

Available from Amazon

Why Evolution Is True - Jerry Coyne

A compelling discussion of the evidence for evolution, from geology, genetics, morphology, archeology, and more. He talks about interesting issues I hadn’t even realized were problems. Like, if evolution is incremental, how do different species arise out of the same parent species? The answer is that one group of individuals become isolated from the rest, and then the two groups can evolve separately. This makes a prediction: a species should be most closely related to another species that is separated from them by some kind of geographical barrier. And in fact, this is true. There are seven species of snapping shrimp on the west side of the Isthmus of Panama, and seven species of snapping shrimp on the east side. And the closest relative of each species of snapping shrimp on the west side is one of the seven species on the east side of the Isthmus of Panama. Which is just what you would expect if, 3 million years ago, there were seven species of snapping shrimp near Panama, then the Isthmus of Panama rose out of the water, separating each species into two groups, which then evolved independently of each other.

I know that people who believe evolution is false are not really influenced by the evidence, but I loved learning about the evidence. It made me feel so much smarter and more connected to the natural world.

Why Evolutions Is True
Jerry Coyne
2009

Available from Amazon

Infrastructure - Brian Hayes

Sorry for the long delay. We moved to Maryland in mid-June, and things have been crazy. But hopefully now I'll get back to regular posting.

This is a guide to industrial structures, written in the style of nature guides by a long-time science writer. It’s totally fascinating. He explains all sorts of things I’d never thought to wonder about before. Why do high-tension power lines sometimes have three lines running side-by-side in a triangle formation? (It’s to reduce coronal discharge because the electricity acts as if it is traveling in a single line with the diameter that of the triangle.) What is the difference between open-pit mining and strip-mining? (Open pit digs down in an inverted cone, while strip mining digs up huge swaths of land to get at ore that is widely dispersed but not very deep.) The pictures are awesome, and the author is excellent at explaining complicated things.

We just moved to Maryland, and the very last thing I did before leaving was take a load of trash to the dump. And with my new insight into all things industrial, I discovered the road to the dump is filled interesting things to look at. There was a gas pipeline station, a massive electrical substation, and, of course, the dump. My husband tells me that there’s a dump near our new house, and I can’t wait to go out and see what there is to see there.

I highly recommend this book – it’s going to be my Christmas present for all my geeky friends and relatives.

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
2008
Brian Hayes

Available from Amazon

Harry Potter Audio CDs

I just started listening to the Harry Potter audio CDs and they are enchanting. I've read all the books already, but I had heard that the reader for the audio version, Jim Dale, was amazing. Within 30 seconds I was totally hooked. He has a perfect voice and accent for the books, and does fantastic voices for all the different characters. (Apparently he develops a new voice, complete with accent and phrasing, for each new character then tape records it so he can go back and reconstruct it when the character appears again later.)

Harry Potter Audio CDs
J.K. Rowling, read by Jim Dale
1999 and later

Available from Amazon

Know Your Chances - Steve Woloshin, Lisa M. Schwartz, H. Gilbert Welch

At first I wasn't going to recommend this book, because I thought it was too simple. But I'm finding myself using the ideas they develop every time I read an article about health, and they are useful.

They point out that benefits of drugs are often talked about in terms of relative improvement: "Drug X reduces your risk of heart attack by 20%." But without knowing your absolute risk of having a heart attack, you can't tell if this is important or not. If your risk of having a heart attack is 1%, and the drug reduces it to 0.8%, this is obviously a different matter than if your risk is 50%, and the drug reduces it to 40%. And even the better case, do you care about at reduction from 50% to 40%? What are the side effects like?

I'm extrapolating a bit here, but I think the authors would like to see the FDA require drug companies to put a standard chart in ads and product literature that lists the effectiveness (and side effect percentages) of placebo and drug treatment. This would be a standard drug information label like the standard nutrition labels we have on all our foods. I was certainly startled to see how small the effects of many interventions are.

For instance, folic acid supplementation is recommended for all women of child-bearing age. The March of Dimes has run ads comparing not taking folic acid to letting your baby crawl out into traffic. And yet without folic acid supplements, you have a 2/1000 risk of neural tube defects, and with folic acid a 1/1000 risk. So it's worth taking folic acid because the cost and side effects are negligible, but it is making a very small risk even smaller.

The authors also cover risks and benefits of mammograms and PSA testing, which are now being better discussed by the media. I'd think very hard before having either one.

A deceptively easy read, because the ideas are so important and relevant.

Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics
Steve Woloshin, Lisa M. Schwartz, H. Gilbert Welch
2008
Available from Amazon

Goo Gone

Every house should have Goo Gone. And now I have a new use for it.

I went to duplicate a DVD I had made a couple of years ago and discovered that my computer could not read it. It turns out when I had made the DVD, I had labeled it with an paper adhesive label by Avery, and that paper adhesive labels (all of them, not just AbverY) do something to the DVD (render it unbalanced? make it too heavy? warp the disk?) so that computer drives eventually can’t read them. The DVD worked fine in the DVD player attached to my TV, but not in my computer, perhaps because the computer drive spins the disk faster. Let me just say here that I am dumbfounded that anyone sells a label for DVDs that renders the DVD inoperable. Dumbfounded.

Through the wonder of the Internet, I learned that you can fix your DVD by removing the label, and that Goo Gone is the method of choice. So, with much trepidation (this was a DVD of my kids, so it mattered to me), I poured Goo Gone in a bread plate, put the DVD in label-side down, let it soak for 15 minutes, removed the label, and then washed and dried the disk. And voila! The DVD worked again. Of course, then I spent the next 3 hours with a little factory of bread plates soaking the labels off all my DVDs and labeling them with a Sharpie marker.

I love Goo Gone. It’s great for getting stick stuff off whatever. You can buy it at pretty much any hardware store or grocery store.

Goo Gone
Available from Lowe’s and a million other hardware/grocery/super stores

Rapture Ready – Daniel Radosh

Daniel Radosh sets out to explore Christian pop culture. I was cautious about picking this book up, because I didn’t want to read some screed against religion or something that denigrated believers in a general sense. But it did neither of these things. It is a respectful, thoughtful examination of Christian pop culture by an outsider. I feel like it helped me understand American evangelicals better, as well as understand more of their world view and the differences within the community. Plus, it was an incredibly engaging work. Radosh is a fun tour guide, well-versed in secular culture, and now, apparently, in Christian culture as well.

Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture
Daniel Radosh
2008
Available from Amazon

Medicine, Meaning and the “Placebo Effect” – Daniel E. Moerman

I picked up this book because David H. Newman mentions it several time in his book Hippocrates’ Shadow. He mentions it to make the point that medicine is not as effective as it seems, and that the human body, through things like the placebo response, does a lot of the healing work that we attribute to medicine.

Daniel E. Moerman is a medical anthropologist who dislikes the term placebo effect, because it is often used pejoratively and because it downplays the breadth of healing initiated by the body. He prefers the term “meaning response”, because our bodies are responding to the meaning we attach to the intervention. If someone is unaware they have been given a placebo, they don’t respond. For instance, studies have shown acupuncture to be effective for pain relief, but acupuncture given while the patient is under general anesthesia for some other reason have no effect on pain.

Moerman observes that the meaning response is so powerful it makes sense for medicine to invoke it as much as possible. Patients who respond to placebos are often seen as gullible or naïve, but he points out that no one has been able to establish any common characteristics of placebo responders. The beliefs of the medical professionals seem to be at least as important as the beliefs of the patient. In one study, patients were told they would be given either placebo, naloxone, or fentanyl for dental surgery pain. Placebo or naloxone would not reduce their pain, but fentanyl would reduce it markedly. The medical professionals were told that because of an administrative mistake, no patients would receive fentanyl in the first week of the experiment – that is no patients would get active medicine. Thereafter, patients might receive any of the treatments. All the patients were given placebo, and the study found that in the first week (when providers thought there was no chance the patients were getting fentanyl), patients had no decrease in pain. But after the first week, patients had significant pain relief from the placebo they received. Somehow the doctors were conveying to the patients that there was now a chance that they would get pain relief, and the patients were responding to that message.

I thought this book was interesting and important for medical professionals and patients, but also for counselors. He has two chapters on the meaning response in psychotherapy. One of the puzzles of psychotherapy is that psychotherapy is more effective than no treatment, but all methods of psychotherapy are about as effective as each other. Moerman argues that psychotherapy is invoking the meaning response, and lays out a framework for understanding it.

This is a more academic work than most books I read, but still very readable. I wish it was more widely read, because I thought it was an important book.

Medicine, Meaning and the “Placebo Effect”
Daniel E. Moerman
2002
Available from Amazon

In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson

If you haven't read Bill Bryson, you are missing out. He is a very funny travel writer and commenter on the English language. I just re-read In a Sunburned Country, which I love because it's about Australia. I've read many of his books including A Short History of Nearly Everything and Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, which I only single out to emphasize that it's not only his travel writing that is funny, interesting, and worth reading.

In a Sunburned Country
Bill Bryson
2000
Available from Amazon

Almost French - Sarah Turnbull

An Australian journalist meets a Frenchman at a dinner party in Romania. She goes to France to spend a week with him, and ends up staying and ultimately marrying him. It's been a while since I read a book by an Australian, and I had forgotten what a nice writing style Australians tend to have: direct, self-reflective, anjd unsentimental. Other books by Australians I have loved: Motherhood by Anne Manne, Searching for Charmian by Suzanne Chick, A Fence Around the Cuckoo by Ruth Park - though she's actually a New Zealander, she feels Australian to me.

This book is mostly about adjusting to the different culture in France as compared to Australia. She writes about being ignored, one-upped, or critiqued at dinner parties, about strangers being rude, about watching in astonishment as her boyfriend removed all the paintings from the walls of a hotel room because he thought they were ugly. She writes about taking her dog to a patisserie (which is completely normal in France) and having a stranger say loudly and disapprovingly to his wife, "Imagine that, a dog in a patisserie." And by this point, the author had been in France long enough that she smiled and said sweetly to him, "Imagine that, a dickhead in a patisserie." Her boyfriend was so happy for her.

Initially I thought this book was a fun (and funny) trifle, but I found myself talking about it with friends and they found that it helped them understand their past interactions in France and with the French. My husband said that now he understood why his date with a French exchange student in high school went so badly. He took her to the Skate House for roller-skating and then to Char-Grill, an outdoor-seating-only burger joint, where she ordered black coffee and chain-smoked. I know he still thinks Char-Grill is a good place to take a date - "It has great atmosphere!" he says - because he took me there when we first started going out. In fairness, back when my husband was in high school Char-Grill had better atmosphere; there was an African-American church beside it and you could sit in the parking lot and listen to the gospel choir practice.

Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris
Sarah Turnbull
2004
Available from Amazon

Gay Marriage - Jonathan Rauch

A lucid, compelling argument for why gay marriage is important. It was fascinating to read an analysis of what marriage is for. I am unequivocally in favor of gay marriage, and I have never understood what people meant when they said that gay marriage would undermine marriage. Jonathan Rauch attempts to get at whay people may mean when they say that, and then explains why he thinks the failure to provide gay marriage undermines marriage. In a nutshell, more and more people believe that being gay is unchangeable, and they are not willing to discriminate. By not allowing gay marriage, organizations (states, cities, companies) are forced to come up with alternatives like civil unions or domestic partnerships, which then are competitors to marriage and reduce marriage's special place in our society. Plus I hadn't before had a conscious understanding of what marriage is for. It was clear to me that it wasn't about having children, as some people say when they are trying to say why gay people shouldn't be allowed to marry. But while I felt it was important, I couldn't have put it into words. This book gave me a framework for thinking about what marriage is for and why it is important.

I read this after reading an Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes by Jonathan Rauch and David Blankenhorn, president of the (conservative) Institute for American Values: A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage. This piece is interesting because the two authors have opposing views on gay marriage, and together they suggest a compromise acceptable to both of them.

Gay Marriage: Why it is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America
Joanathan Rauch
2004
Available from Amazon

The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene

Brian Greene is seriously good at explaining things. Wow. And he's so generous to his reader. He's forever saying things like, "You're probably wondering how how this point I'm making here can be reconciled with the idea I introduced 4 pages ago." And I'm never wondering about that - I just can't keep the ideas in my head that long. But it is so nice to be treated as if I'm that smart. My husband, who is a physicist and no slouch himself, calls Brian Greene "the rock star physicist." I've got to find a way to see him speak in person.

This book is about what makes up space-time. I found the material more difficult that his previous book, The Elegant Universe, especially the middle section where he talks about whether time really exists or not. But the difficulty is worth it, because the ideas (and as I said, the explanations) are so fascinating. He talks about theoretical models for time machines, the prospects for actual time travel, what a "moment" really means.

As an added bonus, check out this fascinating Scientific American article: Was Einstein Wrong? A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity. Readable and surprising, it talks about how quantum non-locality undermines all of special relativity by allowing distant simultaneous events.

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Brian Greene
2004
Available from Amazon

Pachelbel Rant

Sorry I've been gone so long. We think we might be moving soon, and I've been occupied with planning for that.

So here's a fun one before I get back to the real thing. A comedian named Rob Paravonian talks about the plague of Pachelbel's Canon in D.

Available from YouTube
Also, check out his website at robprocks.com

The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud - Harry Markopoulos

This is the memo that Harry Markopoulos wrote to the SEC in 2005 about why he thought Bernie Madoff was a fraud. He first contact the SEC in 1999, and this memo is an attempt to get thngs moving because 6 years of talking wouldn't. If we knighted people in the US, we would knight Harry Markopoulos.

Technical but riveting reading.

Available from the WSJOnline

Partly Cloudy Patriot - Sarah Vowell

Funny. Even better if you’ve heard Sarah Vowell on This American Life, so you can imagine the essays in her funny, little-girl voice. I especially like the essay about ridiculous comparisons to Rosa Parks (and not just because she quotes one of my favorite shows, Sports Night).

The Partly Cloudy Patriot
Sarah Vowell
2002
Available from Amazon

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread - Don Robertson

I don't read much fiction, but when I read well-crafted fiction I find it so astounding. How on earth do people think it up, and create the style and the mood and the characters?

This book is well-crafted and really fun to read. A nine-year-old boy goes on a quest on the day of a huge industrial disaster in Cleveland, OH. It's set in 1944 and written in 1965, but feels modern and fresh. Now I have to go find Don Robertson's other books.

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
Don Robertson
1965
Available from Amazon

Hippocrates' Shadow - David H. Newman

A book by an emergency room physician about the secrets doctors keep from patients and themselves, and how those secrets affect patient care.

Here's one secret: what doctors do doesn't work. CPR, for instance, saves 1-5% of the people it is performed on. 95-99% of them die. Even if it is performed on people whom it is medically appropriate for (that is, the healthy dead), it only saves 30% of them.

Here's another secret: even when a treatment does something, it doesn't do what the patient thinks. For instance, patients go to the doctor with a sore throat, they get a strep test and are treated with antibiotics. The patient thinks the antibiotics will help their throat heal, but in fact antibiotics reduce a 7-day course of illness by just 16 hours. Doctors are actually giving antibiotics to prevent a rare complication of strep throat, rheumatic fever, and and an even rarer complication of that, heart damage. But we need to treat a million people with strep throat with antibiotics to prevent one case of heart damage, and of the million people we treat, 2,000 will have life-threatening reactions to the antibiotics, and 200 will die.

This book is well worth reading, but skip the last chapter. In it he tries to apply Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Godel's incompleteness theorem to the practice of medicine. And they don't apply, and they don't make sense, and he just comes off as anti-science. Which is strange, given that in the rest of his book he is strongly in favor of science, of using scientific evidence, and of discussing it with patients. Actually, I fairly often find this with non-fiction books. Everything goes well till the last chapter, and then, in an attempt to sum up and place in a larger context, the author over-reaches and things go all fuzzy. But apart from the last chapter, I loved this book and thought it was really valuable to have read.

Hippocrates' Shadow: Secrets from the House of Medicine
David H. Newman
2008
Available from Amazon

When You Are Engulfed in Flames - David Sedaris

Very funny. The essay about smoking alone is worth the price of admission; while reading it, Coke came out my nose. I love his discussions of cultural differences, between the US and France, where he lives, and Japan, where he visists. He talks about watching parents with a toddler on a train in Japan. The child wanted to look out the window, so the father took off his shoes, the mother placed a cloth on the train seat, and the child stood in his sock feet on the cloth. Then, before their stop, the father put the child's father put his shoes back on, and the mother folded up the cloth and wiped off the window where the child had smudged it with his fingers. I think of myself as pretty good at cleaning up after my children in public, but I have nothing on this. Maybe I should start. Or maybe it would just make me look like a complete freak here in the US.

I didn’t enjoy David Seadris’s last book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, (too oblique and depressing) but I loved this one. So don’t stay away just because of a previous bad experience. This one is good.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames
David Sedaris
2008
Available from Amazon

Every Living Thing - Rob Dunn

A fascinating look at the attempt to understand all the different kinds of life and to place them into categories. Starts back with Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who first made microscopes capable of seeing bacteria, and moving forward to recent developments in extremophile life and genetic analysis. I highly recommend it.

This is the first book I've read by someone I know - Rob's daughter is in the same preschool class as my daughter. And I found myself staggered that he had time to write at all, what with raising a child and being a full-time professor. Plus, that he had such interesting things to talk about. And interesting stories: he and his wife (a medical anthropologist) spent time in a small village in the Amazon, cataloging the medicinal uses of various plants and watching the local children's pet monkey ride on around a pet pig. Among other things.

Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys
Rob Dunn
2008
Available from Amazon

Watergate - Fred Emery

I was re-reading All the President's Men recently, and I realized one of the reasons I have read it so many times is I am trying to make sense of the whole Watergate affair. And All the President's Men is not the best vehicle for that. It tells the story from the perspective of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward - so you learn what happened as they learn it, in bits and pieces, and never get the whole chronological picture. So I went looking for a definitive account of Watergate and found this.

Wow. This is a good book. Nixon is lucky the Watergate burglars got caught when they did, because they weren't very good at what they were doing, and their plans were getting bigger and stupider. They considered firebombing the Brookings Institution to cover stealing classified documents from the Institution's vault, kidnapping and drugging anti-war leaders to prevent them from leading demonstrations, and murdering a newpaper columnist, Jack Anderson, because a column he had written allegedly lead to the death of a CIA operative.

Fred Emery, the reporter who covered the Watergate scandal for the Times of London, lays out how the Nixon White House got to the stage of Watergate and its coverup. The break-in doesn't make sense by itself, it only makes sense in the large context of paranoia and law-breaking. He explains how Nixon obstructed justice and abused the power of his office. It's too bad Nixon's reputation was rehabilitated toward the end of his life, and after his death, because he really didn't deserve it.

Watergate
Fred Emery
1995
Available from Amazon

Johnson & Johnson First Aid Burn Cooling Patches

Completely amazing. Every should home should have these.

I burned my finger on a 350 degree Fahrenheit cookie tray yesterday. It hurt like crazy. All I could do was keep my finger in water, and as soon as I took it out, I would start whimpering from the pain. And I got one of these on my finger and it totally stopped the pain. It's a wet gel pad, surrounded by some very effective adhesive. So you're effectively keeping the burn in water, but you can move around and do things, rather than having to sit still for the next 12 hours. By nighttime when I took it off, my finger had completely stopped hurting. It looks like I'm going to lose the top layer of skin, but for how much it hurt, I'm amazed at how little damage there is. A little tricky to apply the first time - I was too wound up to read the instructions properly and had to have my husband do it. But I'll be able to do it easily next time.

I bought mine at Target. Seriously, the next time you're at a drug store, you should buy some to keep on hand. I've also used and loved Spenco's 2nd Skin Moist Burn Pads, which you attach with tape.

Johnson & Johnson First Aid Burn Cooling Patches
Available from Amazon

The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene

An astonishing book. I have a physics degree, but I never took a class on cosmology or string theory, and I've always skipped over those articles in Scientific American because I couldn't follow them. This is a lucid, clear, fascinating discussion of string theory - why it is thought to be correct, what benefits it brings to our understanding of the universe, and what the current state of research is. I loved this book.

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
Brian Greene
2003
Available from Amazon