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