Genre: Non-fiction

Review – Hyphen

Posted June 13, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Hyphen

Hyphen

by Pardis Mahdavi

Genres: History, Memoir, Non-fiction
Pages: 160
Series: Object Lessons
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts.

Hyphen follows the story of the hyphen from antiquity - Hyphen" is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning "to tie together" - to the present, but also uncovers the politics of the hyphen and the role it plays in creating identities. The journey of this humble piece of connective punctuation reveals the quiet power of an orthographic concept to speak to the travails of hyphenated individuals all over the world. Hyphen is ultimately a compelling story about the powerful ways that language and identity intertwine.

Mahdavi - herself a hyphenated Iranian-American - weaves in her own experiences struggling to find her own sense of self amidst feelings of betwixt and between. We meet six other individuals who are each on a similar journey and watch as they find a way to embrace the space of the hyphen - rejecting the false choice of trying to fit into previously prescribed identities. Through their stories, we collectively consider how belonging only serves to fulfill the failures of troubled states, regimes, or institutions and offer possibilities to navigate, articulate, and empower new identities.

Pardis Mahdavi’s take on the Object Lessons series, Hyphen, is part-informative, part-memoir, and it’s a format that works well. I still far prefer the books that focus in on the object in question, but this one alternates the two quite well, using the one to help to illuminate the other. It’s probably one that will make a different kind of sense to Americans, since a good portion of the discussion is about “hyphenated Americans” (a phrasing I haven’t heard before, but which apparently has a history), and it delves into the history around that.

Not that immigrants in other countries don’t have similar stories, but I’d also hesitate to generalise. There are certainly parallels with “hyphenated British” experience, and it’s certainly not better here, just different (though increasingly the same all over, I guess; thanks globalisation).

Anyway, Mahdavi’s take on the hyphen wasn’t perhaps the detailed history of punctuation that I might find fascinating (though I have read a book about hyphens before, if memory serves), but it was interesting.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Vinyl Frontier

Posted June 12, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Vinyl Frontier

The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record

by Jonathan Scott

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 288
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

The fascinating story behind the mission, music, and message of NASA's Voyager Golden Record -- humanity's message to the stars.

In 1977, a team led by the great Carl Sagan was assembled to create a record that would travel to the stars on NASA's Voyager probe. The Vinyl Frontier reveals the inside story of how the record was created, from the first phone call to the final launch, when Voyager 1 and 2 left Earth with a playlist that would represent humanity to any future alien races that come into contact with the probe. Each song, sound and picture that made the final cut has a story to tell.

The Golden Record is a 90-minute playlist of music from across the globe, a sound essay of life on Earth, spoken greetings in multiple languages, and more than 100 photographs, all painstakingly chosen by Sagan and his team to create an aliens' guide to Earthlings. The final playlist contains music written and performed by well-known names such as Bach, Beethoven, Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson, as well as music from China, India and more remote cultures, such as a community in Small Malaita in the Solomon Islands.

Through interviews with all of the key players involved with the record, this book pieces together the whole story of the Golden Record. It addresses the myth that the Beatles were left off of the record because of copyright reasons and will include new information about US president Jimmy Carter's role in the record, as well as many other fascinating insights that have never been reported before. It also tells the love story between Carl Sagan and the project's creative director Ann Druyan that flourishes as the record is being created.

The Golden Record is more than just a time capsule. It is a unique combination of science and art, and a testament to the genius of its driving force, the great polymath Carl Sagan.

I don’t know how it took me so long to get round to starting Jonathan Scott’s The Vinyl Frontier, because the Golden Record (as included on Voyager 1 and 2) is a fascinating topic. I’m glad I finally got to it, because Scott writes a lovely biography of the Golden Record here (and a bit of a eulogy for Carl Sagan, too). He captures perfectly the naive hope of it, along with the genuine hard graft, and the difficult thinking to find ways to portray humanity that might mean something to an alien encountering it when we are gone.

He covers the human part of it as much as the technical side (or more so even), and his portrayal of the relationship between Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan is tender and sympathetic. I’ve no idea if it was as lovely and inevitable as he makes it sound, and I’m sure Carl Sagan was no saint, not even a pothead saint, but Scott’s clear admiration is actually enjoyable to read.

Thinking about the Golden Records does always make me imagine someone finding them. I often imagine, though, it’s more likely to be our own descendents. Regardless, what would they or those alien to us make of it all? I wonder.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Lapidarium

Posted June 6, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Lapidarium

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones

by Hettie Judah

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 336
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, this book is a beautifully designed collection of true stories about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history

The earliest scientists ground and processed minerals in a centuries-long quest for a mythic stone that would prolong human life. Michelangelo climbed mountains in Tuscany searching for the sugar-white marble that would yield his sculptures. Catherine the Great wore the wealth of Russia stitched in gemstones onto the front of her bodices.

Through the realms of art, myth, geology, philosophy and power, the story of humanity can be told through the minerals and materials that have allowed us to evolve and create. From the Taiwanese national treasure known as the Meat-Shaped Stone to Malta’s prehistoric “fat lady” temples carved in globigerina limestone to the amethyst crystals still believed to have healing powers, Lapidarium is a jewel box of sixty far-flung stones and the stories that accompany them. Together, they explore how human culture has formed stone, and the roles stone has played in forming human culture.

Hettie Judah’s Lapidarium is a really beautifully presented book. Not just the cover (though yes, that’s gorgeous), but with the coloured tabs on the sides of pages, the organisation of it, the colour images, etc. I feel like the only thing is lacking there is more realistic images of the various stones, rather than just one canonical image — and especially images of some of the sculptures and examples the stories refer to.

The text itself varies a bit: some stones are more interesting than others. It luckily doesn’t feel like she’s just shoehorning everything into the same space: some stones get a couple more pages than others, while some are short and sweet.

Overall, it’s lovely to look at and there were some interesting titbits, but I feel like it gets more points for presentation than content! Not that the content is bad, either, but it’s very bitty and disconnected, there’s no overarching narrative, and that makes it a book designed for dipping in and out of more than anything.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Sleeping Beauties

Posted June 5, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Sleeping Beauties

Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture

by Andreas Wagner

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 352
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Why do some of nature’s marvels have to wait millions of years for their time in the sun?

Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species – but there’s a catch.

Animals, plants and even human inventions can languish for eons, despite having everything going for them. Once you start to look, those ‘sleeping beauties’ crop up everywhere. But why?

Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and through cutting-edge experiments, Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed. Look at prehistoric bacteria with the remarkable ability to fight off 21st-century antibiotics. And human history fits the pattern too, with life-changing technologies invented, forgotten and rediscovered before they finally took off.

Andreas Wagner’s Sleeping Beauties is a book of two halves: the first half posits a modified idea of how evolution works, which is mostly common sense once it comes down to it. The point is that things which don’t currently help organisms survive but might in future already exist, and it is these which evolution often acts on. It’s easiest to understand in the microscopic world: a bacterium which has never encounted penicillin can nonetheless be completely immune to it. How? Because there are other adaptations which just happen to also allow it to evade the action of penicillin. This can be through “promiscuous” enzymes, which do one job but also have a sort of general function. Evolution can select for organisms which have that, and those organisms with the best match for penicillin survive and multiply. The enzyme gets better and better suited to handling penicillin, until it looks purpose-made for that — but originally it was handling something completely different.

Wagner also talks a bit about de novo new genes, and points out that of course (completely according to common sense if you understand genetics) those genes don’t appear from nowhere. Instead, they’re random transcripts in an open reading frame that happen to have a start codon and a stop codon. Those transcripts can do useful things, perhaps regulating other genes, or producing random peptides that boost a microbe’s resistance. That’s enough to create something that can be useful and can be selected for.

The second half of the book goes on to discuss this same concept of “sleeping beauties” in other fields, including technology and art. To me, this is the lest interesting half, and kind of just obvious (technology sometimes needs to wait for other circumstances in order to be useful; art sometimes doesn’t fit current tastes, but later takes off because tastes change); I’m amused to notice another StoryGraph review which finds the biology part irrelevant and boring, and finds the second part much more interesting. I think it depends on your existing interests.

From the blurb of a previous book by Wagner, I’d expected something a bit less evidence-based, and I think it’s because it did something dramatic like suggest it aimed to show that “Darwin was wrong about how evolution worked”. But Darwin’s theory was general: he didn’t know yet about genes or anything about how inheritance works. Modern knowledge expands and refines his theory, rather than (at least so far) outright contradicting it. Nothing I read here contradicts Darwin, it just illustrates how beautifully the theory fits what we observe: organisms adapt because the ones which can handle new challenges survive and the others don’t. Those that survive, breed. Those that survive best, breed most. And so the species change and change.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Mushroom

Posted June 2, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Mushroom

Mushroom

by Sara Rich

Genres: Memoir, Non-fiction
Pages: 152
Series: Object Lessons
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms.

The mushroom is an ordinary object whose encounters with humans are usually limited to a couple of species prepackaged at the grocery store. This book offers mushrooms as much more than a pasta ingredient or trendy coffee alternative. It presents these objects as the firmament for life as we know it, enablers of mystical traditions, menders of minds lost to depression. But it acknowledges, too, that this firmament only exists because of death and rot.

Rummaging through philosophical, literary, medical , ecological , and anthropological texts only serves to confirm what the average forager already knows: that mushrooms are to be regarded with a reverence deserving of only the most powerful entities: those who create and destroy, and thrive on both.

Sara Rich’s entry into the Object Lessons series, Mushroom, is another one which is more about the author and about ideas around mushrooms than about mushrooms in and of themselves. Mushrooms as metaphor, mushrooms in Rich’s own life, and only sometimes mushrooms as mushrooms and what they’re like.

Still, there are glimpses of what a mushroom actually is, as well as what it means to us, and there are short sections describing a handful of mushrooms you might find and how you’d prepare them to eat, and as such it felt a bit more grounded than some of the other Object Lessons.

That said, I wondered very much at Sara Rich’s apparently unselfconscious juxtaposition of “my family’s land in Kansas, which used to be a reservation” and her closeness with various Native American people. Your land, huh? You sure about that? You’re just talking about something like animism (to simplify it a lot), and yet you think your family can own that land? Hmmm.

Perhaps there’s explanations for all that in Rich’s full life biography, but it jumped out at me as an oddness (meaning that Rich’s life got very much in the way of the actual topic, mushrooms).

Rating: 2/5

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Review – A Short History of Tomb-Raiding

Posted May 29, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – A Short History of Tomb-Raiding

A Short History of Tomb-Raiding: The Epic Hunt for Egypt's Treasures

by Maria Golia

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 304
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

To secure a comfortable afterlife, ancient Egyptians built fortress-like tombs and filled them with precious goods, a practice that generated staggering quantities of artifacts over the course of many millennia—and also one that has drawn thieves and tomb-raiders to Egypt since antiquity. Drawing on modern scholarship, reportage, and period sources, this book tracks the history of treasure-seekers in Egypt and the social contexts in which they operated, revealing striking continuities throughout time. Readers will recognize the foibles of today’s politicians and con artists, the perils of materialism, and the cycles of public compliance and dissent in the face of injustice. In describing an age-old pursuit and its timeless motivations, A Short History of Tomb-Raiding shows how much we have in common with our Bronze Age ancestors.

Maria Golia’s A Short History of Tomb-Raiding is a slow, thorough thinking through of the different times and political/economic climates in which Egypt’s tombs have been plundered. Often we think of early archaeologists and antiquarians, or even current archaeologists where big institutions are trying to grab and keep priceless, culturally important objects, but Golia begins in the past.

It’s a bit of a dry read, ultimately, but it’s more sympathetic to the Egyptian tomb raiders who raid their own ancestors’ tombs than most accounts. Sure, they destroy context and thus knowledge — but there’s a reason they do what they do, mostly grinding poverty.

I’d honestly expected more commentary on European thieves, though; in one way this really centres the Egyptians themselves, but… European demand is also a huge part of that, and even men like Petrie (who was at least methodical) were digging among the bones of someone else’s ancestors, and not always sharing that knowledge with the descendents.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Doctor Who Fooled The World

Posted May 27, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – The Doctor Who Fooled The World

The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield's War on Vaccines

by Brian Deer

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 416
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

From San Francisco to Shanghai, from Vancouver to Venice, controversy over vaccines is erupting around the globe. Fear is spreading. Banished diseases have returned. And a militant “anti-vax” movement has surfaced to campaign against immunization. But why?

In The Doctor Who Fooled the World, award-winning investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes the truth behind the crisis. With the page-turning tension of a detective story, he unmasks the players and unearths the facts. Where it began. Who was responsible. How they pulled it off. Who paid.

At the heart of this dark narrative is the rise of the so-called “father of the anti-vaccine movement”: a British-born doctor, Andrew Wakefield. Banned from medicine, thanks to Deer’s discoveries, he fled to the United States to pursue his ambitions, and now claims to be winning a “war.”

In an epic investigation, spread across fifteen years, Deer battles medical secrecy and insider cover-ups, smear campaigns and gagging lawsuits, to uncover rigged research and moneymaking schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with disability, and the scientific scandal of our time.

I’ve always felt that Andrew Wakefield was a murderer — growing up with my mother, who is a doctor, I’m not sure any other opinion was possible. As someone who’s now studying for a degree in infectious diseases, I feel it even more. So my comment on picking up Brian Deer’s account of Andrew Wakefield’s fraud, The Doctor Who Fooled the World, was that it was surely going to raise my blood pressure.

It did, of course. The very beginnings of Andrew Wakefield’s fraud could have been, possibly even were, an honest attempt to look into a hypothesis. But then money got involved, big money, and he saw his name writ in lights — and he wanted it so badly. He still wants it, and he’ll do anything for it: that is apparent in all his actions.

It doesn’t help that I don’t think (from Deer’s account anyway) that Wakefield really understood the science that he was having others do for him. He latched onto theories suggested for him by non-scientists, and tried to make them true by force of will, altering the evidence until it suited his purposes. It also likely wasn’t helped by other people around him, convinced by his charisma, trying to get him the results he wanted.

This is why we start out with a null hypothesis. We go in assuming that we’re wrong, and it requires clear evidence that meets criteria that suggest it didn’t happen by chance in order to change our minds. Even then, even when we’re got a likelihood of P = 0.05, that’s still a chance that we got this result by chance (to be accurate, P = 0.05 means that there’s a 5/100 = 1/20 chance that the observed result arose by pure chance). Deer doesn’t go into the depths of whether Wakefield had a null hypothesis, or what his P-values looked like, but the rest of his descriptions inspire no confidence, along with the fact that he refused to conduct a proper, blinded trial when it was offered to him on a silver platter.

If you’re a scientist, you don’t say no to the chance to run a fully funded study that will prove or disprove your theory — not unless you think there’s a significant chance you’re wrong, and you want to make money out of the ambiguity that you might just be right.

Deer discusses all kinds of ways in which Wakefield created and perpetuated his fraud, and also some of the human impact thereof. It’s a journalist’s point of view, so sometimes the scientific detail I crave isn’t there, but it’s explained well and clearly for a layperson. It’s difficult to say I enjoyed this, but it was valuable.

I don’t think it would convince anyone who isn’t already willing to be convinced, unfortunately, but if someone’s on the fence, it might help.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Chillies: A Global History

Posted May 22, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Chillies: A Global History

Chillies: A Global History

by Heather Arndt Anderson

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 126
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

There are some of us who can’t even stand to look at them—and others who can’t live without them: chillies have been searing tongues and watering eyes for centuries in innumerable global cuisines. In this book, Heather Arndt Anderson explores the many ways nature has attempted to take the roofs of our mouths off—from the deceptively vegetal-looking jalapeno to the fire-red ghost pepper—and the many ways we have gleefully risen to the challenge.

Anderson tells the story of the spicy berry’s rise to prominence, showing that it was cultivated and venerated by the ancient people of Mesoamerica for millennia before Spanish explorers brought it back to Europe. She traces the chilli’s spread along trading routes to every corner of the globe, and she explores the many important spiritual and cultural links that we have formed with it, from its use as an aphrodisiac to, in more modern times, an especially masochistic kind of eating competition. Ultimately, she uses the chili to tell a larger story of global trade, showing how the spread of spicy cuisine can tell us much about the global exchange—and sometimes domination—of culture. Mixing history, botany, and cooking, this entertaining read will give your bookshelf just the kick it needs.

I’ve been meaning to pick up Chillies by Heather Arndt Anderson for a while — I love books in the Edible series, which are all a little history of a certain food item, accompanied by colour images and a handful of recipes. I’m a lover of spicy food: nothing silly, with trying to one-up other people etc etc, but a burst of spicy heat is great.

Sometimes these books can end up feeling like a bit too much of a list of dishes that the food in question is used in, and despite the subtitle of all of them (“A Global History”), often they don’t go broad enough. This one was broader than some, with a chapter on the worldwide adoption of chillies that did indeed feel global.

As always, it has references and a bibliography, and is a well-put-together little book. And for once, I’m actually quite tempted to ask my wife to try making one of the recipes!

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Monarchs of the Sea

Posted May 21, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Monarchs of the Sea

Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods

by Danna Staaf

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 256
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Before mammals, there were dinosaurs. And before dinosaurs, there were cephalopods.

Cephalopods, Earth's first truly substantial animals, are still among us: their fascinating family tree features squid, octopuses, nautiluses, and more. The inventors of swimming, cephs presided over the sea for millions of years. But when fish evolved jaws, cephs had to step up their game (or end up on the menu). Some evolved defensive spines. Others abandoned their shells entirely, opening the floodgates for a tidal wave of innovation: masterful camouflage, fin-supplemented jet propulsion, and intelligence we've yet to fully measure. In Monarchs of the Sea, marine biologist Danna Staaf unspools how these otherworldly creatures once ruled the deep—and why they still captivate us today.

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Danna Staaf’s Monarchs of the Sea is a fascinating tour of the evolution of cephalopods. I am very very late to review it, and I’m sorry for that because it was fascinating. I’d never quite understood that ammonites were cephalopods before, somehow, so that was a surprise, and I was delighted to read more about them and the diversity of their shells. It’d be nice if some modern cephalopod was evolved from an ammonite, really, but Staaf does suggest it’s pretty unlikely.

This is the kind of non-fiction I really enjoy: a deep-dive on a particular subject, not afraid to get into the weeds, and glowing with the author’s fascination for the topic. I don’t know if I could stomach dissection, but she makes even that sound fascinating — I bet she’s great at teaching it.

I was especially fascinated by the discussion of the modern cephalopods and what’s become of their shells, the very last vestiges thereof. Fun!

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Eve

Posted May 17, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Eve

Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

by Cat Bohannon

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 621
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

How did wet nurses drive civilization? Are women always the weaker sex? Is sexism useful for evolution? And are our bodies at war with our babies?

In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, she covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon's findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women's pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

It would be easy for a book like Cat Bohannon’s Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution to get all gender essentialist about things, and I was completely braced for it. I also wouldn’t have been surprised if the book just ignored the existence of trans people, since how we currently understand and perceive gender variance is often quite divorced from stuff that might be obviously related to evolution.

So I’m going to say up front that it doesn’t go in that direction, and Bohannon mentions trans people and trans bodies where relevant, often with the caveat that (unfortunately) we don’t have the same volumes of data to go on, and in some cases studies just haven’t been done. The book does focus on sex rather than gender, mostly (there’s some stuff about stereotype threat that’s more gendery), but transness is mentioned where appropriate.

It’s a chonky book, and there are a lot of footnotes, sometimes multiple per page; at times, that makes it a bit too dense and overwhelming. Each aside takes you away from the main point of the narrative, and ultimately I found it rather distracting, even where the footnotes were useful or interesting. Sometimes it kind of had the effect of a student trying to show you they know a lot about a topic by inserting an only slightly relevant footnote on the topic (I’ve never done that, I swear); sometimes it just felt like a digression.

Regardless, I really enjoyed it, even if the organisation felt a little overwhelming at times. It focuses on the ways evolution had to work on female bodies: pregnancy and lactation, the implications of pair-bonding for offspring, behaviours that needed to go with the physical changes, etc. It isn’t my exact area of interest, so it’s hard to evaluate some of the claims: evolution must’ve acted on male bodies too, but sometimes it seems like there’s not much left that can be about the males of the species, based on this! But it’s interesting, and Bohannon writes very clearly about a whole range of topics.

Rating: 4/5

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