Tag: non-fiction

Review – Ouch!: The New Science of Pain

Posted August 7, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Ouch!: The New Science of Pain, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, Margee Kerr

I’d somewhat feared when I picked this book up that it would be unsympathetic to those with chronic pain, in the way that some doctors are at the moment, because the overprescription of opiates is so much on their minds that everyone reporting pain sounds like a drug seeker to them. There is a bit of commentary on the fact that modern people are more likely to report pain and to be afraid of pain, etc, etc, but overall I found that the two authors were fairly sympathetic and willing to seek out multiple views.

One of the authors has experience with chronic pain and a degenerative illness, and both of them make sure to position themselves so the reader understands where they’re coming from — perhaps too autobiographical for some when it comes to popular science, but I think it was valuable in this case. Either way, both seem to have done a lot of research, including hands-on. Their attitude does lean toward “pain is a good thing and painkillers are generally the wrong treatment”, but doesn’t exclude the usefulness of painkillers for some people. It’s mostly sensitive and sympathetic, as I said, including toward the BDSM community, whose attitudes toward pain they also discuss.

It’s a layperson-friendly guide to what we understand about pain, not just biologically (although it does discuss that) but also psychologically and socially… and it discusses not just physical pain, but to some degree emotional pain as well (particularly as you can’t really have one without the other: human experience isn’t neatly divided like that). It was what I’d hoped for from another book which was much more about responses to pain, so that was nice. Overall, it’s super readable, and I flew through it.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, science

Review – Elephants On Acid

Posted August 6, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Elephants on Acid, Alex Boese

I was warned by reviews that Boese covers some abhorrent experiments on animals without any kind of critique, and that’s correct. Boese seems more interested in the shock and amusement factor of some of these experiments, including expecting people to be rather shocked that scientists have tried to study sex in the lab. I actually knew about most of these experiments and findings before, so there was nothing much shocking or surprising for me — except his casual tone about animal experimentation.

(I’m not personally against animal experimentation when necessary, when there’s a possibility of great benefit. I think. It’s a stance that wavers across time, something that I have great difficulty with. What I never change my mind on is unnecessary experimentation: harming animals just to see what happens. Like giving them a massive and deadly overdose of acid, for example.)

It’s a good overview of some “weird” experiments, some of which have produced useful results. Otherwise, meh?

Rating: 2/5

Tags: Alex Boese, book reviews, books, non-fiction, science

Review – Seashaken Houses

Posted August 4, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Seashaken Houses, Tom Nancollas

This was a complete impulse-buy on my part; something about it just really drew me, in the moment, so I went ahead and grabbed it. I read it right away to try to capitalise on that, and it was the perfect thing for my mood: it’s a history of a number of specific lighthouses and how they relate to the development of rock lighthouses in the UK, but also a personal response to them in many ways –Nancollas’ enthusiasm and interest, along with his imaginings about the lighthouses, really shine through. Do I really care about how the light of a particular lighthouse was installed? Only because he did, and made it sound interesting.

There were a couple of bits I found a bit overly sentimental or kinda purple-prose-y, and I had a roll of my eyes when he referenced King Arthur and got something wrong (Arthur died at Camlann, not anywhere else, in most versions of the Arthurian stories)… but mostly it just really hit the spot. I love it when someone can take a topic that I have very little personal connection to, and make it fascinating. If that sounds interesting to you too, then I recommend this!

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Tom Nancollas

Review – Snowball in a Blizzard

Posted August 2, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Snowball in a Blizzard, Steve Hatch

Snowball in a Blizzard is a great examination of something that goes overlooked far too often — or blown out of proportion in ways that serve weird fringe agendas: the fact that very little in medicine is certain, and it’s not possible to put numbers on many/most things about biology. People forget that when looking for certainty about how to reduce their risk of cancer, or blow it up into something quite different when they want to argue against the importance of vaccines… and it’s really important to understand why there is uncertainty in medicine and what it really means, if you want to make truly informed decisions about your own healthcare. Informing people about this is Steve Hatch’s aim here, and I think he does a great job.

There are one or two points which have suffered a bit in time — for instance, the Rosenhan experiments that he leans on heavily to make a point or two have been discredited, with Susannah Cahalan’s The Great Pretender arguing pretty convincingly that Rosenhan falsified much of the data in his study, which was never run in the way he described. There are also some references to SARS, which are pretty apocalyptic… But broadly speaking, Hatch’s points hold true.

There’s some really fascinating stuff here that I knew very little about. For example, screening mammography — mammograms for people who have not discovered lumps or had any other symptoms of breast cancer — is, on balance, probably harmful for most people. This doesn’t mean that diagnostic mammography is a bad thing, but the indiscriminate screening of everyone in certain groups includes far too many people who are at too low a risk of cancer. Thus, false positives are common, and a lot of mental distress results — and sometimes worse, with people even ending up having unnecessary mastectomies.

Hatch explains the statistics underlying evidence-based medicine really well. I don’t have a good instinctive grasp of statistics, and never have, and this book helped some of these concepts lodge in my brain — which was nice, because I had an exam coming up at that point on exactly some of these types of statistics. I think it would be really useful for anyone who wants to understand better how uncertainty in medicine works and what that might mean for making decisions about your own care.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, science, Steve Hatch

Review – The Fabric of Civilization

Posted July 31, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made The World, Virginia Postrel

This book looks at fabric not as an art but as a piece of technology, a scientific endeavour. Separate chapters discuss various themes: how the first thread was made, and the impact of selective breeding and experimentation in finding threads long enough to work with, for instance. I found the chapter on dyes particularly interesting, to be honest.

There was one thing that I found kind of weird, and that was some of the perspectives Postrel takes. Like she defends the low-paid status of women who spun thread because it would be cost-prohibitive to pay them more — cloth would be too expensive if people were paid more, so it can’t be done (instead of valuing people’s work at what it’s worth). And she’s very much automatically on the side of the middlemen who sold cloth for others, saying they were unfairly treated by people who didn’t know the worth of what they did? (Rather than what is more likely which is that it’s a bit of both.) It hits weirdly for me.

The chapter on new fabrics was pretty fascinating as well. I’d kind of like to see this on Great British Sewing Bee: here is this new fabric, here are its properties, make something out of it.

Anyway, overall pretty enjoyable and informative; I wish I was a bit more visual so I could understand exactly what’s going on in some of the descriptions, but that’s not the author’s fault — I can never picture anything, no matter how well you describe it.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Virginia Postrel

Review – The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth

Posted July 28, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine, Thomas Morris

The answer to most of the “mysteries”/”curiosities” here is “someone was mistaken or lying”. I was hoping for some weirder tales, to be honest, and some of this is really just “hur hur people swallow weird things sometimes” and “lololol someone put WHAT up their butt?” I was raised by a doctor, none of this is a shock to me, though I’m gonna provoke an internal wince in anyone in my family by just mysteriously leaving one word here: “lightbulbs”. (It’s probably worse than you’re imagining.)

It’s a fun enough light read, though for me it really harped too much on obvious hoaxes, misunderstandings and just the weird things people do that isn’t particularly interesting except that it’s sex-related and idiotic so it’s a reliable source of humour for some people.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, science, Thomas Morris

Review – Walls

Posted July 26, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, David Frye

This book has one major thesis, which it argues fairly well: walls made civilisation possible. Walls are contrasted against wars, with warmongers living a more day-to-day existence and wall-builders creating culture, politics, philosophy, technology, etc. As you read it, at least, it seems pretty convincing — but of course, Frye chooses his examples carefully, and doesn’t provide any counter-arguments of times and places where people created art without being walled in, had complex social contracts that allowed for safety and self-expression without carefully delineated borders.

I don’t have the historical knowledge to properly argue the point, but I suspect that Frye’s version is pretty lopsided. I don’t want to romanticise unwalled cultures either, but by and large humans are more complicated than simple dichotomies like this.

Still, I found it an entertaining survey of world cultures where this did seem to play out, and it’s certainly a very readable book. I wish he’d gone more into the modern relevance of walls, but I don’t think it much suited his thesis to discuss Trump’s wall — hardly a beacon of culture-creation — at great length.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, David Frye, history, non-fiction

Review – Never Greater Slaughter

Posted July 20, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England, Michael Livingston

I studied ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’, a poem included in some versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as a piece of literature, back when I was an undergrad. I knew a little of the real history, of course, because I do think it’s important to understand the context that literary works come from — but I’d never dug into the detail, and this book was a great opportunity to do just that, and one I really enjoyed.

Livingston does a great job not only of making his case for the location of Brunanburh (though I’m sure I’d find other accounts persuasive, and don’t particularly have a horse in the race) but of providing the context for what made the battle so important, so crucial, that it ended up being remembered in verse recorded in a chronicle. He avoids fictionalising too much, apart from in one of the final chapters during which he tries to reconstruct the battlefield somewhat — and he manages to write engagingly, so that I read this almost in one go. (Okay, I had to stop for work, but I happily would have sat and read it straight through.)

I can’t speak for the historical accuracy of the book, but I note that he does include footnotes and sources to help support his argument, and he also responds to some of the counterarguments to his ideas, which is usually a good sign. It’s popular history, in the end, but I feel like it matched up pretty well with what I do know, and his quoted translations of the Anglo-Saxon poem match my own pretty well (so I trust either his knowledge of the language or the translation he’s working with, for that part).

For me, this was part nostalgic delight (but how good is my Anglo-Saxon now? ah, not so hot), part genuinely good read, and partly, yeah, curiosity about where he’d nail down as the site of the battle. I think he has me convinced, though I’d be interested to read rebuttals.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Michael Livingston, non-fiction

Review – Pandora’s Jar

Posted July 18, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 7 Comments

Pandora’s Jar, Natalie Haynes

I picked this up somewhat on a whim, and then was hesitant to actually get round to it — I couldn’t quite say why. Which was silly, because once I picked it up, it immediately sucked me in: Haynes discusses the original portrayals of ten women from Greek mythology, what they meant to their original audiences and what they’ve come to mean. It’s not solely about rehabilitating them, but about looking again at them and everything they’ve meant — it doesn’t lionise Clytemnestra, even though it points out that her vengeance has some preeeetty solid reasoning behind it, for example.

I enjoyed the close reading of various texts, including some I knew from studying classics. I’d never viewed Phaedra so sympathetically, I must admit, even though I read the same version of Hippolytus (though I, too, found Hippolytus himself absolutely unbearable, ugh). Haynes often discusses the subtleties of translation, displaying an easy knowledge of the texts in their original form which frankly makes me jealous. (Not for nothing did I consider studying Classics next.)

I think of all them, I found the chapters on Medusa and Medea the most interesting — Haynes digs into the heart of their stories and displays it all, the good and the bad, and some of it may surprise you. Some of it is sadly unsurprising (surprise, patriarchy!). I found pretty much all of it fascinating, and it makes me a lot more interested to read Haynes’ fiction.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Natalie Haynes, non-fiction

Review – Food: The History of Taste

Posted July 17, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Food: The History of Taste, ed. Paul Freedman

This is a fairly academic volume, it feels like; it reminded me of reading essays about literature through history or something like that. The chapters are written by different people, so they vary in how fascinating (or not) they might be: I did like the late chapter about the development of restaurants, which added nicely to what I knew from William Sitwell’s whole book on it.

I must admit that given how academic it felt, I kind of zoned out a lot with this, and I ended up continuing to read because it was mildly enjoyable rather than because I was really retaining information. If you’re interested in more vibrant popular-history stuff on the history of food, this isn’t it: the academic feel keeps it rather dry, and at least one of the essays simply regurgitates its sources in huge chunks rather than doing a lot of interpretive work.

It was okay, but not something I’d hold onto myself — but depending on your level of interest and knowledge on the subject, it might be just the thing.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction