Almost Human, Lee Berger, John Hawks

Way back possibly even before I was doing my biology degree, I was doing all the MOOCs (massively open online courses) I could, and one of them was run by John Hawks. So when I stumbled across this book I had to have it. I’ve always been vaguely aware of and interested in what’s understood about hominin evolution, but I mostly knew about the big classic hits like Lucy. Homo naledi, discussed in this book, is new and rather surprising.

The story of excavating the remains is also pretty fascinating, with a team of female scientists picked for their ability to wriggle into the cave systems to retrieve the items, and all the science and planning that went into understanding what was happening. The book does also include some info on Berger’s career in general, which is less interesting to me, but his excavations of hominin remains… it’s all astounding and exciting to me.

Knowing that Berger’s work can be controversial, I’d love to read some other takes on the same info. I might even dig into the journals while I still have access, before my degree’s done. Either way, it’s fascinating stuff, though.

Rating: 4/5

Immune, Catherine Carver

I’m not entirely the audience for this one, since I know the subject from a reading-scientific-papers and writing-a-dissertation-on-tuberculosis level, and this is like the other Bloomsburg Sigma books aimed at a casual, pop-science kind of audience. Not a bad thing, but if you’re here to seriously buckle down and learn (e.g. because you have an immune condition), then it’s going to feel far too light and flippant, and the focus will be all wrong. For me, it was a good opportunity to revise my understanding of some of the topics I’ve been learning about, and see an alternate way to describe them, but it’s nothing new and Carver couldn’t get me more excited than I already am about the subject.

A couple of times the topics lean towards the memorable and thus aberrant things like the boy who grew up and lived entirely in a bubble due to immune problems; this can be fascinating, but you could see it as an element of sensationalism in a topic that needs no sensationalising to be fascinating and deeply relevant to all of us. After all, the same illnesses and malfunctions await all of us if our immune systems fail, and our immune systems are the only things that really have a hope of continuing to be effective against the pathogens around us in the long run.

Rating: 3/5

Science and the City, Laurie Winkless

I expected to enjoy this a lot — I typically do like the Bloomsbury Sigma books, even if they tend to take on quite a chatty tone. But this one just felt boring: partly that was because I wasn’t learning anything, because everything seemed obvious, and partly because I wasn’t interested in the flippant remarks, etc. It felt like it was pitched to someone who knows less about this sort of thing than I do, but also someone who is rather more interested in the ins and outs of the science applied to the city, if that makes sense.

Whatever, in the end it didn’t work for me and I was, in fact, deadly bored.

Rating: 2/5

The Brain Supremacy, Kathleen Taylor

There’s a lot of research going on into neuroscience, and it can lead us some pretty tricky places — morally and socially, as well as in terms of the science itself. Taylor’s book is very much a warning note, sometimes verging on the melodramatic, about the kinds of technologies which might be on the horizon. It’s worth noting though that the book came out in 2012, and I haven’t seem much in the way of the kind of exponential progress she envisages.

At times her style is a little dry, but it’s mostly readable and the warning note is worth sounding — and the technology itself is fascinating.

Rating: 3/5

Kin, John Ingraham

Kin is a book about microbes and how they’re related to us, and the surprisingly close ties between microbes and humans. It does a lot of digging into the origin of life in general, really; I didn’t find it as interesting as Nick Lane’s The Vital Question, and ultimately I was also surprised by how bad some of the editing was — it was just careless, typos and missing words, etc.

If you’re looking for a book about where life came from, I probably recommend Nick Lane’s book; I’ll have to have a think for some others which present alternative ideas. Ingraham’s book is easy enough to read, but it didn’t feel quite worth the time for me. Bearing in mind, of course, that I’m finishing up my biology degree at the moment with a dissertation on one particular microbe, so I guess I’m not really the target audience here.

Rating: 3/5