Creation: The Origin of Life/The Future of Life, Adam Rutherford

This book has kind of a fun design: the two sections are separated by flipping the book upside down. It’s a gimmick, but it’s kind of a cool design anyway. The topics are pretty interlinked, but you can read one half of the book without the other, or read them in either order; whatever you like. One half covers how life came to be, and one half covers the attempts to create life (or should that be recreate?), via genetic engineering, etc.

It’s an interesting bunch of issues, and Rutherford handles it well. His tone is informative, without being stultifyingly boring: he has some moments of humour which, while not laugh-out-loud funny, did provoke a snort or two. He writes engagingly, and those it is definitely an overview of the topics not really meant for a professional audience, he doesn’t shy away from discussing the complex ideas and different theories. None of it was really surprising or groundbreaking to me, because biology and genetics are big areas of interest for me, but it would make a good introduction for the intelligent reader, or a refresher to bring you up to date.

Rating: 4/5

The Periodic Table, Eric R. Scerri

I picked this up to help me get to grips a bit more with electron shells, and especially sub-shells, which I need to know for my OU course but are a step further that I learnt back in my GCSE. But really, it focuses more on the history of the periodic table, on the people who developed the most common versions and why it’s useful. There is some explanation of why the periodic table works and why it’s useful, but it didn’t really get me any further toward understanding it. I’m still left with “there are sub-shells because we say so”.

So, useful for background and history, less so for actual chemistry. Onward, I guess!

Rating: 3/5

Blackbeard, Angus Konstam

Another entry in “Nikki picks up the most random stuff at the library”, though this might’ve been around the time Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag came out, when I also picked up a book on George Washington I haven’t read yet… In any case, this turned out to be a bit disappointing. There’s a wealth of information here about pirates in general, their ports and habits and motivations, and yet it all seems to work out to a big heap of nothing when it comes to Blackbeard. The conclusion seems to be he’s more myth than man, because what we have of him was witnessed by terrified victims and the authors of sensational tales — i.e., not the most likely group to stick to the truth and nothing but the truth.

It’s interesting to get an idea of what does survive from the period, but most of it is very flimsy, and it makes it worse that Konstam will introduce it, dismiss it, and then still build other suppositions on it. For example, he establishes that there’s no proof beyond gossip for Blackbeard being a Bristol boy, and then goes on to build a whole theory about his piratical career on the basis of him being a Bristol boy. The two theories then prop each other up, neither very substantial. Not good practice!

Rating: 2/5

Stonehenge, Mike Parker Pearson

The whole idea of Stonehenge is a potent one. Those massive stones, dragged there from so far away (40 miles, by the most conservative theory) by people so long ago, for purposes that have puzzled us for centuries. Pearson’s work acknowledges the hold it has on our imaginations, and discusses a lot of the different theories before setting out his own and that of the excavation team he worked with. That aspect may be disappointing to you if you believe in a Mycenaean influence, or aliens building it, or that it’s an astronomical observatory. Or that Merlin brought the stones from Ireland and erected them with magic.

Overall, though, Pearson discusses the excavations themselves, the actual results of the digs and surveys, and the definite facts that came out of them. His interpretation is included, but I think he’s fairly clear that most of it is a working theory, albeit considered proven by himself and his team. I don’t know what archaeologists more generally think of it; to me, his theories seemed to make sense, but then I’m not an archaeologist, I have no particular specialist knowledge relevant to Stonehenge, and he wouldn’t exactly write the book to make himself sound like a crank. It does help that it seems aligned with theories about Seahenge that I read about by a different writer (review here).

If there’s a sense of wonder at history here, it’s about the things that humans could do, from so early in our history. It’s not about any religious awe; Pearson seems pretty devoid of that, at least as regards Stonehenge. And maybe a sense of wonder at what we can recover.

I think in some ways he theorises beyond his data, as the temptation always is with something like Stonehenge. I think he’s pretty convinced his theories are right, despite the fact that you can’t prove a lot of it (e.g. we can’t prove that henge burials tend to be of a family lineage over generations). But it’s overall a compelling book that pulls together the facts we have.

Rating: 4/5

When Life Nearly Died, Michael J. Benton

For all that this purports to be about the end-Permian extinction — the greatest of the extinction events, where maybe 90% of living organisms were wiped out — this actually contains a lot more information about the end-Cretaceous. This makes some sense, because we have a much better understanding of what caused the end-Cretaceous extinction, and it helps that it’s also the most widely known and understood. People don’t really want to hear about the extinctions in the Permian, however much more disastrous, because the image of the extinction of the dinosaurs is so entrenched in our minds.

But I kind of did want to know about the end-Permian extinction, and I wasn’t so interested in chapters and chapters of set up, particularly when it came to the history of catastrophism. It’s enough that I grasp the concepts, and that they haven’t always been agreed upon or understood the way they are now — I don’t really want to know the personal details of loads of scientists’ lives. (Some are interesting characters in themselves. Some are not. Either way, I’m actually here for the end-Permian, not upheavals in Earth sciences.)

I was a bit staggered by a couple of assertions — “all organisms have DNA”, for example, including “the simplest virus”. But no: a virus contains RNA. It’s quite an important distinction, and shouldn’t have slipped past editors, particularly when the book does touch on heredity and descent. And then there was the rather bizarre idea that the Marie Celeste’s crew were struck by a burp of gas which killed them, made their bodies disappear, and left the ship itself untouched. Hm.

Mostly it seems reasonably solid, but bits like that made me raise my eyebrows a bit.

Rating: 2/5

Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough

This is rather more anecdotal than I’d hoped, often exploring memories through Fernyhough’s relationship with his own memories: memories of his father, teaching his children about his father, comparing his memories of a place to re-experiencing the place later on, etc, etc. Some of this is fascinating — especially his interviews with his grandmother, recording all the stories she had to tell. It’s a very personal thing, not scientific, but it’s interesting all the same; I sometimes get the same urge with my grandmother, just to capture the weird things she says sometimes that she trots out like proverbs and yet no one has ever heard before!

There are some discussions of more scientific stuff, and most of it seemed perfectly solid from what I know from other authors; it’s just, under the sea of anecdotal data, I don’t feel like I learned much. There’s nothing wrong with the writing style or the content, but it’s more H is for Hawk than scientific.

Rating: 3/5

Do No Harm, Henry Marsh

If you’re really squeamish about blood and body parts and squishy bits, this isn’t the book for you. Marsh talks a lot about the practicality of operating on the brain, as well as about interacting with patients, decision making, dealing with outcomes, training new surgeons, etc. He’s very frank about all of it. If, like me, you’re planning to become a doctor, you might want to read it just to get a frank, unvarnished view of what it’s like to work in the NHS, what it’s like to have people’s lives in your hands, and how to (and sometimes how not to) interact with patients and coworkers. He has the humility to admit that he’s not perfect, without false modesty. He’s a brain surgeon, and he’s bloody good at it: if he weren’t, a lot more people would be dead. But he does make mistakes, and he owns up to them — both the avoidable and the unavoidable ones.

Some parts of this book feel painfully real, too. I’ve been the family member being told by a doctor that someone isn’t going to make it; seeing it from the doctor’s perspective is no easier. I really appreciated Marsh’s humanity about these things: he wasn’t afraid to admit that he didn’t want to meet bereaved family members, but he did meet them all the same, and confess to his mistakes where he’d made them.

On another level, of course, the book is fascinating just because it’s about the brain. Neurology or genetics are tentatively my interests right now, and while I’m not going within a football field’s length of neurosurgery, this still had a lot of fascinating insights.

As a volunteer for a charity for the blind, I heard about a patient my age who had brain surgery. She was fine before, aside from the tumour on her pituitary gland which was just starting to cause problems. She came out of it totally blind; in removing the tumour on her pituitary gland, the surgeon also irreparably damaged her optic chiasm (where the optic nerves cross). Mostly, I’ve thought about this from her perspective — now I find myself wondering about that surgeon. Did he think it went perfectly, until after? The damage might not have been apparent until she woke up from anaesthesia. He did well, otherwise; got the whole tumour, as near as damn it. And yet the course of that young woman’s life is completely changed all the same. A lot of the things she wanted to do aren’t possible anymore. I bet it felt just a little bit like failure, even if he saved her life.

It makes me doubt being a doctor, a little. But it also makes me think about the importance of good doctors — not just technically good, but doctors who try to do good; who may make mistakes, but admit to them, and try to redress the damage. I want to be one of them, for sure.

Rating: 5/5

The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo, John Boyd

I read this last week or so, before the terrible events in Paris. At the time I thought of it as a self-helpy kind of book, with some relevant psychology; I picked it up because I’d watched some interviews with Philip Zimbardo about the Stanford Prison Experiment, which has always been fascinating to me. I wanted to see more of his work, I guess; get a feel for how a respected psychologist could create a situation which was so evil and not notice it without outside help, get a feel for what work he’s done aside from that. This is pretty far from all of that, though at times insights from that situation do come up when it comes to time perspectives.

Which is what I’ve taken away from this book most: time perspectives. There are several: past-negative, past-positive, present-fatalistic, present-hedonistic, future. And why has this stuck with me? Well, because there is a whole section on terrorist attacks and the explanations in terms of time perspective, which adds one more option (transcendental-future) and gives something of an answer to the issue, and it stuck in my head because of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, stirring up reminders of 11/7/2005 and 9/11.  Here’s a section:

Since the future is our primary motivational space, destroying a person’s expectations of the future can substantially undermine motivation. [Example of WWII, in which the Axis had solid future goals, which the Allies then destroyed; this eroded the Axis powers’ motivation and led to them losing the war.] This will not be the case with the current war on terror. We now face an enemy whose visions of the mundane future lie smouldering in the ruins of Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This enemy’s remaining hope lies squarely in the transcendental future. As we have seen, there is no way to prove, disprove, or destroy belief in the transcendental future. Fighting an adversary with strong transcendental-future goals by destroying its mundane future goals ensures that transcendental-future goals alone are obtainable. We will win the war on terror not by destroying our enemy’s future but by nurturing it. The motivational power of the mundane future must be restored if mundane future goals are to compete with transcendental future goals. Only by building a mundane future full of hope, optimism, respect, health, and prosperity can the motivational power of the transcendental future be balanced. Without mundane future goals, Muslims have little desire left to preserve this life and, understandably, look to the transcendental future to realise their dreams.

There are parts I’m uncomfortable with here, mostly the fact that they’re still talking about the “war on terror”, without even any scare quotes, like this is something we can/should be seeing as a war. The automatic identification of people with this time perspective as Muslim. But there’s sense here too: the goal of terrorism is to cause fear, which any Yoda will tell you leads to hate, and to suffering. And by doing this, people who commit terrorist acts, particularly if they sacrifice themselves, believe themselves to be attaining a better future for themselves and their families.

How can we fight that by making the present worse? By going along with that fear and hate, perpetuating a cycle?

Right now, I wish I could set up a dozen think tanks and set them this book to read, with that chapter particularly highlighted for discussion. Let them all come up with ways to improve the present for the susceptible population, rather than punishing them for crimes committed by people already dead, or for crimes not yet committed. All of that only increases the appeal of a transcendental-future orientation.

Most of the psychology of time perspectives I’ve learned here I’m applying not to myself, but to people around me; identifying behaviours and motivations, working out how to adjust my reactions to people based on what they orientate themselves on. I thought it’d be a light pop psychology read, probably a bit too light because of the self-help-y vibes I got from it. But now I’m thinking about this and I can’t stop, especially as more and more commentary flows in (do we assign blame to Charlie Hebdo, how far do we allow free speech, is it apologism to point out root causes…)

I know I’m going to be looking out for Kiva loans in areas low in mundane future, looking for charities that do aid work in places we’ve devastated, looking for my own small ways to address the damage that’s been done, particularly in the name of the war on terror. And I’m going to be talking about this book.

Rating: 4/5