The Spark of Life, Frances Ashcroft

Since I’m in the middle of my female authors only month, I thought now would be a good time to get round to some of the non-fiction books I have by women, especially in the STEM field. I’d forgotten I had this one, which is a shame: it fits into my general theme of reading about neurology, and builds on a lot of the stuff about ion channels that I learnt in an introductory biology class on Coursera. I understood pretty much all the science without wanting or needing to look anything up, or letting anything wash over my head: in part, that’s because Ashcroft writes very accessibly, but I think it is also because this is stuff I know and love.

Some of it is a little too much towards the neurology end of things for me. I wanted more about electricity in the human body — more of the sparks — and less of the chemical messages (the soups, in that old scientific debate); this veered towards talking much more about the chemical parts of the process, especially toward the end. On the other hand, it’s the chemical processes that create the electrical potentials and make all of the electricity in the human body (and other animals too) possible, so it’s quite inextricable. It just felt like it wandered.

Calling the book The Spark of Life is a little misleading, perhaps. It talks about electricity in the body, yeah, but that’s too small a part of the process to be considered alone, and a lot of other factors have to be discussed at quite some length. Ashcroft uses good examples, and explains things clearly; there’s a section of notes in the back for those who want to get a little deeper into it.

Rating: 4/5

Reasons to Stay Alive, Matt Haig

And it felt like a winter machine
That you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

And when I chose to live
There was no joy
It’s just a line I crossed
It wasn’t worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found
–Dar Williams, ‘After All’

Reasons to Stay Alive is a sort of memoir, a sort of letter-to-self, a bit of a self-help book. It talks frankly about depression and anxiety, trying to put into words the sensations it can cause, the extent to which each is beyond simply feeling sad or worried. Most of the chapters are short; some seemed more useful than others. Some of it might help with understanding a loved one who has depression or anxiety, or any mental health issue, because Haig is a writer and knows how to communicate, and has been there feeling this. Some of it might be helpful in dealing with these kinds of feelings for yourself.

The thing I’ve found is that mostly, people with depression aren’t able to hear this sort of story. I certainly couldn’t. People could tell me until they were blue in the face that it could get better, that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, the fog would lift, etc, etc. I totally get the urge to share that understanding with people who don’t have it yet, but I’m not sure it works.

But if it does, even once, then it’s worth saying, so here’s my voice too: it can get better. No matter how scared or despairing or fucked up you feel, you can come back out of it. You’re never going to be the person you were before the depression, but you can be a new person who has learnt to cope with it, who has good times again.

I’ve been scared again, even desperately so, since I began to get better from my GAD. The important thing was that hard won knowledge that my brain was lying to me and it is possible to be okay again. I believe that for me, I believe that for Matt Haig, and I believe it for you, too, even when you can’t.

Rating: 3/5

The Black Count, Tom Reiss

To be honest, I only knew of one of the three Dumas men: the one who wrote The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. My French history is pretty patchy, too, so this book was full of information that was new to me — it’s amazing how little one can know about Nelson and Napoleon despite knowing their names and historical significance. It focuses on General Dumas: not the father or the son we know from literary works, but the father and grandfather of them. I had no idea he was a man of colour, the son of a slave and a white aristocrat.

The book covers a lot of more general history about race in Europe at the time, as well, and the French Revolution, but it also reveals General Dumas for a passionate, earnest, thoroughly decent sort of man. Too often we seem to idolise people whose legacy is mixed, but everything here suggests that while Dumas was a soldier, he abhorred unnecessary violence and pillaging. Yes, he killed, and gladly, for his cause, and sometimes in great numbers. But that was in the heat of battle, and he didn’t approve of the guillotine.

You can tell throughout the book the warmth that the author Dumas felt for his father, how he idolised him, and Reiss’ liking as well. And it’s amazing how much General Dumas has been erased from the history of a country he served with all his heart. Someone Reiss interviewed called it racism, and I can’t help but agree.

Rating: 4/5

The Universe Within, Neil Shubin

I like sense-of-wonder science, like Carl Sagan’s assertions that we are “starstuff”. This sounds as if it’s going to be in that vein, and in a way it is — certainly it brings home that it’s only possible for us to have iron in our blood because of ancient fusion in the hearts of stars — but on a more banal level, it’s the perfect way of revising what you’ve learnt in the Open University’s introduction to science module, S104. If you can follow and understand everything here, you’re okay on at least the first and second book of that course.

It’s fairly simply written, not going too much into depth about the technical details, but more providing a survey of some important scientific discoveries. Though the title The Universe Within may imply that it’s more about our own bodies, it actually goes into a lot of Earth science, touching on continental drift, global warming, even the formation of planets and the existence of water in the solar system.

It’s an easy enough read, and not a bad way to check your understanding.

Rating: 3/5

We Are Our Brains, Dick Swaab

I don’t particularly argue with the premise of this, but the constant emphasis on how everything is pre-determined for us before we’re even born… I prefer to live my life as if I have free choices, as if I’m a unique person formed by all sorts of circumstances over time, not just by stress chemicals my mother released while I was gestating. As if I’m responsible for, if not what I am, then what I do with what I am. Swaab’s research removes even that responsibility, if you follow it logically: if paedophilia is caused by something in the brain, and successfully inhibited in some people by their amygdala, that leaves people with the defence, “Oh, my amygdala is too small to inhibit these urges, it’s not my fault.”

You can extend that argument forever, and then what’s the point in living? We don’t experience it as just a series of chemical processes.

I also noted that Swaab avoids addressing some things. I looked in the index for any mention of asexuality, for example — surely he must have considered studying people who don’t feel sexual attraction, in all of this? Apparently not. You can’t check up on any of his results and conclusions, because there are no references. He claims that socialisation has nothing to do with gender-based preferences in toys and later, by extension, professions. Tomboyish girls are, in his book, girls gone wrong: they just have too much testosterone, so they don’t prefer the things that biologically (he says) they should.

I don’t like the way this book tackles the subject, even where I know that other research backs him up. I don’t like his attitude to other experts, to people who question his results, or… well, any of it. I’ve read most of this stuff before, but presented with much more care and consideration. I find something about Swaab’s whole attitude distasteful.

Rating: 1/5

The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Margalit Fox

This book discusses the decipherment of the Minoan script, Linear B. I didn’t know much about it before I started reading this; I’ve read pretty often about Champollion’s work on hieroglyphs, though not in the detail given here, and it’s the kind of thing that always fascinated me as a kid. So I was intrigued by this right away, especially because it promised to bring the work of a more obscure female scholar into the foreground. Fox definitely wants to highlight the work of Alice Kober, who she seems to hold in great affection, but there is quite a lot of space dedicated to the discoverer of Linear B, Arthur Evans, and the man who ultimately deciphered it, Michael Ventris.

It’s a thorough explanation of the decipherment, so perhaps not for the faint of heart, and it never pretends that the contents of the tablets were expected to be (or found to be) particularly glamorous: it was obvious from the start that the tablets would prove to contain inventories, not great literature. The glamour is in the mystery, which for a long time was completely locked: the language wasn’t known, the script wasn’t known, and the contents weren’t known. It was very hard to get a grip on how to extract meaning. Arthur Evans never did; he seems to have locked onto what he thought the answers would be, and gone looking for evidence. Ventris did the same, initially. Kober, of the three, was the one who really began on the right track: she studied all sorts of languages to understand how languages in general work, and she did painstaking work on the statistics, until the facts began to emerge for themselves.

The book also includes the life stories of the three scholars, particularly Kober and Ventris. It was fascinating to read about Kober and her determination, and her career in academia in the 40s; the hopes and setbacks she experienced. I can understand Fox’s fascination with her. It sounds like she was a great teacher and a passionate person, for all that you can peg her for the dried-up-spinster stereotype.

Some of the technical details of the decipherment were a bit beyond me — statistics and anything to do with numbers just don’t stick in my head — but I enjoyed this anyway. It’s a thorough account, which shines some light on a deserving person (Kober) whose contribution has been neglected.

Rating: 4/5