Tag: non-fiction

Review – How To Make A Vaccine

Posted February 10, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Review – How To Make A Vaccine

How To Make a Vaccine

by John Rhodes

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 160
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Distinguished expert in vaccine development John Rhodes tells the story of the first approved COVID-19 vaccines and offers an essential, up-to-the-minute primer on how scientists discover, test, and distribute vaccines.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has affected every corner of the world, changing our relationship to our communities, to our jobs, and to each other, the most pressing question has been—when will it end? Researchers around the globe are urgently trying to answer this question by racing to test and distribute a vaccine that could end the greatest public health threat of our time. In How to Make a Vaccine, an expert who has firsthand experience developing vaccines tells an optimistic story of how three hundred years of vaccine discovery and a century and a half of immunology research have come together at this powerful moment—and will lead to multiple COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. John Rhodes draws on his experience as an immunologist, including working alongside a young Anthony Fauci, to unravel the mystery of how vaccines are designed, tested, and produced at scale for global deployment. Concise and accessible, this book describes in everyday language how the immune system evolved to combat infection, how viruses responded by evolving ways to evade our defenses, and how vaccines do their work. That history, and the pace of current research developments, make Rhodes hopeful that multiple vaccines will protect us. Today the complex workings of the immune system are well understood. The tools needed by biomedical scientists stand ready to be used, and more than 160 vaccine candidates have already been produced. But defeating COVID-19 won’t be the end of the story: Rhodes describes how discoveries today are also empowering scientists to combat future threats to global health, including a recent breakthrough in the development of genetic vaccines, which have never before been used in humans.

As the world prepares for a vaccine, Rhodes offers a current and informative look at the science and strategies that deliver solutions to the crisis.

For a short book, John Rhodes’ How To Make a Vaccine is surprisingly in-depth. Motivated by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Rhodes discusses how vaccines are manufactured, along with some of the history of vaccination and the cultural reaction to it. While most of this obviously isn’t new to me (as someone studying for my MSc in infectious diseases), his explanations are very clear.

I did find that after a while he got a little too in depth, towards the end of the book, discussing every single possible type of vaccine and adjuvant. For me, it got a little tedious because I know this stuff in slightly more depth… and I worry that for a layperson, it’s actually a bit too much depth. It’s hard for me to judge, though, as I haven’t been a layperson for a while now!

If you’re curious about the topic, and ready for some of the ins and outs of the regulatory proces, different types of vaccine and adjuvant, etc, I think this would be of interest, all the same.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Ice Cream: A Global History

Posted February 8, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 10 Comments

Review – Ice Cream: A Global History

Ice Cream: A Global History

by Laura B. Weiss

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 176
Series: Edible
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Be it soft-serve, gelato, frozen custard, Indian kulfi or Israeli glida, some form of cold, sweet ice cream treat can found throughout the world in restaurants and home freezers. Though ice cream was once considered a food for the elite, it has evolved into one of the most successful mass-market products ever developed.

In Ice Cream, food writer Laura B. Weiss takes the reader on a vibrant trip through the history of ice cream from ancient China to modern-day Tokyo in order to tell the lively story of how this delicious indulgence became a global sensation. Weiss tells of donkeys wooed with ice cream cones, Good Humor-loving World War II-era German diplomats, and sundaes with names such as "Over the Top" and "George Washington." Her account is populated with Chinese emperors, English kings, former slaves, women inventors, shrewd entrepreneurs, Italian immigrant hokey-pokey ice cream vendors, and gourmand American First Ladies. Today American brands dominate the world ice cream market, but vibrant dessert cultures like Italy's continue to thrive, and new ones, like Japan's, flourish through unique variations.

Weiss connects this much-loved food with its place in history, making this a book sure to be enjoyed by all who are beckoned by the siren song of the ice cream truck.

As always with the Edible Series, Laura B. Weiss’ Ice Cream: A Global History has colour illustrations and a few recipes at the back, along with references and a bibliography. It’s a bitesize look at food history through a very specific food. (Yep, you’ve guessed it — ice cream.)

Unlike some of these volumes, it doesn’t get too pedantic about what counts here. It discusses gelato and, though it mostly sticks to milk-based iced treats, it does mention the water-based treats which have gone alongside it (sorbet, popsicles, etc). Though it does touch on most of the world here, it feels like it’s most emphatic about the USA’s part in popularising ice cream, and I don’t actually know if that’s as true as the book makes it sound. It does refer to the development of various well-known ice cream brands from the US, but the discussion of soda fountains and such seems very specifically USian.

Overall, it had the predictable effect: I learned some fascinating new things, and I really want some ice cream right now.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Blue

Posted February 3, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Blue

Blue: The Science and Secrets of Nature's Rarest Colour

by Kai Kupferschmidt

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 224
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Blue is the most widely beloved color—but in nature, it’s the rarest hue of all. True, physics paints the sea and sky blue, but we can’t bottle this trick of the light. And blue pigment requires such complex chemistry that blue creatures, plants, and minerals are few indeed. Artists and kings have treasured blue dye like precious gold since the time of the pharoahs—and who today can help but marvel at a morpho butterfly in the rain forest or a blue jay at the window?

Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been enraptured by blue since childhood. In his quest to understand the mysteries of his favorite color, he takes readers on a vivid journey—from a biotech lab in Japan and a volcanic lake in Oregon to his native Germany, home of the last blue-feathered Spix’s macaws. Deep underground where blue crystals grow, and miles overhead where astronauts gaze at our “blue marble” planet—wherever he finds this alluring color, it always has a story to tell.

Kai Kupferschmidt’s Blue is a book-length meditation on all things, well, you guessed it. It discuss blue as a pigment, blue as a historical and cultural thing, blue in linguistics, blue in plants, blue dye… you name it, it discusses it. Kupferschmidt is fascinated, and he’s sharing the journey, and along the way he explains some complex things very succinctly and clearly.

The book is also beautifully illustrated, all in colour, and has a section with further reading and sources, including image sources. All-in-all, beautifully presented and a joy to read — exactly the kind of curiosity I enjoy, zooming in on one subject and unravelling the things that touch it.

It’s shorter than it looks, given the illustrations and the full pages printed blue; I’d say it’s meant to be an object you enjoy looking at as much as anything else. I sped through it!

Rating: 4/5

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Review – A City on Mars

Posted January 30, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – A City on Mars

A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?

by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 448
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered:

Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism?

With deep expertise, a winning sense of humor, and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.

Get in, we’re going to Mars.

Zach and Kelly Weinersmith cover a lot of information about the colonisation of Mars in this book, but they do so in a breezy, conversational way that makes it really easy to read. I found the whole thing fascinating, if a bit disheartening: somehow from popular culture you’d think we were really close to putting settlements on Mars, at least within the next decade or something, but the Weinersmiths make it clear we’re not there yet, for a bunch of reasons.

Those reasons can roughly speaking be broken up into categories: the things we don’t know about human bodies and how they’ll react to low or no-gravity situations, the technology we don’t yet have, the stuff we don’t yet know about Mars, and the legal framework that is currently ambiguous/contested/not likely to produce happy, harmonious space settlements.

The whole time I was reading, I couldn’t stop thinking about James S.A. Corey’s Expanse books, which wrestle with the aftermath of these issues in a fictionalised way: Belters are physically different to those born on Earth, the whole political structure (and the implosions thereof), the issue of childbirth, etc, etc.

Anyway, the Weinersmiths have solid reasonings for the things they assert, it all makes sense, it’s wonderfully readable for the layperson, and there are lots of illustrations which make it all a bit more fun along the way.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Script & Scribble

Posted January 28, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Script & Scribble

Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting

by Kitty Burns Florey

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 190
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Steeped in the Palmer Method of Handwriting she learned in Catholic school, Kitty Burns Florey is a self-confessed “penmanship nut” who loves the act of taking pen to paper. So when she discovered that schools today forego handwriting drills in favor of teaching something called keyboarding, it gave her pause: “There is a widespread belief that, in a digital world, forming letters on paper with a pen is pointless and obsolete,” she says, “and anyone who thinks otherwise is right up there with folks who still have fallout shelters in their backyards.”

Florey tackles the importance of writing by hand and its place in our increasingly electronic society in this fascinating exploration of the history of handwriting. Weaving together the evolution of writing implements and scripts, pen-collecting societies, the golden age of American penmanship, the growth in popularity of handwriting analysis, and the many aficionados who still prefer scribbling on paper to tapping on keys, she asks the question: Is writing by hand really no longer necessary in today’s busy world?

Kitty Burns Florey’s Script & Scribble is a short history of handwriting, far from comprehensive, and larded heavily with the author’s own opinions and experiences (which I know would drive some readers wild, since some prefer a more objective, less personal account). It comes with a lot of different illustrations of different types of handwriting, along with some explanations about how exactly they’re formed.

The author is an unabashed fan of handwriting, though not a Luddite (accepting the need for typing skills, enjoying the use of her own computer, etc). I can’t help but feel if she’s not a Postcrossing member, she ought to be — most postcards I receive via Postcrossing are handwritten, and all of the ones I send are.

(Full disclosure: I work for Postcrossing! But I’m also a fan of it and frequently send and receive postcards on my own dime.)

Her elegy for written items seems a little premature to me, though perhaps that’s a peculiarity of my family; we send written letters a fair amount, and corresponded often via letters while I was at university around the time this book came out. That said, our handwriting isn’t brilliant, and I’m sure the handwriting experts she consults would have plenty to say about my rounded, mostly-cursive hand.

It’s an interesting read and quite quick, but doesn’t feel very in-depth. By the time it’s reaching the modern period, it’s focused solely on the North American picture, even specifically the US. I’d have loved something a little more general.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The History of Wales in Twelve Poems

Posted January 25, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The History of Wales in Twelve Poems

The History of Wales in Twelve Poems

by M. Wynn Thomas, Ruth JĂȘn Evans

Genres: Poetry, Non-fiction
Pages: 127
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Down the centuries, poets have provided Wales with a window onto its own distinctive world. This book gives a sense of the view seen through that special window in twelve illustrated poems, each bringing very different periods and aspects of the Welsh past into focus. Together, they give the flavour of a poetic tradition, both ancient and modern, in the Welsh language and in English, that is internationally renowned for its distinction and continuing vibrancy.

M. Wynn Thomas’ history of Wales in twelve poems taps into one of my favourite genres: giving a history of a time or place through objects or similar, using them as a window to look around at their context and what produced them, how they fit into it. It’s a pretty brief volume, presenting each poem alongside its translation (where necessary, since they’re not all in Welsh), and adding in the art of Ruth JĂȘn Evans for illustration.

The art is all black and white, with thick lines — it’s pretty striking. The choice of poems is something I’d find difficult to comment on, but Thomas’ notes on each use them exactly as I’d hope, giving something of their context and trying to unlock what they say about Wales (sometimes intentionally, sometimes as a side-effect of the poet’s main intent).

I enjoyed it, though I wouldn’t view it as a full history or as having a very strong sense of continuity from poem to poem — it’s more like twelve poems were chosen as little windows to illuminate a topic of interest, rather than them showing a consistent line of developing a theme (though they are given in chronological order).

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close

Posted January 20, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close

Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close

by Hannah Carlson

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 320
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Who gets pockets, and why?

It’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? And why are the pockets on women’s clothes often too small to fit phones, if they even open at all? In her captivating book, Hannah Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, reveals the issues of gender politics, security, sexuality, power, and privilege tucked inside our pockets.

Throughout the medieval era in Europe, the purse was an almost universal dress feature. But when tailors stitched the first pockets into men’s trousers five hundred years ago, it ignited controversy and introduced a range of social issues that we continue to wrestle with today, from concealed pistols to gender inequality. See: #GiveMePocketsOrGiveMeDeath.

Filled with incredible images, this microhistory of the humble pocket uncovers what pockets tell us about ourselves: How is it that putting your hands in your pockets can be seen as a sign of laziness, arrogance, confidence, or perversion? Walt Whitman’s author photograph, hand in pocket, for Leaves of Grass seemed like an affront to middle-class respectability. When W.E.B. Du Bois posed for a portrait, his pocketed hands signaled defiant coolness.

And what else might be hiding in the history of our pockets? (There’s a reason that the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets are the most popular exhibit at the Library of Congress.)

Thinking about the future, Carlson asks whether we will still want pockets when our clothes contain “smart” textiles that incorporate our IDs and credit cards.

Pockets is for the legions of people obsessed with pockets and their absence, and for anyone interested in how our clothes influence the way we navigate the world.

Hannah Carlson’s Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close begins with the oldest types of pockets we know about, for both sexes, and quickly moves on through the years, discussing the evolution of pockets, the politics of pockets, and ultimately the fashion world’s take on pockets. It’s really not just about pockets: it’s also about women’s lives and how pockets have figured into those (they’ve been more significant than you might think), about how men’s fashions have changed and what those fashions have meant (hands in pockets used to be considered super rude), etc.

As a way of examining a swathe of history and society, it works pretty well, and it’s aided in its pace and interest by the addition of lots of colour images. I did briefly wonder whether it had forgotten all about tie-on pockets or decided to treat them as bags, but it got there after dealing with men’s pockets, in the end.

It made an interesting supplement to Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900, since it fills in some of the men’s side of things, and doesn’t confine itself within that period. Slightly less academic than that book, too, I’d say.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Science of Sin

Posted January 19, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Review – The Science of Sin

The Science of Sin: Why we do the things we know we shouldn't

by Jack Lewis

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

It can often seem that we are utterly surrounded by temptation, from the ease of online shopping and the stream of targeted advertising encouraging us to greedily acquire yet more stuff, to the coffee, cake and fast-food shops that line our streets, beckoning us in to over-indulge on all the wrong things. It can feel like a constant battle to stay away from the temptations we know we shouldn't give in to. Where exactly do these urges come from? If we know we shouldn't do something, for the sake of our health, our pockets or our reputation, why is it often so very hard to do the right thing? Anyone who has ever wondered why they never seem to be able to stick to their diet, anyone to whom the world seems more vain and self-obsessed than ever, anyone who can't understand why love-cheats pursue their extra-marital affairs, anyone who struggles to resist the lure of the comfy sofa, or anyone who makes themselves bitter through endless comparison with other people - this book is for you.

The Science of Sin brings together the latest findings from neuroscience research to shed light on the universally fascinating subject of temptation - where it comes from, how to resist it and why we all tend to succumb from time to time. With each chapter inspired by one of the seven deadly sins, neurobiologist Jack Lewis illuminates the neural battles between temptation and restraint that take place within our brains, suggesting strategies to help us better manage our most troublesome impulses with the explicit goal of improving our health, our happiness and our productivity - helping us to say `no!' more often, especially when it really counts.

The Science of Sin takes on a lot of religious baggage, for all that Jack Lewis, its author, says that he’s an atheist. To some extent that’s inevitable given his background, and his choice to shape the book around the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins, looking for neurological and evolutionary explanations for the origins of each — both their pitfalls and their utility.

The problem is that it inevitably becomes very moralising. He does try to point out when certain neurological things might not be someone’s choice, but he seems to have more sympathy for paedophiles than for fat people, and is very certain that being fat is almost totally a choice people make (when in fact there are many contributing causes, including sheer poverty, where good food choices are not always available), and a moral one that impacts badly on society and on everyone around them. Fatness is also unequivocally bad for you, in Lewis’ view, where the real picture is more mixed (fat people, for instance, have lower 30-day mortality from bacterial pneumonia and have better survival rates and reduced immune depletion when living with HIV) and thinness is no guarantor of health of any kind.

(Important note: this is not something I’m interested in debating in the comments on this blog. I’ve studied some of the science of nutrition in relation to immunity as part of my MSc, but you’re best off heading to the literature with an open mind and a careful eye for bias — your own and that of the papers you find.)

In almost every chapter, he finds a way to reference narcissism, blame fat people, suggest fat people are narcissistic, and so on. And again, he treats these as moral issues, failures that people should rectify.

In some cases, he isn’t wrong, but he’s replacing religious moralising about it with a kind of secular moralising about it that sits badly with any effort to be objective. Combine that with his reliance on scans like fMRI to tell us about what’s going on in someone’s brain, and a lot of his conclusions are questionable: you can get apparently significant results from the brain of a dead salmon, with fMRI, an issue that he very briefly references before waving it away and saying that fMRI is the tool we have, so he’s going to use it.

For me, there was a kind of entertainment value in watching him build up his argument, but I was aware of the one-sided nature of his search for appropriate sources, and not appreciative of his moralising.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

Posted January 15, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

by Kate Strasdin

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 320
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments - some her own, others donated by family and friends - she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of their lives. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.

Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Using her expertise, Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages.

Her findings are remarkable. Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: Pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.

This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: not the grandees of traditional written histories, but the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.

Kate Strasdin’s The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes takes a real object as her starting point in order to unravel the life of the original owner of the object, and through that, a picture of the world she lived in, the experiences she was likely to have had, and the things that shaped the lives of the average woman in her position. Strasdin came into the possession of a rare item: a journal in which the owner pasted scraps of cloth, representing the clothes of various of her loved ones and acquaintances, men and women alike (though mostly women).

She did a lot of research to find out who the owner of this book might be, pinning it down to a Mrs Anne Sykes, and discovering her origins and who her family were. Each chapter discusses the clothes both in the context of Anne Sykes’ life, but also the lives of other people at the time — even servants, as one rare item included is a scrap from Anne’s cook’s Sunday best.

I find this kind of thing fascinating, and Anne luckily had a quite interesting life, travelling with her merchant husband and seeing more of the world than many of her period. She lived in Singapore and Shanghai, as well as in the UK, and the scraps of her clothes show us how little she assimilated, though there is the intriguing inclusion of a scrap of a pirate flag.

It’s a little slow at times, but I think worthwhile; there are some full colour plates to give you a better idea of the scraps included, and of Anne’s careful labelling. It works well to give a picture of the life of a young woman married in 1838, whose apparently adoring husband gave her this journal to begin to memorialise their lives together in.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Tickets for the Ark

Posted January 7, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Tickets for the Ark

Tickets for the Ark: From Wasps to Whales - How Do We Choose What to Save?

by Rebecca Nesbit

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

Our planet hasn't seen the current rate of extinction since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and global conservation efforts are failing to halt this. As a society, we face choices which will determine the fate of Earth's estimated 8.7 million species, including humans. As wildlife declines, conservation needs to make trade-offs. But what should we conserve and why?

Are we wrong to love bees and hate wasps? Are native species more valuable than newcomers (aka invasives)? Should some animals be culled to protect others, and what do we want the 'natural world' to look like? There are many surprising answers in Rebecca Nesbit's lively, stimulating book, which sows the seeds of a debate we urgently need to have.

Rebecca Nesbit’s Tickets for the Ark attempts to be somewhat nuanced about the topic of conservation, and to dig into why we want to save the creatures we want to save — and why we might want to save other animals instead. It’s not always obvious that we might want to save parasites, but we know little about some parasites, and little about what advantages they might offer taken as part of a whole ecosystem. Nesbit also talks about what we define as “wild” vs “domesticated”, how our responsibilities differ between the two, and how much responsibility we might want to or need to take for animals in rewilding projects.

That’s just a taster of the various dilemmas she serves up, but hopefully it gives an idea of the gist of the book. I appreciate that she recognises the potential role of animals that people don’t like — wasps, including parasitic wasps, and other ectoparasites like lice — and the issue that it’s very difficult to decide what counts as a “native” plant. All cut-offs are artificial, and do we really want to roll back time? Maybe we need a new normal?

None of it came as a surprise to me, since it’s a topic I’ve thought about a fair bit, but it’s an attempt at nuance in a world that sometimes lacks it, and I appreciated that. It was a slower read than I expected, but full of helpful context that can get a layperson properly interested and involved in the hypotheticals.

Rating: 3/5

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