How the Zebra Got Its Stripes, Léo Grasset, trans. Barbara Mellor

This book is admittedly slight: if you already know your evolutionary biology, then you’re not likely to learn anything from this in terms of the principles. However, if you’re not, these stories demonstrate the points well, and even if you do know the principles, you can learn some new facts. Which you may or may not find interesting, depending on how much you cringe at the description of how hyenas give birth!

It’s an entertaining read, and I was glad I picked it up, even though it didn’t exactly take me long to digest.

Rating: 3/5

The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Emperor of All Maladies used to scare me. Just the idea of a whole book about cancer kinda gave me the heebie-jeebies. Generalised anxiety disorder and three grandparents dead of cancer will do that, I guess. Luckily, I’ve turned a corner and reading this just fascinated me — my only regret being that it isn’t quite up to date on the latest in cancer treatments, stuff which I know about from my medical transcription work that isn’t always even past the phase II trial stage yet. The way the doctors I transcribe talk about that… well, I’d love to know more.

Still, there’s a lot here: a history of what we’ve known about cancer from ancient history to the time of publication, with meticulous footnotes. It’s illustrated with some case studies, patients of Mukherjee’s, which help to contextualise the treatments mentioned or the cancers being studied. His fascination with the disease is clear, but also his compassion for his patients, though I never found it sentimentalised.

It’s a little dense and probably slow going if you’re not used to reading non-fiction, or if the subject matter is unfamiliar. I was delighted that I could follow pretty much all of it, even when he discussed statistics (the bane of my biology degree); I found it pretty impossible to put down, because I had to keep finding out more. As the best non-fiction always does with me, I ended the book by wanting Mukherjee’s job.

Rating: 5/5

Bones of Contention: The Archaeopteryx Scandals, Paul Chambers

I never quite realised before I read this how much controversy Archaeopteryx stirred up, or the petty quarrels between opposing professors and palaeontologists. I found it interesting that Chambers gave serious consideration to the ideas of people who say that birds aren’t descended directly from dinosaurs; as he says, some of the arguments against that direct relationship do make sense and are worth considering, even though there’s also plenty of evidence on the other side.

Altogether, this is a great analysis of Archaeopteryx, its impact, and what it symbolised. There’s mini biographies of various scientists, including Huxley (Darwin’s Bulldog), and some of them are surprisingly fascinating. In a way, this is more about arguments about evolution via natural selection and “missing links” than it is specifically about Archaeopteryx, although there is plenty of info here about the fossil itself as well.

Readable and interesting, though at times there’s a bit too much about the feuds of ridiculous scientists who just wanted to prove each other wrong.

Rating: 4/5

Suspicious Minds, Rob Brotherton

Suspicious Minds is not a book about conspiracy theories in the sense of recounting different conspiracy theories for the sake of convincing you of them, or indeed of debunking them. Instead it examines what makes people so susceptible to believing in conspiracies, with a good deal of sympathy — it can be tempting to ask what on earth some people are even thinking to believe the outrageous things they do, but Brotherton doesn’t laugh at them too much. Instead, he shows why the human brain is so prone to believing these things, so easy to influence.

It mostly wasn’t surprising to me, but it’s a good summary of what we know about conspiracy thinking, and it’s a healthy reminder to mind what you believe yourself lest you end up exclaiming that the naked emperor is wearing the most fabulous clothes.

It’s a Bloomsbury Sigma book, though, and I’m relatively unsurprised that it’s good; they tend to be very readable and cover interesting topics. I’m just about at the point where I’m willing to pick them up regardless of the subject.

Rating: 4/5

The Viral Storm, Nathan Wolfe

If you’re already familiar with pop science books about diseases, this isn’t really going to surprise you any. It’s competently written, though at times the statistics are a little off (as another reviewer pointed out). I don’t agree that he’s too unduly alarmist, though; our current environmental and social conditions are just about perfect for a pandemic (viral or otherwise) to sweep through the world’s population. If you doubt it, The Great Influenza by John M. Barry should disabuse you of that notion, rapidly. And our world is more interconnected now, not less.

I hoped that this might be a little more in depth, given Wolfe being a biologist and all, but there’s nothing that really elevates it above other pop science books available. It’s honestly rather forgettable.

Rating: 3/5

Zika: The Emerging Epidemic, Donald G. McNeil

This isn’t written by a scientist studying Zika, but by a science reporter. Given that, it’s not terribly in depth about the disease itself, but rather provides something of an overview, written in an engaging and easy to read way. If you’re interested in learning the facts about Zika (at least as per the point when the book was sent to press), this is a good choice to my mind. It’s sometimes a little reliant on anecdotes, because of course much of the in-depth research on Zika was (and is) yet to be completed. Obviously, he has an interest in making it sound interesting and more than a little horrifying, but broadly speaking I trusted the sources he used.

A number of people have given this book relatively low ratings because McNeil is a big proponent of the advice to delay planned pregnancies if you live in a Zika-infected area. It’s unfeminist, people say; it ignores the fact that some of these areas have a high risk for sexual assault, it ignores female choice, etc, etc. I don’t quite get it: the first instance, he refers to planned pregnancy, so it’s not like he’s saying “don’t get sexually assaulted”. In the latter, you can choose to have a baby when you’re at risk of contracting Zika if you like, but then you must know and accept that your child could die or be severely harmed by it. McNeil doesn’t say “pregnancy should be banned and people who get pregnant should not get healthcare”. He says, “If I wanted a healthy baby, and I was planning to become pregnant, I would wait until I was sure I wasn’t at risk for Zika.” Which is fairly easy, since as far as we can tell, once you’ve had Zika once, you’re immune and there would no longer be a risk. And of course, there’s the potential for vaccines and eradication, in the longer term.

There’s also a bit of criticism of people who get pregnant in Zika-affected areas and then don’t take precautions not to contract Zika. Which is fair: you can choose to do risky things, but why should anyone think it’s a good idea?

All in all, I don’t think McNeil is wrong (or anti-feminist). He’s giving solid advice backed up by what we know of Zika. I don’t believe it’s anti-feminist to point out that drinking alcohol when you’re trying to get pregnant is likely to harm the baby once you do conceive if you don’t realise it, and that you’re best just avoiding drinking alcohol if you want your baby to be healthy. This is a similar situation.

Rating: 4/5

What on Earth Evolved… in Brief, Christopher Lloyd

It’s pretty much what it says on the tin. To a biologist, the choices of species aren’t particularly surprising, though I might perhaps have included fewer animals and more bacteria and plants. Even though this is a cut-down version of the full book, it’s still pretty exhaustive (and at times a bit exhausting). It’s full of interesting titbits, but nothing at great length, and a large portion of the back is taken up by charts attempting to put things into some sort of ranking as to how much it has affected the world. The focus is very much with Lloyd’s subtitle, “100 Species That Have Changed the World”.

Easy enough to read, though perhaps one you might prefer to dip in and out of than just read straight through.

Rating: 3/5

Goldilocks and the Water Bears, Louisa Preston

The best thing about the book is that title. It’s just inspired. Unfortunately, it’s also misleading; actual tardigrades are covered in about three pages, buried in the middle of the book. Most of it is about the search for other life in the universe, what it might look like, where we might find it, and how it might survive. Granted, the blurb does say that, calling it “a tale of the origins and evolution of life, and the quest to find it on other planets, on moons, in other galaxies, and throughout the universe.” But still, I’d hoped for tardigrades to be a little more central, or at least more relevant than just another example in a litany of living creatures which can tolerate extreme conditions (or rather, what would be extreme from our point of view). At the very least, I was hoping for a survey of where in our solar system tardigrades could happily live. You can extrapolate that, but… I just wanted more water bears, okay?!

In terms of the writing, there are two especially irritating habits: one is a constant grammar failing, where the start of the sentence doesn’t agree in number with the end, and the other is an unfortunate habit of italicising key words in a way which gives the sentences really weird emphases. Sometimes names are randomly italicised, sometimes not. It’s not consistent and at the same time, it’s so pervasive as to be distracting.

(E.g. in the sentence above, Preston would have written, “There is two especially irritating habits”. No! That’s not… No! I can’t remember if she ever actually did it while stating a number as in that sentence, admittedly, but she would use “is” when there were two or more things being stated. No!)

The actual content is fine, if you weren’t hoping too much for more info on tardigrades. It’s a pretty workmanlike exploration of the concept of the Goldilocks zone and how it might help us identify suitable planets that are not our own.

Rating: 3/5

Ebola, David Quammen

This is actually an excerpt from the excellent book Spillover, with a few details added because it was published slightly later, as the ebola epidemic really kicked off. It doesn’t contain anything new that wasn’t in Spillover, and I actually ended up asking for a refund because that wasn’t clear up-front.

However, it’s a great excerpt, and I do strongly recommend Quammen’s writing on diseases — just don’t be fooled into getting the excerpts of Spillover instead of just buying the whole book. It’s a crafty idea by his publishers, but it’s just annoying. The full book links up the various diseases and expands on themes they share; this mostly comes across from Ebola on its own, but you get a much fuller picture with the rest of the book to refer to.

Information: good, packaging: disingenuous.

Rating: 3/5