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

Bring Back the King, Helen Pilcher

If you’ve read Beth Shapiro’s How to Clone a Mammoth, all of the content in this book should be pretty familiar. Helen Pilcher’s voice is entertaining, and some of her examples are different, but the basic concept is the same. I wouldn’t recommend reading both, though I would recommend either of them if you haven’t read the other.

The only thing you may not enjoy about Pilcher’s is the flippant humour — she even has a chapter about cloning Elvis, for example. She’s a stand-up comedian as well a biologist and a journalist, so it might well be that you just don’t get along with her sense of humour. I’ll admit it did begin to wear on me. Nonetheless, she presents the information clearly and in a way that’s easy to digest, so it might be the best way to get the information across for some folks.

Rating: 3/5

Adventures in Human Being, Gavin Francis

Gavin Francis’ book is basically a series of essays about the human body and how it works (and how it breaks), from the head down. It’s pretty readable, with anecdotes from Francis’ time as a doctor, though it’s not something that grabbed me as much as, say, Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm. Actually, it’s fading a bit from memory already. It’s certainly readable and filled some time during an epic plane and train ride from Canada through Amsterdam to Belgium; it’s not revelatory, or amazingly written. I’m a little surprised, though, at how ‘meh’ I feel about it in retrospect.

Rating: 3/5

A Sting in the Tale, Dave Goulson

I’m not a big fan of insects. If you know me personally, even a little, you’re probably laughing at the understatement there. So okay, the truth is that insects scare me silly. But so did disease at one point, and now look at me tearing through my degree and thinking of working in a lab to study infectious diseases… All through the power of reading enough about it to really pique my curiosity. So maybe I can do the same with insects, and hence this book. Not that bumblebees frighten me that dreadfully; they’re sort of endearing, at their best. But it’s a place to start, and Goulson’s enthusiasm really sold me on it. I even have another book potentially lined up about bees now…

There’s a lot of personal reflection, including talking about what he did as a kid to get involved with bees, and his place in France where he’s rewilding a field to attract more wildlife. It’s not strictly scientific, by-the-book facts, that’s for sure; for me, that added to the appeal. I could almost get excited about bees, through the eyes of Dave Goulson — and I could definitely get excited about his conservation goals and hopes.

Also, you get to learn fun things like the fact that bees have smelly feet…

Recommended! Even if bees are not exactly your cup of honey-sweetened tea. (And yes, yes, I know, bumblebees do not actually make honey. I did pay attention to that much, I promise.)

Rating: 4/5

The Brain, David Eagleman

If you haven’t read anything else about the human brain and how it works, you’ll probably find this interesting. It covers the usual points: a lot of interesting stuff about the way our brains work and the way they perceive the world. And it’s definitely presented in a readable, easy to understand fashion; I think it’d definitely be suitable for a layperson.

For me, however, it got boring pretty fast because I know this stuff. It’s hardly even revision for me – this is stuff I just know. I had the same feeling with one of the author’s previous books, so I’d better keep a mental note and avoid in future!

Rating: 2/5

The Bonobo and the Atheist, Frans de Waal

If you’ve ever wondered about the evolution of morality and whether humans are the only moral creatures, this is a good exploration of the idea. Frans de Waal posits that we have an innate sense of morality, and like Jonathan Haidt, suggests that this sense dictates what we do – the emotional tail wags the rational dog, rather than the other way round, in Haidt’s terminology.

The main attraction for me is not the ideas, which I’ve come across plenty of times before, but the anecdotes about the behaviour of wild and captive bonobos and chimpanzees. They’re our closest relatives, on the evolutionary tree, and we can learn a lot about ourselves from observing them. Frans de Waal includes a lot of interesting titbits, and I found his work fascinating, though not surprising.

It probably won’t convince anyone who thinks that morality comes only as handed down from God, but if you wonder about this kind of thing, you’ll probably find this interesting.

Rating: 4/5