Posted September 16, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich, trans. Ayca Türkoglu
Slime: A Natural History is a very readable book. Often with translated works, I can tell that they’re translated, but this translator is very good at making the book feel chatty and colloquial. It slips by really quickly, with the author’s enthusiasm for the topic shining through.
However, it doesn’t quite feel organised. Although the chapters are arranged into sections by theme, it feels very “and another thing, and another thing, and another thing” — a pile of facts that doesn’t really cohere into a structure. I also thought that the human “fear” of slime was a bit over-egged. Sure, there are times when slime is very gross and touching it would be aversive, and there are horror films which use that grossness as part of the fever-pitch of emotion, but I don’t find slime inherently frightening.
Still, an enjoyable read, and I learned some interesting things!
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, science, Susanne Wedlich
Posted September 12, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Possibility of Life, Jaime Green
The Possibility of Life looks to both science and science fiction for an idea of humanity’s hopes, dreams and fears of what alien life might look like, how realistic that might be, and what it’s based on. If you’re an SF/F fan, you’ll probably recognise a lot of the references, and not just the old white men or the hit TV series of SF either: Ursula Le Guin and N.K. Jemisin are here too.
I found it very readable, and thought Green presents the scientific facts (such as they are) very well. The enthusiasm for the subject is palpable, and optimistic, but doesn’t over-egg it (we’re probably not five minutes from meeting a Vulcan or Cardassian).
Nothing too surprising for me, but I enjoyed the approach to the subject.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Jaime Green, non-fiction, science, SF/F
Posted September 3, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
An Immense World, Ed Yong
I remember really liking Yong’s previous book about microbes, and this didn’t disappoint — despite being a whole new topic! The best pop-science, for me, is the stuff that makes me constantly want to tell someone about the neat things I’m learning. That was definitely the case here: I was texting my mum from the discharge ward after a minor surgery to tell her about the eyes of scallops!
Yong writes clearly and with lots and lots of examples. Now and then I didn’t care much for the metaphors, as in the introduction — just get down to the actual science, pleeeease. I also got a bit overloaded by all the footnotes. But for the most part, it was really readable and fascinating. There are a lot of references and so on in the back, and Yong is careful not to claim too much for any fascinating theories, making it clear when things are fully understood and when they aren’t. (At least, to the best of our knowledge.)
Animal senses really aren’t my main interest, but Yong writes engagingly enough — and the topic is fascinating enough — that it really doesn’t matter.
Definitely recommended, if your interest is piqued.
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Ed Yong, non-fiction, science
Posted August 22, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Flaws of Nature, Andy Dobson
Flaws of Nature is about the weird stuff that happens due to evolution — the famous cases where an organism is far from perfectly designed, like the long nerve in the necks of giraffes, or the fact that dolphins and whales can’t actually breathe underwater (which seems like a bit of a drawback, even if they have a workaround and things seem to work out for them). It’s not just a litany of interesting facts, though: instead Dobson’s interested in why and how this stuff might evolve this way.
For the most part, this is explained accessibly, through examples and a little bit of math. Nothing I struggled with, and I’m not great with figures, so definitely still accessible to a layperson. And there are some interesting random facts among all of those examples (the multiple jaws of fish were new to me; I thought that was unique to morays).
One thing that irritated me quite a bit was the constant footnotes, and the format of them. *** and **** aren’t sufficiently different to make it swiftly obvious which footnote I want to look at: numbers would be much, much better.
Overall, it seemed pretty solid to me, if obviously sometimes rather simplifying matters. It has a bibliography which looks fairly thorough, albeit not numbered references. I found it interesting.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: Andy Dobson, book reviews, books, non-fiction, science
Posted July 31, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Good Virus, Tom Ireland
This is one of those popular science books that got me excited by teaching me new things — something that you wouldn’t think is easy when it comes to things like viruses, which I’m studying during my MSc at LSHTM. The “good viruses” of the title are bacteriophages, though: viruses that specifically target bacteria as their natural hosts, and surprisingly little is sad about those when you’re studying viruses in general, despite the fact that — as Ireland makes clear — they’re absolutely ubiquitous. If anything rules the world by sheer numbers, it’s bacteriophages, and they’re absolutely everywhere, from the icecaps to the deep ocean to the human body.
It’s likely that Ireland is a little hyperbolic at times here about the potentials of bacteriophages, though he does sound a note of caution here and there about his own enthusiasm. But it’s also true that bacteriophages offer us some answers to knotty problems, like antimicrobial resistance, and we’d be stupid to keep turning away. I had no idea that bacteriophages were being used to treat bacterial infections in clinics in places like Georgia, and I had no idea that “the West” was so pathetically behind and completely unable to legislate in ways that would make clinical trials possible. It’s exciting, and vital, and I have so many questions about why we’re not in a hurry to do more.
If you’re in my position, where you study this stuff, then obviously this book — absolutely riveting as I found it — isn’t the end: you’ll need to read papers, ask further questions, and maybe get in the lab. But as a starting point, it’s a good read, informative and enthusiastic, and full of titbits I couldn’t wait to share with… well. More or less everyone who stayed within earshot for long enough, actually.
This is the best kind of popular science, shining a light on something that is wrongly obscure, and it has plenty of resources in the footnotes to guide you to where the info comes from. (That said, more footnotes would’ve been good. I wasn’t always happy with statements that didn’t have references.)
So glad I picked this up.
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, science, Tom Ireland
Posted May 29, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment
Pathogenesis, Jonathan Kennedy
Pathogenesis was less absorbing for me than I’d hoped; I love non-fiction about diseases, even though I’m already studying for my MSc in the subject and thus most of it is not new to me. Still, often there are titbits I didn’t know, and that seemed like it was going to prove true here too when I read the introduction: did you know that viral genes are involved in the formation of the mammalian placenta?
But overall, the rest of it was much less scientific, less based on… well… pathogenesis, and much more about history. How diseases affected armies and governments, and how changes like capitalism (of which the author seems to be a huge fan) changed the approach to public health. Which is to say, created a demand for it, since there was no such thing under feudalism.
For someone who is interested in the history of infectious diseases in relation to humanity, this is probably still fascinating. For me, it was just a bit to starboard of my real interests, and I found it far too simplistic in discussing how diseases work. (Plus, there was definitely a lot more room to consider the impacts of the current pandemic and what it means for the future. Consider the impact on the treatment of tuberculosis, for example — deeply negative.)
It was alright, but not what I wanted, ultimately.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, history, Jonathan Kennedy, non-fiction, science
Posted May 3, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Premonitions Bureau, Sam Knight
The study of things like psychic powers and premonitions is always fascinating. There’s a sense that so many of us want to believe in this sort of thing — the way the human brain insists that there must be a pattern behind circumstances. One can be fairly intellectually sure that there’s no such thing as precognition per se, and yet find it a little freaky that (say) a young girl would dream of her school being swallowed up by black stuff a couple of nights before she dies in the Aberfan disaster…
This book is all about digging into that, mostly through looking at the investigations and interests of John Barker, a British psychiatrist who tried to gather up premonitions and test them scientifically. He was sometimes a bit too credible, a bit too inclined to influence the data — but then, two of his clairvoyants (percipients, as he called them) predicted his death fairly accurately, and had a number of other surprisingly specific hits (such as predicting a train derailment).
The book mostly follows Barker, along with a few of his colleagues, trying to understand his attempts to study premonitions, and why he was so fascinated by the subject. Knight doesn’t attempt to come to any conclusions, just presents the facts as best as they can be known — though of course there’s always a chance someone massaged the facts to make a better story, whether it was Barker, one of his colleagues, or Knight himself.
There’s quite a bit of detail on the Aberfan disaster in the first 50 pages, by the way, which hit me where I live. If that disaster is particularly evocative for you, then read with care.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Sam Knight, science
Posted April 5, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain, Grace Lindsay
I’m probably slightly misquoting, but there’s a bit in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Clouds of Witness where Peter’s sister is explaining things to him, and asks him if she isn’t making his head hurt. “Damnably, but I like it. Go on,” Peter says. I felt kind of that way, when reading this — I wasn’t always 100% understanding what was going on, for sure, but I was intrigued and I wanted to read more. Each chapter helped build my understanding up a little more, too: I found it was well-written in that way, even if math really isn’t my thing.
I doubt I’ve retained a great deal of the information, sadly, but it was nonetheless an enjoyable reading experience. The brain is so complex and so fascinating, and Lindsay tries to show how mathematics has been able to illuminate parts of how it works — where squishy biologists like myself might shrug and say it’s too complex. (Maybe that’s just me.)
Most likely math can’t answer all the questions on its own, but Lindsay makes it clear that it’s offered some useful insights and paths to go down.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Grace Lindsay, non-fiction, science
Posted April 2, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
A Taste for Poison, Neil Bradbury
This book didn’t start quite where I expected it to, with the most conventional poisons — arsenic or cyanide or even digitalis. It began with insulin, which was an interesting way to approach the topic, and that gave it a certain amount of freshness. Each poison is illustrated with two or three stories about how it’s been used by someone or other, historically, and how they were caught (of course, cases where no one was caught are harder to prove).
It talks a little about how each poison works — not in exhaustive detail, but enough to give you a pretty good layperson’s understanding of why it should prove a poison.
It’s interesting how often doctors and medical professionals are the culprits in these stories. It makes sense — access to the poisons, and trust from patients — but it’s a little disheartening to read, actually!
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, history, Neil Bradbury, non-fiction, science
Posted January 10, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 7 Comments
Splitting: The Inside Story on Headaches, Amanda Ellison
This is very much a book for a layperson, and I sometimes worry about the author being overly glib or just not thinking things through. At one point, for example, it states that antibiotics are “not very effective” against viruses. The substances commonly thought of as antibiotics — penicillin, streptomycin, etc — are of course actually antibacterials, and are not at all effective against viruses, and it’s irresponsible to suggest that they are at all effective in that situation, given that they’re completely pointless.
If you’re going to refer to antivirals as “antibiotics” (which some people might do, arguing that “anti-biotic” means “anti-life” — assuming you believe that viruses are alive), then it’s irresponsible in the other direction to suggest that they’re not very effective. It might lead to someone not taking antivirals when they should. I know this sounds like an extremely minor point in a book unrelated to infectious disease, but it’s really important, and a good scientist should not cut this kind of corner, even (or perhaps especially) when communicating to laypeople.
When it comes to discussing neurotransmitters and so on, the author is fairly precise… so far as I can tell, being more interested in infectious disease than human biology for the sake of human biology. Given her carelessness about other things, though, it does leave me with doubts.
I did appreciate the chapter on tension headaches, which I’m prone to. There’s even an interesting point about the fact that stomach ulcers generating histamine, which — given a stomach ulcer is one of the potential causes of some of my health issues, and given my high levels of stress — is worth exploring. But, by and large, I’m not impressed with this book. Writing for laypeople should not mean being cavalier about facts.
Rating: 2/5
Tags: Amanda Ellison, book reviews, books, science
