Throughout my life, certain people have had the audacity to lecture me about how a scientific education and a scientific life forever destroys a persoThroughout my life, certain people have had the audacity to lecture me about how a scientific education and a scientific life forever destroys a person's ability to appreciate nature. I always tell them how science enhances my appreciation and .. dare I say it? .. my love of the natural world, but I sometimes think no one hears me. But thanks to the wonderful book, Return To Warden's Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows by Chris Norment (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press; 2008), there are others out there who openly celebrate how science has enriched their lives and deepened their love of the natural world and her citizens.
This well-written book is a brilliant synergy between science and poetry. It describes the author's highly personal journey to establish a connection to something beyond himself, to discover his intellectual, emotional, and spiritual "far country" in a world that felt less and less familiar and welcoming for him. But this book is also about the process of doing science, particularly the type of science that focuses on patiently observing and recording the details of the lives of animals in their natural environments -- a dying "breed" of scientific inquiry in a high-tech world filled with cell and molecular biologists, it seems.
It's humbling to consider the process of getting inside the mind of a nonhuman animal and understanding something of how it views the world. [...] Most behavioral ecologists argue that fundamental differences in how human and nonhuman animals perceive the natural world make it impossible to understand what it is like to be another species. The difficulties are compounded by the necessary limitations of the scientific method. We can study the structure and function of a Harris's Sparrow neural system at scales extending from the organ (brain, central and peripheral nervous systems) to subcellular (individual ion channels in neurons) and molecular (action potentials and the chemistry of neurotransmitters at synapses) levels. We can quantify relationships between physical and social environmental stimuli and the organism's behavioral responses under precisely controlled field conditions. We are good with anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and behavioral outcomes, but we are very poor with emotion and answering a fundamental question, What is it like to be a Harris's Sparrow? [pp. 61-62]
Norment never answers that particular question, but he is far richer emotionally and intellectually for having tried, as we discover from reading his book. Return to Warden's Grove is based on three years of the author's field research while a graduate student at the University of Kansas investigating the breeding biology of Harris's Sparrows, Zonotrichia querula. To complete his dissertation work, the author left his family behind every spring to migrate north, just ahead of his birds, to Warden's Grove in the Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary of the Barrenlands in the Canadian arctic. The story itself is "creative nonfiction" because the author compressed his three years of work into one archetypal field season, similar to what Edward Abbey did in his classic, Desert Solitaire.
One of the things I loved most about this book are the beautiful descriptions of those fleeting moments that I also experienced during my own dissertation work, the depth and richness of those moments, along with the intensity, the sheer poetry of his revelations;
Listen. When I cup a small bird in my hand and feel its heat, feel the thrum of its fear and the tiny pounding of its heart against my palm, it is impossible not to wonder. Or when I look into the umber silence of its eyes and imagine the paths of light and chemicals that bind us together (cornea and lens, retina and optic nerve, sodium and potassium, brain and neural network), it is impossible not to wonder. And when I am done with my measurements and I have written down the last of the numbers, I will open my hand, as if in supplication, and the bird will rise into the air. Then, too, it is impossible not to wonder -- about the arc of its flight, the way in which the barbs and barbules of its feather vanes interlock, the lightness of its bones and very being and, most of all, its completeness. Connected as we are by the paths of history and genes -- stasis and change, extinction and speciation, and the tangled necklaces of adenine and guanine, thymine and cytosine -- it is still impossible not to marvel at its sheer otherness, and the way in which it makes its way through the world. [pp. 7-8].
As the reader follows the thread of Norment's archetypal field season, we are taken on an intellectual and philosophical journey through the major themes of biology. As the author explores each topic, their threads combine to form a progressively thicker and stronger cord that leads the reader through the labyrinth of ideas and knowledge that characterize life and the study of life: we learn about the cascading interrelationships between the hormones that regulate reproduction, moult and migration in songbirds (much of this based on the work of my advisor and his advisor), how Norment decided to devote a significant portion of his life to studying the mysterious Harris's Sparrows, the value of natural history museums and the scientific collections they house (along with the "morality" of killing things), how scientific papers are written and the purpose for their very distinct language, and the stories of some of the birds that provided data for his dissertation.
This book is only 215 pages long, but it will stay with you much longer than that. It will change how you think about scientists and their science, about man's relationship to nature, and it will open your eyes to the true value of knowledge.This book will be appreciated by those who particularly love biology and enjoy poetry and beautifully-rendered prose, as well as those who enjoy reading stories about scientists and their work in remote and seemingly barren places.
The Second World War had ended and, buoyed by ‘limitless hope and confidence’, Don and Mimi Galvin dedicated themselves to achieving their idea of theThe Second World War had ended and, buoyed by ‘limitless hope and confidence’, Don and Mimi Galvin dedicated themselves to achieving their idea of the American dream: a happy marriage, a large happy family and a happy life. In their mad pursuit of reproductive success, they had 12 children, 10 boys and 2 girls, between 1945 and 1965.
Their happiness was short-lived, however, when the oldest boy began to show bizarre behaviors, then the next oldest one began to act weird, and on down the line, until six of the ten boys were behaving strangely. Each son had his own particular demeanour, but each was becoming ever more … peculiar. They were diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mental illness with an average age of onset in the late teens and early 20s, so these boys — young men, actually — were getting ready to make their way in the world when they fell ill. But schizophrenia was poorly understood then — it still is, in fact — so most people think it manifests as “multiple personalities”. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
“Schizophrenia is not about multiple personalities. It is about walling oneself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real”, according to journalist and writer Robert Kolker in his latest book, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (Quercus; 2020).
Schizophrenia is a brain disorder that encompasses a wide variety of symptoms, so each son required different treatments, and often their distinct behaviors inspired a variety of diagnoses before the medical doctors converged on schizophrenia.
Although heartbroken, Don and Mimi pretended to their peers and colleagues that nothing was wrong. Eventually, they tried to get help for their ailing sons, but were faced by an antiquated mental health establishment that knew little about schizophrenia, that advocated the use of barbaric and cruel ‘treatments’, and often openly blamed poor parenting, especially by the mother, as the primary or sole cause of schizophrenia — a widely-held, but erroneous belief with no scientific support.
“And so I was crushed,” Mimi, the mother, said. “Because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.”
But the Galvin family’s personal tragedy is starting to change all that misinformation: universities and “big pharma” are studying the Galvin family tree and DNA collected from each family member and are compare it to genetic samples from the general population in their quest to identify which gene variants contribute to schizophrenia. This large sample size is giving researchers the unprecedented opportunity to begin making significant advances in prediction, treatment, and even prevention of schizophrenia.
In this book, which is a skilful mix of biography, a history of mental illness and medical case studies, the author alternates, chapter-by-chapter, between sharing some of the Galvin family’s countless struggles and revealing how our scientific understanding of schizophrenia evolved rapidly during the past 50 years. In these chapters, we read the tragic story of the Galvin family and meet some of the incredible scientists who are dedicating their lives to pushing back the boundaries of our ignorance about the causes of and treatments for schizophrenia, how a healthy brain develops and functions, and the book even mentions some past mistakes.
In some ways, this powerful book reads like a retrospective of abuse: familial, social, medical and societal. It certainly is not a feel-good story, but it is educational and meticulously researched. The writing is perceptive, the story is absorbing and it is obvious that the author has spent a tremendous amount of time interacting with and interviewing the family, especially the mother and the two daughters, over a number of years.
The Galvin family themselves are quiet, but complicated, heroes because not only did the entire family share their DNA and brain scans with researchers, but they shared their remarkable life story honestly and without reservation with the public, warts and all, thereby helping to remove the veil of secrecy and shame associated with severe mental illness. Highly recommended.
Meave Leakey is a real-life Indiana Jones. Her life has been filled with adventure, struggle, and discovery after amazing discovery that are detailed Meave Leakey is a real-life Indiana Jones. Her life has been filled with adventure, struggle, and discovery after amazing discovery that are detailed in her riveting autobiography, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search For The Past (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020).
The author's story begins with her birth during the middle of the London Blitz in 1942, then quickly moves on to her unconventional youth and to her dream to become a marine biologist, an unusual ambition for a woman in the early 1960s. Only after being repeatedly denied a place on a research vessel because these ships lacked facilities for female scientists (!!) did she begin looking around for other scientific opportunities. As luck would have it, she was invited to interview with Louis Leakey to care for his colony of live monkeys in Kenya. Soon after arriving on site, she entered another male-dominated scientific field when she began digging hominid fossils alongside Louis and Mary Leakey, contributing to the work they began almost 100 years ago.
This book, which her second daughter Samira helped write, includes brief details about Meave's life with husband, Richard, such as when he lost both legs in a plane crash that probably resulted from sabotage, and when she donated one of her kidneys to him after his failed, but the majority of the book focuses on Meave's long and celebrated career as she worked to better understand our own evolutionary history. It uses good old fashioned storytelling to combine science and field work to reveal the intellectual excitement of discovery and the huge strides made in our knowledge of human origins and evolution. Each new fossil that's unearthed adds to our growing body of knowledge, and each new advance in dating techniques and molecular biology refines that knowledge. Further, the author contextualized these discoveries within the local ecology and the landscape that was responding to the changing climate.
In my opinion, one of the most interesting findings is that modern-day people are not the pinnacle of a straightforward evolutionary trajectory extending from ancient ape-like creatures to modern humans, but instead, the fossil evidence increasingly shows that we are the product of a messy affair between a number of hominid species that lived alongside each other in the Turkana Basin and elsewhere.
I was disappointed by the illustrations, which were few and very far between. I especially wanted to see the geology and the landscape of Lothagam, which the author describes as "stunning", and also because she claimed that her work in this region was important for establishing her credibility as an competent fossil hunter both with her field crews and with funding sources. Unfortunately, not even a Google search provided much to look at.
I think that the book and its readers would have benefitted greatly from a timeline showing when the first hominids began to stand upright and to develop big brains, including the not-so-distant past when humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans coexisted, up to the present time. Additionally, because the author frequently mentions the usefulness of pig and elephant teeth for estimating the ages other fossils unearthed in the same sedimentary layers, a timeline or diagram illustrating the evolutionary progression of pig and elephant dentition and their locations in the various sediment layers would also have been helpful to familiarize readers with the time intervals being investigated.
Despite the scarcity of useful illustrations and diagrams, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in evolution (especially human evolution), or palaeontology, who is interested in what it’s like to do field work in Kenya, or who wants to know how one determined female scientist managed to accomplish so much at a time when most of the world’s women were trapped in a kitchen.
The truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off. — Gloria Steinem
Economic inequality surrounds us. It drags us down. It makes us poorer. IThe truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off. — Gloria Steinem
Economic inequality surrounds us. It drags us down. It makes us poorer. It drowns us. It destroys our dreams. It destroys our lives.
In this powerful and enraging book, The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Empowering Women (Faber and Faber; 2020), global thinker and author Linda Scott brilliantly argues that “equal economic treatment for women would put a stop to some of the world’s costliest evils, while building prosperity for everyone.”
These “costly evils” include the unequal access to education for women and girls, domestic violence, sex trafficking, the gender pay gap, the lack of child care and the gender divide in both business and land ownership. As an internationally renowned expert on women’s economic development and Emeritus DP World Professor for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Oxford, Professor Scott has seen a lot of gender-based economic inequality around the world, and is a position of authority to compare the world’s poorest nations to the richest.
From the backstreets of Accra to the boardrooms in New York City, Professor Scott thoroughly investigates female economic disenfranchisement and explains how this prevents women from fully participating in society. She makes it clear that only goods and services that are exchanged for money are valued — but contends throughout most of her book that it is the work done by women, which is often unpaid, is what actually supports the global economy. But despite this, women remain economically oppressed.
Professor Scott points to an uncomfortable paradox: in the United States, where women are paid less than 70 cents for every dollar earned by a white man, but they determine 67% of all consumer spending. It is similar in developing countries, where women’s work is devalued and yet is foundational to the measured economy, according to research. Additionally, real life experiments find that when women in developing economies have more control over family finances, not only do they benefit, but their children do, too. And this benefits national economies as well. But the isolation of women from money makes countries more vulnerable to financial crises, as Professor Scott explains in detail in the chapter, “Money Bullies.”
Throughout her entire polemic, Professor Scott assembles a tremendous amount of scientific evidence to argue clearly and convincingly that female economic exclusion must change. She skilfully interweaves research with her first-hand experiences to explain the way things are now, highlighting how things can be improved and the social and economic results when such changes are implemented.
I do have several criticisms, which I hope will not reduce the significance of this book’s important argument. First, I was bothered greatly by Professor Scott’s repeated use of the term ‘forced sex’ or ‘sex against her will’ because, in my view, nonconsensual sex is rape, plain and simple. The fact that rape is so common — in times of peace as well as during war — underscores that rape culture is globally entrenched, and using euphemisms does nothing to change this fact.
I also was bothered by Professor Scott’s assertion that giving African girls a good education and good jobs would naturally stall population growth, thereby reducing the climate crisis. On one hand, yes, this is true, but on the other hand, this argument fails to recognize who the real climate change villains are: the Developed World, especially the United States, China and the European Union. These top three greenhouse gas emitters produce 41.5% of total global emissions, whilst the bottom 100 countries (which includes most African nations) only account for only 3.6%. To contend that reducing the birth rate of Black and Brown Africans will do much to reduce climate change is to miss the point.
Despite my criticisms, I was greatly energized by this book’s argument as well as by its delivery. Professor Scott does not pull any punches, and nor should she. Using scientific research and describing the nuanced results from short- and long-term outcomes from real-life experiments, she hammers away at the many mundane ways — both big and small — in which women are denied economic equality, from bride burning when a woman’s husband has spent his wife’s dowry to outright denial of bank loans and savings accounts based on sex alone.
Professor Scott’s writing is passionate and accessible, her research is meticulous (34 pages of notes and references), but in spite of all she has seen and experienced and read, she remains hopeful. In the epilogue, she proposes tangible solutions to rectify gender-based economic inequality and divides them into three categories: one set for the United States, because it is at an important crossroads that will determine women’s fate for many years to come, and which will also ripple out to affect women around the world; a second set for the global community; and a third for individuals. Professor Scott ends her book by calling upon everyone to ‘think creatively about your own strengths’ and how to apply them to help women achieve economic equality.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize and longlisted for the 2020 Financial Times / McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, this provocative book is an essential call to action for women to participate equally in the global economy.
Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you [thereafter], save only this, that if you work
Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you [thereafter], save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not sole, purpose of education.
— Idealist philosopher John Alexander Smith (1863 – 1939)
Spin. Fake News. Conspiracy theories. Lies. We are daily confronted with a stinking quagmire of misinformation, disinformation and fact-free drivel. How do we sort the truth from the lies? This is the premise of the timely new book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (Allen Lane/Random House, 2020), a book that effectively acts as a field guide to the art of critical thinking.
The authors are expert guides. Carl Bergstrom is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist who researches how information flows through biological and social networks. Jevin West is a data scientist who studies misinformation in science and society. Together, they teach a popular undergraduate class offered under the same name by the University of Washington.
This book, a distillation of that course, presents a mix of amusing anecdotes, timely news stories and accessible explanations of scientific and medical data. You do not need to be a professional statistician or some other sort of mathematical wizard, nor must you invest weeks into fact-checking to see through most nonsense. Instead, the authors argue, assessing the accuracy of a particular claim using basic logic, augmented (where necessary) with information that can be easily retrieved by an online search engine is sufficient to “call bullshit”.
The authors point out that creating bullshit is easier and often simpler than speaking the truth. That is why BS is accepted as truth. Italian software engineer, Alberto Brandolini perhaps said it best when he noted in 2014 that “the amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than [that needed] to produce it”, which explains why there is so much baloney in the world. Uriel Fanelli helpfully observed that “an idiot can create more BS than you could ever hope to refute.”
So why bother “calling bullshit”? As the authors assert, adequate bullshit detection is essential for the survival of democracy. Regardless of political ideologies, democracy has always relied on a critically thinking electorate, and this intellectual skill is more important than ever in this modern age of online information warfare. It also is critically important for proper functioning of any social group, whether it is a small group of friends or some other social group, or a professional community.
This book teaches us how to identify the various forms of new-school bullshit: how to evaluate scientific claims, to distinguish between correlation and causation, to recognize biased and unrepresentative data and small sample sizes, to identify selection biases in samples, to understand how data can be manipulated visually, and more. They also include lots of graphs and other data images so you can practice spotting screwy data representations yourself. Whether you are confused by the anti-vax movement, which grew out of a single retracted medical study, to the claim that Artificial Intelligence can infer sexual orientation from analyzing a photograph of a person’s face, there is no shortage of nutty ideas out there to contemplate and dissect.
The book ends with two empowering chapters on how to spot and refute nonsense and, more importantly, how to do so in a useful and constructive way.
Ironically, despite the authors’ assertion that proper fact-checking is essential, the book only has an alphabetized reference list for each chapter in the back of the book, leaving interested readers to scratch their collective heads as they try to deduce which statement should be attributed to which source. And although mistakes do inevitably creep in during the writing and editing process, I was surprised that the letter M in the commonly used acronym, STEM, was erroneously attributed to medicine, instead of mathematics. And yes, I was disappointed by the poor quality paper that the book was printed on.
Despite my complaints (some of which are probably beyond the authors’ control), Calling Bullshit presents a thoughtful, careful and engaging deconstruction about how to spot and disprove nonsense. It should be required reading for high school and university students as well as for any thinking person who is working to identify questionable news sources and stories, and navigate their way around social media in these weird times.
How can a woman live her best life when everything she says and does is attacked, questioned or ignored? In today’s modern world, why is gender still How can a woman live her best life when everything she says and does is attacked, questioned or ignored? In today’s modern world, why is gender still a fundamental prerequisite to success?
Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Allen Lane/Random House, 2020) by prominent philosopher Kate Manne is a timely and important investigation of misogyny, male privilege and how men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies, time, care, domestic labor, and admiration. In her earlier book, Down Girl, Ms Manne examined the ways that society polices girls and women who violate or even question the patriarchal system, whereas Entitled focuses on the range of ways that men behave that women cannot.
Interweaving a combination of recent anecdotes, news stories, literature, and scientific research, Ms Manne builds her case for how patriarchal structures and a culture of misogyny support widespread male misbehaviors from gaslighting and mansplaining to rape and mass shootings — most of which in the past 20 years were planned and carried out by white men and boys. Early in the book, Ms Manne coins a word, himpathy, to describe the way that powerful and privileged boys and men who commit acts of sexual violence or who engage in other misogynistic actions often receive sympathy and concern whilst their female victims are marginalized, disbelieved or told they somehow provoked their own extreme circumstances. Think: Brett Kavanaugh and Harvey Weinstein and the familiar excuse “boys will be boys.”
Entitlement is not genetic: women are just as capable of acting out of a sense of entitlement as men are, and the author recognizes this. Ms Manne mentions her own position of privilege (she’s a white woman) and points out that provides her with entitlements that non-white women and LGBTQIA minorities typically do not enjoy. However, boys in general are raised to expect special treatment, and boys and men live immersed in a pervasive culture of entitlement, whereas women and girls are penalized — often severely — if they do not adhere to this often unspoken code. Basically, women must live according to vastly different (and higher) standards than men or they are punished.
The book is nine chapters long, and each covers the various entitlements enjoyed by privileged men. But the chapters about abortion and health care particularly enraged me. Yet it’s no surprise that women’s bodily autonomy and health concerns are not taken seriously by the medical profession despite the fact that women usually prioritize themselves last. Women’s health complaints are frequently whitewashed by the medical establishment. Even their pain is regularly downplayed or disbelieved, and inspires less medical intervention, despite research indicating that women feel slightly more pain than men when experiencing the same noxious stimuli. Ironically, despite the medical profession’s innate distrust of women’s complaints about their own health status, their testimonies about their children’s health complaints are recognized as being supremely competent. Why?
The author also discusses the poor health care that Black women in particular receive from white care providers, and how Black women are routinely neglected and dismissed — silenced — by the medical establishment. Even fame and wealth don’t help Black women, as we saw when tennis superstar Serena Williams nearly died after childbirth because her health care team ignored her repeated warnings about her history of blood clots. Although Ms Manne did include several credible anecdotes and news stories, I was disappointed that she did not reference any scientific studies of Black women’s (mis)treatment at the hands of the medical establishment.
The other chapter that really made my blood boil focused on Elizabeth Warren and how her male colleagues treated her during her presidential run, and how she was largely ignored at the ballot box by the American public despite polling that indicated that she was widely perceived as a serious and worthwhile candidate. Ms Manne writes:
“But while there is reasonable disagreement over whether Warren deserved to win the nomination, there has been considerable surprise and consternation that she didn’t at least do better than she did — losing contests to various white men, in the form of Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and sometimes even Pete Buttigieg or Michael Bloomberg — especially given her erstwhile popularity.” [Italics the author’s] (p. 177)
Although she continues the discussion specifically about Elizabeth Warren’s political opponents, I think that Ms Manne’s observations are generally applicable to any situation faced by women:
“We expect too much from women. And when a woman we like or respect disappoints us, even in minor and forgivable ways, she is liable to be punished — often by people who think they have the moral high ground, and are merely reacting to her as she deserves, rather than helping to enact misogyny via moralism. Meanwhile, no such perfection is demanded of her male rivals. Sanders paid no penalty for flipping his 2016 position on whether the candidate with a plurality of delegates should automatically become the Democratic nominee, when that outcome stood to his potential advantage in 2020. Nor did Biden face much criticism for his hazy public-option health plan, or for the embellished stories he told on the campaign trail — not to mention, his history of plagiarism.” (Pp. 177-178)
I really appreciated how the author consistently focused on women’s experiences of men’s entitlement rather than talking about how men think about themselves in relation to women.
In our modern world, women are still fighting for equality. Sure, we have the right to vote (finally) but we still are responsible for most of the housework and childcare and are paid less than men for working the same jobs, whilst patriarchal culture ensures that women pay more for clothing and dry cleaning and hair cuts and health insurance than men. It is clear to any rational person that there is still much work to be done before we achieve parity.
And as an aside, writers typically use Twitter to share news of their writing with the public — normally a happy occasion. But when I looked at the author’s Twitter timeline, I was astonished to see her announcement for the upcoming (at the time) release of this book had been removed after hoards of testosterone-poisoned misogynists reported it to the deluded imbeciles that populate the staff of Twitter (here).
The message here is overwhelmingly clear: an intelligent, well-educated, respected woman is not allowed to share her writing with the public on Twitter if she discusses the myriad ways women are abused by a paternalistic Western culture.
If you read Ms Manne’s previous book, Down Girl, and were dismayed by her conclusion that nothing would likely ever change for women in any meaningful way, Entitled ends on a more optimistic note. The final chapter is an eloquent outline of Ms Manne’s hopes for her baby daughter and what she will hopefully be entitled to expect as an adult in the future, despite the many seemingly intractable problems facing women and other minorities today. I’m doubtful. I think Ms Manne came to the correct conclusion in Down Girl. But I guess she should be at least somewhat optimistic since she is a new mother to a baby girl in a male-dominated world.
This book is witty, honest and infuriating. It is meticulously researched (with more than 60 pages of references and notes), and well-indexed (11 pages) and delivers a powerful dose of reality about the many obstacles that our patriarchal culture creates for girls and women. Entitled is impassioned and timely and is essential reading for us all.
This gripping novel, The Chemical Reaction (Point Blank, 2020) by Fiona Erskine is the second instalment in the Jaqueline “Jaq” Silver series and This gripping novel, The Chemical Reaction (Point Blank, 2020) by Fiona Erskine is the second instalment in the Jaqueline “Jaq” Silver series and it starts, literally, with a BOOM. It picks up where the first novel, The Chemical Detective (my review), ended with our fearless hero, globe-trotting chemical engineer, Dr Jaqueline Silver, sailing the yacht, Good Ship Frankium, on the Black Sea with her lover, Giovanni. That yacht, which promptly sinks, was owned by her former boss, Frank Good, a ruthless corporate player who has trapped Jaq in a watertight contract that demands repayment for the cost of the boat, regardless of the fact — a minor detail? — that it was not seaworthy. At the same time, Jaq is already strapped for cash because she is paying hospice bills for her aging mother who is suffering from dementia.
Predictably, events escalate from there. Jaq, who is unemployed, is suddenly offered a high-paying contract that will solve her financial woes. Her potential benefactor, Sophie Clark, is the managing director of the joint venture company, Krixo. This company, which uses rare earth elements to develop superstrong magnets for wind turbines, batteries and other green energy technologies, is located in Shingbo, a mythical coastal town that lies south of Shanghai in Zhejiang province, China. Because tensions have recently arisen between Krixo’s joint venture partners, Sophie wants an expert to secretly investigate. Despite her money problems, Jaq is very reluctant to get involved with what appears to be corporate espionage.
“I’ve had enough of investigating dodgy companies. I’ve put my friends in danger, and I’m not doing it again. Give me a technical problem and I’ll solve it, give me a project and I’ll manage it, give me a team and I’ll lead it, but no more mysteries”, Jaq later complains privately (p. 89).
But someone has already been put in danger, as Jaq discovers, after one of her former students, who is Chinese, disappears shortly after she sent him a brief email query about Krixo.
So of course, Jaq accepts Sophie’s contract and goes to China. But things do not go well: not only can she not find her former student, but her translator and driver also disappear — as does the entire Krixo factory. Whoa, whaaa..? How can an entire factory and all of its large and expensive equipment just ... disappear? In just a few days?
Meanwhile, at roughly the same time in London, the rare jade Lovers Cup, once the possession of Quinlong, the 18th century Qing dynasty emperor who was infamous for executing his enemies by slicing them to death with a thousand cuts, is sold for £10 million. When both the art auctioneer and a retired professor are murdered and their pets dismembered, these two eerily similar crimes raise troubling questions about potential connections. Further, is all this connected to the recent heists of Chinese treasures from museums in Durham, Stockholm and Lisbon? And what is the connection between ancient Chinese works of art and a joint venture green tech company located in China?
These questions and more are addressed by an intricate but plausible plot that skilfully weaves together fact and fiction — along with plenty of high-octane action and mystery. I was especially impressed by the author’s use of a character to provide a personal view of the 1975 Banqiao dam disaster as well as a glimpse into the tragically misguided “Smash Sparrows” campaign, which lasted from 1958 to 1962 — both of which devastated farming communities and led to catastrophic famines in China. (You can even read a little more about the Chinese history mentioned in this novel in the 6-page Author’s Note at the end.)
In addition to having a healthy imagination and a love of history, the author also relies on her real-life expertise as a chemical engineer to share some science with her readers, including some information about the 17 rare Earth elements (which really aren’t very rare) used by green energy technologies, and even venturing into describing a little human endocrinology.
As I read the book, I became intrigued by the chapter pages because each featured a different rare earth element. What could this possibly mean? After puzzling over this for a few hours, I tweeted my question to the author, and she replied on twitter.
Mystery solved. Both I and my many tiny color-coded post-it tabs peeking out from pages throughout the book were satisfied.
Overall, this unique and entertaining novel is a lot of fun. The plot is complex, intelligent and carefully developed and features just the right blend of suspense and mystery, explosions and gorgeous male strippers, theft of multi-million dollar artworks and five-star dining in interesting locations that will especially satisfy those suffering from cabin-fever. But be careful if you have a meeting in the morning: you may not be able to put this book down once you’ve started reading it!
Accidentals (Torrey House, 2020) is a lovely story narrated by Gabriel, the 23-year-old son of a naturalized American who suddenly decides to leavAccidentals (Torrey House, 2020) is a lovely story narrated by Gabriel, the 23-year-old son of a naturalized American who suddenly decides to leave California after residing there for more than 30 years to return to her native Uruguay. After some cajoling, Gabe leaves his high-paying but boring data analysis job to help his mother realize her dream to grow organic vegetables on the family’s abandoned estancia.
“You’ll like the estancia,” Mom said. I hadn’t even looked at her but she knew she was getting to me. “It’ll be spring, summer. If you don’t want to help with the farm, you can go exploring. Borrow a horse, or go hiking and birding.” (P. 12)
A month later, Gabe and his mother, Lili, are residing in his Abuela’s family house in Montevideo busily restoring order to the chaos reigning there, but soon, they are spending increasing amounts of time on the family estancia, a few hours’ drive away. At first, he feels like he’s on an obligatory holiday, but Gabe’s interest in birds tempts him to explore the ranch’s marshes and fields, and soon, he’s filling notebooks with detailed sketches and notes about his many fascinating avian discoveries and observations. On one of his birding expeditions, he meets a local microbiologist, Alejandra, who’s searching for undiscovered microbes on the estancia.
Gabe also becomes swept up in the ongoing family drama over what to do with the land. One of Lili’s brothers, Juan Luis, is determined to bulldoze the estancia so he can grow rice and sell it at a profit to a European market. Complicating (or perhaps clarifying) the discussion about the fate of the family estancia, Gabe stumbles across a species of rail (that’s a bird) lurking in the dense vegetation on the estancia’s wetlands that does not appear in any of his field guides. Is this an accidental: a bird that pops up far out of its range for reasons unknown? Or is this a species that is new to science?
Appropriately enough, accidents are critical to this novel. Not just rails, but as the story unfolds, other accidents play pivotal roles in driving the plot, too. I particularly enjoyed how this novel took its time to tell the story, and to tell it well. It starts slowly, conversationally, and gently builds to a surprising conclusion. Every word, every sentence, every scene adds depth and intensity to the story. Throughout the entire book, many seemingly disparate themes whose hidden and often intricate connections are melded into one story. The characters, both human and avian, were complex and believable, and I ended up liking them all. Gabe’s inner monologues were enlightening, and his growing love for Alejandra humanized him and made him vulnerable, transforming him from a detached observer to an active, passionate participant in his own life.
This modern coming-of-age story is intelligent and epic in scope: presenting a thoughtful commentary on intimate family relationships; an investigation into how repressive government regimes and political violence that have sabotaged the lives of so many families continue to reverberate generations later; a sharp criticism of globalization and a warning about the growing threat of environmental devastation that is steadily bulldozing its way into our everyday lives.
The author, Susan Gaines, writes exceptionally well: her short stories have been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her meticulous research into microbiology, ecology, rice cultivation, and the politics and history of Uruguay provide additional authenticity. Her elegant prose is so powerfully evocative that the landscape, the people and its birds bounced off the page, surrounding and immersing me in the unfolding story.
If I could sum up this multifaceted story in just one word, that would be love. From its first sentence to its last, this book focuses on what we love — children, spouses, family, friends, nature, the environment, country — and the many ways that we show our love. Highly recommended.
I've always loved mathematics, so I was pleasantly surprised when Satyan Devadoss and Matthew Harvey’s new book, Mage Merlin’s Unsolved Mathematical MI've always loved mathematics, so I was pleasantly surprised when Satyan Devadoss and Matthew Harvey’s new book, Mage Merlin’s Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries (MIT Press, 2020), arrived in the mail recently. These mysteries consist of sixteen unsolved mathematical conundrums, each of which is “a sword in the stone waiting for someone to draw it out”, presenting a riddle “that no mathematical wizard has yet overcome”. Some of these mysteries are well-known, such as the Goldbach Conjecture, whilst others are relatively obscure, but certainly no less captivating to contemplate. The basic mathematical ideas have been elegantly reframed into captivating puzzles like Lancelot’s labyrinth, The Great Hall Window, and Round Table Tiles, and that involve solving simple physical puzzles like gift wrapping a package, perfectly slicing a cake at a festival, and designing a mirrored vault for the Holy Grail.
The authors present each puzzle in a fun way that is easily understood and tested by anyone with only basic mathematical knowledge. The lavish illustrations are colorful contributions that make it easy for the reader to understand at a glance the precise nature of the problem they are being asked to solve.
Even more appealing, these mysteries are presented to the reader by a fictional narrator, Mage Maryam, who weaves these puzzles into an enjoyable story that her distant ancestor, Merlin the Magician, recorded in a notebook. (Mage Maryam is inspired by real-life maths genius, Iranian-born Maryam Mirzakhani, the only woman to win the Fields Medal — nicknamed the “Nobel Prize of mathematics” — before her life was tragically cut short by cancer.)
This unique book will charm and delight mathematical explorers of all ages with its beautiful illustrations, captivating story, and unsolved mathematical challenges that range from geometry to number theory and more.
Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you [thereafter], save only this, that if you work
Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you [thereafter], save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not sole, purpose of education.
— Idealist philosopher John Alexander Smith (1863–1939)
Spin. Fake News. Conspiracy theories. Lies. We are daily confronted with a stinking quagmire of misinformation, disinformation and fact-free drivel. How do we sort the truth from the lies? This is the premise of the timely new book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (Allen Lane/Random House, 2020), a book that effectively acts as a field guide to the art of scepticism.
The authors are expert guides. Carl Bergstrom is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist who researches how information flows through biological and social networks. Jevin West is a data scientist who studies misinformation in science and society. Together, they teach a popular undergraduate class offered under the same name by the University of Washington.
This book, a distillation of that course, presents a mix of amusing anecdotes, timely news stories and accessible explanations of scientific and medical data. You do not need to be a professional statistician or some other sort of mathematical wizard, nor must you invest weeks into fact-checking to see through most nonsense. Instead, the authors argue, assessing the accuracy of a particular claim using basic logic, augmented (where necessary) with information that can be easily retrieved by an online search engine is sufficient to “call bullshit”.
The authors point out that creating bullshit is easier and often simpler than speaking the truth. That is why BS is accepted as truth. Italian software engineer, Alberto Brandolini perhaps said it best when he noted in 2014 that “the amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than [that needed] to produce it”, which explains why there is so much baloney in the world. Uriel Fanelli helpfully observed that “an idiot can create more BS than you could ever hope to refute.”
So why bother “calling bullshit”? As the authors assert, adequate bullshit detection is essential for the survival of democracy. Regardless of political ideologies, democracy has always relied on a critically thinking electorate, and this intellectual skill is more important than ever in this modern age of online information warfare. It also is critically important for proper functioning of any social group, whether it is a small group of friends or some other social group, or a professional community.
This book teaches us how to identify the various forms of new-school bullshit: how to evaluate scientific claims, to distinguish between correlation and causation, to recognize biased and unrepresentative data and small sample sizes, to identify selection biases in samples, to understand how data can be manipulated visually, and more. They also include lots of graphs and other data images so you can practice spotting screwy data representations yourself. Whether you are confused by the anti-vax movement, which grew out of a single retracted medical study, to the claim that Artificial Intelligence can infer sexual orientation from analyzing a photograph of a person’s face, there is no shortage of nutty ideas out there to contemplate and dissect.
The book ends with two empowering chapters on how to spot and refute nonsense and, more importantly, how to do so in a useful and constructive way.
Ironically, despite the authors’ assertion that proper fact-checking is essential, the book only has an alphabetized reference list for each chapter in the back of the book, leaving interested readers to scratch their collective heads as they try to deduce which statement should be attributed to which source. And although mistakes do inevitably creep in during the writing and editing process, I was surprised that the letter M in the commonly used acronym, STEM, was erroneously attributed to medicine, instead of mathematics. And yes, I was disappointed by the poor quality paper that the book was printed on.
Despite my complaints (some of which are probably beyond the authors’ control), Calling Bullshit presents a thoughtful, careful and engaging deconstruction about how to spot and disprove nonsense. It should be required reading for high school and university students as well as for any thinking person who is working to identify questionable news sources and stories, and navigate their way around social media in these weird times.
NOTE:Originally published at Forbes.com on 28 August 2020.
Also note that I read the hardback edition, which (weirdly) is not listed on goodreads, NOT THE KINDLE VERSION....more
Wouldn’t you like to read an action thriller that features a strong yet credible female scientist as its protagonist? Well, look no further because FiWouldn’t you like to read an action thriller that features a strong yet credible female scientist as its protagonist? Well, look no further because Fiona Erskine’s debut novel, The Chemical Detective (Point Blank; 2019) delivers.
The central character, Jacqueline Silver, is a chemical engineer who works for a research center, Snow Science, in Slovenia. She studies artificial glaciers and works to keep people safe using her expertise with explosives to manage avalanches. So when a consignment of explosives is delivered with inaccurate paperwork, Jaq reports this to her boss, who dismisses her concerns. Confused and suspicious, Jaq does what any competent professional would do: she takes samples and investigates. After the shipment mysteriously disappears, she takes her concerns to corporate headquarters in Britain. But instead of rewarding her diligence, she is attacked by her employer who openly questions her mental health, accuses her of professional incompetence and then falsely blames her for an explosion at the research center before suspending her from her job. But even after all that pushback, Jaq continues to investigate the matter, and ends up narrowly escaping death before she is framed for murder.
Jaq ends up on the run from the Slovenian and British police. She travels from the snowy Slovenian Alps to the bleakness of England’s Lake District, to other locations in Europe — and even to the devastation of the Chernobyl exclusion zone — all places where the author has lived and worked so you feel like you are right there alongside Jaq as she searches for clues into the illegal global trade in chemical weapons.
Science is woven throughout the novel, and the explanations of explosives, isotopes, and gravity provide the reader with important insights into the satisfyingly convoluted plot. The author, Fiona Erskine, is a chemical engineer herself so she writes about these science-y topics with an easy authority that makes them accessible to anyone.
Jaq is a charismatic and multi-faceted character with a complicated personal and professional background and a weakness for younger men. She is tenacious and intelligent, and despite being completely unprepared for what happens in the book, and being disbelieved by everyone, she simply does her best to make things right. In short, she’s likeable and real instead being portrayed as some sort of invincible action superhero.
In contrast, I didn’t much like the villains. In my opinion, they were too perfectly evil, and too one-dimensional. I also found the chapters devoted to following the CEO of a shady chemical company, Frank Good, and his shenanigans as a ruthless corporate player to be rather tedious.
Shortlisted for the Best Debut Crime Novel of 2020 by SpecSavers, this novel is entertaining and engaging. Although this fast-paced action thriller is rather far-fetched in places, it has a realistic premise and it untangles the story with just the right blend of suspense and tension, and with the added bonus of fascinating locations that will especially satisfy those suffering from cabin-fever. You’ll also learn a little about chemistry, chemical weapons, Chernobyl, the Russian derivation for engineer, and what makes the sea smell like, well, the sea.
I recommend this original and compelling debut novel for fans of mysteries and thrillers, as well as for those looking for a credible female protagonist in a genre dominated by male superheroes. Already, I am looking forward to reading the next instalment in this series.
NOTE: Originally published at Forbes on 23 July 2020.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest, unbiased review....more
Loading...
