I’ve mentioned this here before, but not following my first dream of becoming a paleontologist is one of my great regrets. It was quite literally my first dream job – I wanted to start digging up dinosaur bones at the age of four and was constantly bringing home rocks so my dad and I could hammer them open and check for bones. My parents were indulgent of my obsession with rocks and bones, which I try to remember every time I am bitter that they wouldn’t send me for ice-skating lessons. I digress. Anyway, I am still interested in dinosaurs probably more than the average person but maybe not as much as the average enthusiastic child (myself as a 5-10 year old).
I did Stephen Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World as an audiobook and I regret it for two reasons. The first reason is that I didn’t get to look at the photographs and illustrations. The second is I couldn’t skim the memoir parts. Brusatte clearly knows his stuff and loves dinosaurs, and I learned a lot from this book and greatly enjoyed the parts about dinosaurs. The memoir parts were sort of self-congratulatory and not so great? They were informative, just sort of annoying. He drops a bunch of names and while it’s fine, it feels egocentric after awhile.
Brusatte’s writing could also be a bit dry at times. It wasn’t terrible, mind you, I just sometimes felt he could have been using more engaging language. That said, I did feel like he enjoyed and loved dinosaurs too, which I felt a lot of value in. Textbooks are fine but I haven’t actually ever read a textbook I didn’t have to.
Anyway, if you like dinosaurs and want to read more about them, I recommend this book. If you don’t want to read a guy’s memoir where he drops names and congratulates himself for his achievements I also recommend this book but mostly skim those parts. Simple enough, right?
Category Archives: science
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
How Not To Die
I forget how I stumbled across How Not to Die, but the title interested me. I am rather invested in not dying.
The author, Michael Greger, is an MD whose argument is that most disease in the United States are preventable with simple diet changes – basically that people should adopt a plant based diet. This book presents a lot of good information and overall I liked it and found it valuable, however, I’m also rather torn over it.
Greger advocates for people to switch to a plant based diet and while he claims that he doesn’t support any particular diet, it basically sounds like his recommendation is veganism, but he never says veganism, probably because veganism is “controversial” in the United States, but also because veganism has some drawbacks. Vegans frequently require supplements – because vegan diets frequently lack critical nutrients like B12 and iodine.
Some of the research is cherrypicked. You can read more about that here.
But overall, Greger is not wrong. People, particularly Americans, should be eating more fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds than they currently are. They shouldn’t be consuming the vast amounts of meat (particularly red meat), sugar, and unhealthy fats that they do.
That said, Greger also discusses some of the more systemic problems with “Big Agriculture” in the United States – the chemicals that Big Ag is allowed to add to our foods, particularly meat, that are banned in the rest of the world.
I definitely recommend this book – it will, at the very least, help you make some easy, for-the-better diet changes – I try to eat more berries now! And seeds, which I wasn’t eating much before. Just make sure you investigate the claims in the book and make sure you do what works for you.
The Lost City of the Monkey God
The Lost City of the Monkey God is a 2017 non-fiction book by Douglas Preston (who also wrote The Monster of Florence, which I didn’t realize until recently) about the efforts to discover La Ciudad Blanca in Honduras.
Legends of La Ciudad Blanca go back centuries, with stories circulating as far back as the era of the conquistadors of Spain. Naturally, La Ciudad Blanca is supposedly a civilization of legendary wealth, and people have been exploring the Honduras and Nicaragua jungles for decades, looking for the ancient ruins of the city (and probably hoping to find lots of gold). Archeologists, anthropologists and the other ‘ists’ who study these things now believe that while it’s likely such a settlement did exist, it was probably a larger civilization over a larger area that just one specific city.
Preston’s book takes on one such effort to locate what’s left of the civilization. The book debunks claims to have found such a city in the 1930s (when these exploration expeditions were quite common). Those 1930s expeditions are where the book gets its name from, though.
Preston ends up joining a joint Honduran & American expedition to a previously unsearched area, where lidar technology indicates extensive archaeological sites hidden by the rainforest. The site ends up being a large pre-Hispanic settlement – with plazas, terracing, canals, roads, etc… The site indicated that in this area once was an extensive, fairly advanced civilization. It was also determined to be abandoned approximately 500 years ago. While this city was an invaluable find, the existence of La Ciudad Blanca remains uncertain. The city Preston’s expedition found is modernly called ‘City of the Jaguar.’
Preston’s book was quite interesting and I learned a lot from it (I don’t know that much about South America, so it’s not surprising I learned a lot). In addition to the discovery of the abandoned settlement, Preston recounts the history and geography of the area, mostly remote tropical rainforest, as well as the trials and tribulations of the expedition – dehydration, mud, parasites, poisonous snakes. So, you know, all everyone’s favorite things.
The book was interesting and I learned a lot. Would recommend.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base
I did a couple of pretty heavy history books in 2019, and this one was by far the wildest. Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is exactly the kind of book anyone interested in aviation and military history would want to read.
I originally borrowed Area 51 as an audiobook from the library but enjoyed it so much I ended up buying an actual copy of the book. Jacobsen interviews surviving military and aviation professionals who spent time in Area 51, as well as surviving participants of the US nuclear programs during the second World War and the Cold War.
With all the UFO stuff Area 51 is famous for, a lot of the other history surrounding the area can get lost. The history and use of the base is tightly guarded, which has fed into the legend, but the area is, first and foremost, a military base called Homey Airport or Groom Lake. A lot of the secrecy surrounding the base is due to the military developments taking place there, not aliens. Jacobsen documents the planes/programs developed, built, and tested out there (out there being the Nevada desert, for anyone who doesn’t know) in great detail. Included on the list of Area 51 programs was the U-2 program.
Nuclear testing/development was also taking place out there. In the book Jacobsen interviews Richard Mingus, who worked as security guard at the base for decades. He was even there when the base came under attack during a nuclear test. It turned out to not really be under attack, but it was a great story and I really liked Mingus as he came across.
The book was really interesting. It really was, I very much enjoyed it.
But where it failed was the alien stuff.
I’m about to spoil you.
If you want to be surprised about Jacobsen’s alien hot take, I am telling you stop reading here.
Stop.
Stop.
You asked for it.
Jacobsen claims that the infamous crafts/beings rumored to have crashed in the Nevada desert were, essentially, human guinea pigs flying crafts developed by the USSR. Stalin hired infamous Nazi “doctor” Josef Mengele to develop “grotesque, child size aviators” to pilot crafts to America that would produce the kind of hysteria that happened after Orson Welles’ broadcast of his 1938 radio program, War of the Worlds. The bodies found at the crash site were, ultimately, mutilated children. And this is what has been top secret for 75 years.
While the explanation isn’t any less plausible than an alien spaceship crash, it somehow actually feels like more of a stretch. I wouldn’t put it past Mengele or Stalin to attempt such an evil thing (obviously), but it still just seems too far fetched.
The book is criticized by some for being poorly sourced with errors, however, based on what I read, it seemed unclear if the sources were wrong or the translation into entertainment caused the errors. I think the idea of the UFO stuff being a Soviet hoax is the main source of the outrage from critics. The military and aviation stuff seems reasonably well done, although at least one person took issue with the source Jacobsen used for her information on the Manhattan Project.
Overall, I enjoyed the book tremendously. I highly recommend it if you’re into twentieth century American history, from World War II to the Cold War.
2018: The Year of Bill Bryson
There were a couple of authors I hit heavily in 2018, the first of which being Bill Bryson.
I read/listened to:
The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain
In A Sunburned Country
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Shakespeare: The World as Stage
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
Journeys in English
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Neither Here Nor There
and, last but not least, I’m A Stranger Here Myself.
Bryson writes about history and travel, and I enjoy his wit, knowledge and humor on these subjects.
His travel books in this bunch were The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain (Bryson in Britain), In A Sunburned Country (Bryson in Australia), A Walk in the Woods (Bryson on the Appalachian Trail), and I’m A Stranger Here Myself (Bryson in America after living abroad for 20 years with his British wife).
A Walk in the Woods is probably Bryson’s most famous travel book, and it was adapted into a film starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte in 2015. Bryson and a friend of his from high school, who he calls Stephen Katz, set off to hike the entire Appalachian Trail together. For those who don’t know, the Appalachian Trail is a marked 2,200 mile hiking trail that runs from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine and, IIRC, is the longest hiking only trail in the world. Bryson and Katz do not end up hiking the whole trail, but they do hike a good portion of it, and A Walk in the Woods is, by far, one of the funniest travel books I have ever read. The frenemy-like relationship between Bryson and Katz only adds to the hysterics, and when they accidentally pick up Maryellen as a traveling companion, the results are downright hilarious.
While all of Bryson’s books are, at points, laugh out loud funny, his travel books are uniquely humorous. The culture clashes (particularly in foreign countries and regions in the USA outside of his own), his desire to do things in a frugal manner, and his gift for capturing the characters of people he meets combine into relatable, funny experiences that anyone who has ever felt like a fish out of water can appreciate.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid was a memoir, and while funny and insightful and quite interesting, Bryson’s nostalgia for 50s and 60s America made me cringe a little. I don’t think I’m nostalgic by nature, and the 50s and 60s were a hard time for a lot of people. I just have no desire to return to the era. However, I do get Bryson’s desire for people to return to being politer and quieter.
The other books by Bryson on my list were history books. Most had a central theme, although how closely he stuck to the theme varies. At Home: A Short History of Private Life was about the history of home life and actual rooms in houses, though it branched out quite a bit. A Short History of Nearly Everything is probably Bryson’s most famous history book on my list, and it was quite interesting. It was complex but understandable, with Bryson explaining points of chemistry, geology, biology, and physics in terms the average reader can understand. It was also the only book of Bryson’s he didn’t read for his own audiobook, which was disappointing. I loved listening to Bryson read his audiobooks.
But my favorite of his history books was, of course, Shakespeare: The World as Stage. I don’t know if my love of Shakespeare has been mentioned here. I haven’t read a play on its own in quite some time – since before I started keeping this blog, I think. I read a ton of his plays growing up, for school and for fun, at least two a year for all the summers I went to Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. I haven’t been there in a while. But I love Shakespeare because of HVSF, and am fascinated by the mystery surrounding Shakespeare himself.
Bryson jumps into those mysteries head first, interviewing scholars, establishing what is and is known about the world’s most famous playwright, discussing what can be proved and disproved or neither, as well as discussing questions of authorship, lost plays, and background of cultural, social, political, and historical events of the time that influenced the work.
One thing that I found particularly interesting was that plots and characters by authors and playwrights during Shakespeare’s time were considered common property, and Shakespeare consequently used established characters and plots from other plays, most of which survive in pieces or in name only in the historical record. The plays themselves have disappeared.
The whole book was very interesting but one part that Bryson does focus on towards the conclusion of the book is that people seem determined to believe that William Shakespeare – whether they think he was a composite person or a pen name for one author or many authors – didn’t write his own works. Bryson goes on to say that the theories about who the true authors really were never seem to quite fit and that this determination also doesn’t seem to apply to other authors at the time, Ben Johnson or Christopher Marlowe being prime examples.
I think the fact that people can’t believe that Shakespeare wrote his own work kind of speaks to the work’s enduring brilliance. After all this time and all this study and scholarship, people still can’t believe that one man wrote all those plays. It’s incredible.
So that was my journey through Bill Bryson’s works. I highly recommend all of Bill Bryson’s stories. You will learn stuff, and laugh out loud doing it. I also highly recommend the audiobooks, which Bryson reads himself with his dry, humorous delivery.
Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus
I’m not sure what made me check this out to listen to on Overdrive. I kept seeing it available? Maybe the title? It is sort of unusual to describe a virus as ‘diabolical.’ Viruses are viruses. They do what they do. There is no evil intent there.
But rabies is different. Even now, in the year 2018, with a method of treatment for the sickness that got animals killed by the thousands and terrified everyone throughout cities and rural communities alike, rabies is a scary disease. It’s good practice, as a matter of routine, that if you find bats where you live, you go get treated for rabies. If you’re bitten by anything outside, go get treated for rabies.
Rabies has terrified people for thousands of years. The sickness that makes you fear water is a long, slow, painful way to go out. Even now, once it takes hold in the brain, nobody is immune to it and (almost) nobody survives it. You painfully lose your mind, and you die.
Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy takes us through Greek mythology to the middle ages to the Renaissance to contemporary times, examining the science, history, and the cultural impact of the rabies virus.
One of the most interesting things I found in this book was the link between rabies and the vampire and (even more so) werewolf legends of the middle ages in Europe. Rabies, after about 30 days, depending on the site of the bite, causes the infected, previously normal person to (more or less) lose his/her mind as (s)he becomes a snarling, hissing, foaming shell of his/her former self. The lycanthropy legend involves an infected but previously totally normal person to totally lose his/her mind and become a snarling, hissing, animal monster. When does this occur? At the full moon. How often does it occur? About every 30 days (about the incubation period of the rabies virus). Oh, and how is the werewolf infected? (S)he’s bitten by another person who has the disease. Just like…rabies.
One of my favorite parts of the book was learning about the heroic efforts Louis Pasteur took to come up with a way to inoculate against the rabies virus. I forget exactly why he was interested in this. I can’t remember if someone he loved died of rabies or it was just because he was biologist/microbiologist who was interested in it. He was fearless, collecting samples of saliva from rabid dogs himself (with the help of two assistants), testing the vaccination over and over on various animals (this hurts my heart but I recognize there was really no way around it), and finally testing it on 9 year old Joseph Meister, who had been badly mauled by a rabid dog. This was a huge risk to Pasteur because, in spite of his extensive scientific background, he was not a physician and it opened him up to legal consequences should anything go wrong.
But Meister survived. 3 months after being mauled, he was still in good health. Meister always publicly defended Pasteur (who was somewhat of a controversial figure, as people of science and forward thinking can be) and served as caretaker of the Pasteur Institute in Paris until his death in 1940. The story says he committed suicide rather than let the Nazis enter Pasteur’s crypt.
Fun Fact: I celebrated Louis Pasteur’s birthday this year by baking cookies and handing them out at work. We should celebrate our great thinkers. By the way, Pasteur also came up with the process of Pasteurization aka heating liquids to a certain temperature to destroy dangerous microorganisms living in them. Liquids like milk. Dunk your cookies.
There is a method, called the Milwaukee Protocol, to treat rabies after neurological signs of infection start showing (which usually means the patient is beyond hope) but it usually fails. It worked one time, saving the life of a Wisconsin teenager who is now the only known person to survive rabies without receiving the vaccine. Treatment involves putting the patient in a coma, pumping the patient with antiviral drugs, and letting the body fight off the infection before it completely destroys the brain. The theory behind this treatment being something along the lines of “if the human body can fight off other viruses, it can fight off this one given enough time and medical help.” If a patient is showing neurological symptoms, they might as well try this treatment. They’re definitely going to die without it and only probably going die with it, which is still better than “definitely.” But really, if you think you’ve been exposed, just go get the vaccine.
Finally, as with many of my books, I did this one on audiobook. It was read by Johnny Heller, who was the same person who read another one of my 2017 favorites, The Lampshade. Heller did an excellent job narrating this book as well.
I loved Rabid. It was, in many ways, a scary book. It’s easy to understand why people hundred and thousands of years ago who didn’t understand viruses thought the rabies virus was diabolical. It is slow, and painful, and always fatal, sending normal people into unrecognizable, raving madness before killing them. I know a lot of people on Goodreads didn’t find it a very interesting book, and for some reason they really hated that the virus was anthropomorphized in the title. But I think they missed the point. And I loved the book. I love myths and legends, science and history. And people get all wrapped up in how scary rabies is, and it is scary. But the book, possibly without meaning to, provides a lot of reasons for hope – not just regarding rabies, but regarding lots of things.
As scary and dangerous as the rabies virus is, science and human ingenuity conquered it. Rabies has been almost entirely eliminated as a human cause of death globally. Even developing countries have seen huge declines in deaths by rabies infections. Just think of all the other things we can accomplish.
words in scarlet ink 