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?
Tag Archives: genre: 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.
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 