SubscribeThe Great Influenza
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The Great Influenza
by John M. Barry - Publisher: Viking Adult
- Year: 2004
- Pages: 560
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- №16
The recent hullabaloo both in America and abroad about H1N1 (“swine flu”) last year brought influenza back into the zeitgeist in a way it has not been for many years—more years, likely, than the last couple of generations largely ignorant of just how serious influenza was and could potentially be in the future. About 14,000 deaths were caused by the swine flu worldwide to-date. Compare that figure to the estimates for mortality in the 1918 flu pandemic, which range from 20 million deaths on the low end to 120 million deaths on the high end.
The Great Influenza is what Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone should have been about instead of an Ebola threat that was, well, never actually a threat.
K-Pax
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K-Pax
by Gene Brewer - Publisher: St. Martin's
- Year: 2001
- Pages: 256
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- №13
Like most people (I imagine), I was first introduced to K-Pax via the 2001 film of the same name starring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. I hadn’t even realized until some time later that it was based upon a 1995 novel by Gene Brewer. Though I generally hate comparing books and movies, I will do so to a limited extent here because I think that the movie highlights some of the book’s failings.
SuperFreakonomics
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SuperFreakonomics
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner - Publisher: William Morrow
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 287
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- №63
When Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner published Freaknomics several years ago, they gained a bit of mainstream fame as popular science writers (think Malcolm Gladwell). They also stirred up controversy with their assertion that abortion lowers the crime rate, which also raised a ruckus for poor Bill Bennett, who didn’t deserve it for once.
For better or worse, Levitt and Dubner have drummed up a sequel, dubbed—faster, better, stronger—SuperFreakonomics, a title that is preposterous and sensationalist, but which the authors readily admit.
A Short History of the American Stomach
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A Short History of the American Stomach
by Frederick Kaufman - Publisher: Mariner
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 224
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- №55
When I got Frederick Kaufman’s A Short History of the American Stomach, I had expected something along the lines of Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses, perhaps with the cultural slant of Bill Bryson’s Made in America.
Plastic Fantastic
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Plastic Fantastic
by Eugenie Samuel Reich - Publisher: Macmillan
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 272
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- №52
I remember only vaguely, back in 2002, the story of a scientist who had been exposed as one of the biggest frauds in history. At the time, I suppose, I didn’t follow science news nearly as much as I do now; on the other hands, it’s possible that even a story as big as “the greatest physics fraud in the last 50 years” still didn’t register much in the mainstream news.
When I read the premise of Plastic Fantastic, however, I remembered the scant attention I had paid to the story seven years ago.
The story of Jan Hendrik Schön begins around 1997, according to Eugenie Reich. That was around the time that Schön, who would eventually fool most of the physics community for 4 years, was working on his doctorate at the University of Konstanz, in Germany. Schön eventually found his way into Bell Labs, which at that point was the research wing of Lucent Technology. Reich paints Schön the student as a bright, if not extroverted, brilliant, or adventurous student.
But I’m getting ahead of myself; since a reader of Reich’s book (published in 2009) has at least the distinct possibility of knowing about the scandal, Reich opens with an explicit acknowledgment and brief summary of it: Hendrik Schön, a German research at Bell Labs, garnered critical and mainstream praise as a scientific genius at the helm of a number of huge scientific breakthroughs before ultimately being exposed as a fraud who had faked most, if not all, of his data. It took, Reich figures, about four years for Schön’s deception to go from casual fudging of data to egregious, whole-sole fabrication and eventual discovery. Does this, she asks, represent a success of the much-vaunted scientific self-correction process, or its abject failure? Let’s find out.
The Science of Fear
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The Science of Fear
by Daniel Gardner - Publisher: Dutton Adult
- Year: 2008
- Pages: 352
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- №49
I hadn’t predicted, when I picked up Daniel Gardner’s The Science of Fear and Richard Mullen’s Physics For Future Presidents, that there would be so much overlap between the two. I suppose, ultimately, it was inevitably: Mullen’s book, by title and design, covered those areas of science which are the most politically and socially relevant. As is so often the case with complicated issues with big numbers, these situations have the ability to frighten people who can’t keep a level head: consider, if you will, the fear, antipathy, and abject horror that most people have for nuclear energy after the events of Three Mile Island and —even worse in the sense that it actually caused deaths—Chernobyl.
Enter The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner’s (a Canadian journalist) to both explain and debunk the fear that tends to grip most people when it comes to vaguely menacing concepts.
Recent Comments
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Nice review, Ben. I actually hadn’t heard of this book, but I might have to look for it. True SF...
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If you mean the current, theme, I can’t take the credit for that. It’s Renegade, by...
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