Author: thepassionatereader

This author’s life began in 1956, the child prodigy of an English aristocrat and a Irish society lady in Cork, Ireland. But she became an orphan at age 12 and thereafter was raised by an absentminded uncle who allegedly, simply failed to provide anything and she became severely malnourished. She was educated in the summers in a ancient traditional Irish Celtic coastal community. The 75 page narrative of her early development, is at first a bit paranoid and self-pitying in tone detailing her insecurity and self-doubt, then reversed to tout her self assurance and intelligence as she is educated with a double major in botany and medical biochemistry at University College Cork, finishing a Masters degree course by age 21.

She developed an early love for all animals, and the outdoors, as well an appreciation of ancient customs and folklore. Sun-exposed potatoes were found to be a good topical cure for her warts. (Solanine, the chemical produced in sun-exposed potatoes is a powerful toxin if ingested, but also makes them extremely bitter.) The ancient Celtic rites of the Lisheen valley folk, such as needing to be introduced to scattered altars and using dew on shamrock leafs as beauty aids have a mystical, almost pagan aspect but blend seamlessly with the all-encompassing Catholic influence. Some practices such as using that dew to improve eyesight seem like pure quackery to this scientist and some plant based chemicals such as St John’s Wort are accepted as valuable medicines without critical supporting evidence. (It has dangerous interactions with many proven pharmaceuticals.)

It is not until page 76 that the plight of trees is even mentioned, and cutting them down is then described as an act of suicide. Thereafter the focus is largely on trees as she escapes from her self-pity and demonstrates her real brilliance as a concerned environmentalist.

She moved to Ottawa in 1982 to study plant hormones and get a Ph.D. at Carleton University then taught at the University of Ottawa for nine years. Then, a trophy husband in tow, she moved to a unique private experimental farm somewhere nearby. The claims she makes for the importance of her work are striking. “Trees have the neural ability to listen and think; they have all the necessary component parts to have a mind or consciousness.”

The sweeping assertion that an unidentified chemical from the hop tree “… revs up your major organs.. “ and “ …allows your body to make efficient use of medicines” would be seen as meaningless nonsense to most medical biochemists. It is true that many plant compounds change the rate of liver metabolism of certain other chemicals and medicines but that is as likely to be harmful as beneficial. She spent four days in a helicopter over a 200 square mile Texas ranch looking for a tree species that was possibly extinct, finally finding one tree, then claims that it was the only living one of that species in the world!

While this woman’s insights, perspective, and research findings are important and interesting, the whole book is infused with arrogance and self importance. I recall only one instance where she acknowledges the results of research of another scientist that she was not involved with. There are far too many instances of “I proved”, I found”, I discovered”, “my research showed”, etc. without acknowledgment of the contributions of others. Neither Susanne Simard’s “Finding the Mother Tree” nor Merlin Sheldrake’s “ Entangled Life” are mentioned although much of her research into forest life and fungi overlap with the content of those books. Who coined the term ‘The mother tree’ first? In her Acknowledgments, there are no other research scientists or environmentalists thanked. Even in the Suggested Reading, she cites six of her own works but no other acknowledged world experts in forest preservation such as Sir David Attenborough, Sheldrake, or Simard.

Part 2, comprising 94 pages delves into the ancient Celtic and Druid history and folklore of the message conveyed by 20 different trees and plants. Although this part is an interesting introduction to ancient Celtic culture, it’s claims are even less scientifically authenticated than those in the rest of the book. The discoveries of aspirin from willow and the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel in hickory trees are well known, Some of the other uses of trees and tree products, uncritically accepted by the author, such as divining for underground water with a hickory stick shaped into a wishbone lack any scientific validation. I recall this ancient practice being used in my uncle’s farm yard to locate where to drill a well, but they then had to drill down more than 350 feet to hit water. It may be pure witchcraft with witch hazel. The medicinal claims for the hawthorn extract that supposedly selectively dilates only the left descending coronary artery of the heart seems to me to be dubious at best. By the account here, elderberry extract is used medicinally to treat night blindness. I have become wary of any claims that some product “boosts” the immune system since it is extremely complex and prone to attack other parts of our bodies in the form of autoimmune diseases.

An interesting combination of autobiography and environmental science treatise, I am ambivalent about recommending this book. There are interesting perspectives and bits of information, but to glean them, you need to have both your lie detector and your bs filter in good working order, and on high alert.

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Thanks, Jeannie

In this scholarly work, a University of Warwick professor of History of Science and Technology relocates the origins of modern science from European followers of Ptolemy, Pliny, Galen, and Aristotle to the Aztec and Inca empires and even earlier observers of nature in China and the Islamic world. This is particularly applied to astronomy, mathematics, and timekeeping. There is more detail about who was who in those worlds in the dark ages than most readers will ever need or want to know, but the crux of the message is that the colonial Eurocentric view of major scientific discoveries is just plain wrong. For example, the contributions of Mongrel, Byzantine, Ottoman and Persian astronomers were crucial precursors allowing Nicolaus Copernicus to formulate his radical heliocentric view of the universe. However, the astronomic diagrams accompanying this Part I (96 pages) were very confusing to me. This section also made me acutely aware of how little science outside of the world of biology I really understand.

Islamic cartographers lead the world in mapping making drawing routes to Mecca from anywhere, and North Africans in Timbuktu detailed the Silk Road from the Orient to Europe long before Europeans started to map North America’s coastline. There is no mention of the designers of the even more ancient Stonehenge which must have possessed considerable knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, probably because its designers are still a complete mystery.

In Chapter III, Poskett shows that Isaac Newton relied on observations of France’s Jean Richer’s variations of the pendulum clock’s swing time in different locations and the geographic and mathematical data brought back to England by numerous explorers and slave traders; he was far from the lone genius portrayed in some history accounts. This is a theme that recurs frequently in recent revisionist biographies of many other discoverers and inventors from Copernicus to Tesla to Einstein.

Trade in seeds within the slave economy preceded formal genetic studies and Carl Linnaeus both competed and collaborated with Chinese and Japanese botanical classification systems, aided by international trade. Tea arrived in England in 1658, was considered addictive, and sparked a lively international trade war. Throughout the book, there is emphasis on the interconnectedness of science with politics and international relations.

Etienne Geoffrey in Paris and Cairo postulated a version of the theory of evolution years before Darwin, as did Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Alfred Russel Wallace and others around the globe, but they get little recognition for it, not unlike many dedicated scientists in other fields who were more interested in furthering a field than in seeking fame. (Rosalind Franklin’s major contribution to the DNA story is almost forgotten today and barely mentioned here, but Watson and Crick who basically claimed her data without attribution are lauded.)

Other major advances in science were dispersed around the world. The germ plasma theory postulating meiosis in sperm and eggs before they unite to produce a new organism was first proposed by Japanese natural scientists, complimenting the later genetics studied by the Czech botanist Mendel. The concept of ‘social Darwinism’ was first developed by Englishman Herbert Spencer, but was widely applied by Chinese biologists during the first Sino-Japanese war, and applied by those of the dominant Han ethnicity to suppress other Chinese ethnic groups. Later it was, of course, a mainstay of Nazi dogma.

By the late nineteenth century Europeans and North Americans did dominate in new scientific discoveries with the likes of James Clerk Maxwell in electricity, Marie Curie in radioactivity, and Heinrich Hertz in radio waves, but it was the Russian, Dimitri Mendeleev who developed the periodic table and the best mixture of elements for smokeless gunpowder. A Russian female scientist helped him fill in some gaps in the periodic table. In the late 1890s the now almost forgotten Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bosch (the boson was named after him much later) demonstrated the characteristics of radio waves, transforming the world of long distance communication. Ernest Rutherford is credited with the discovery of the structure of the atom, although Hantaro Nagaoto in Japan published results similar to those of Rutherford several years before the later’s 1911 paper, a prime example of colonial racism. The proof of the existence of the positron led to a Nobel prize for American Carl Anderson although it was in fact ‘discovered’ earlier by a visiting Chinese scientist Zhou Peiyuan, in the era when both China the new Soviet Union vastly increased spending on sciences.

The book thoroughly debunks the myths of the lone genius scientist and the Eurocentric history of the advancement of all sciences right up to the present. Most of the emphasis is on astronomy, physics and mathematics and there is a paucity of information on the long and checkered history of medicine. Semmelweis, Lister, Pasteur, Banting, and Fleming do not even warrant mention. Galileo is not mentioned either. The field of the history of science is so vast that anyone discussing it can be very selective in choosing what to include so as to fit with any particular bias.

This narrative is also plodding, tedious, dry, and detailed. Not many readers are likely to care much about the specific mutations governing taste and smell in fruit flies, discovered by a female Indian researcher in 1978. The author seemed much more articulate and focused when I listened to his interview with Bob McDonald on CBC radio’s Quirks and Quarks. He seems to have a common affliction that I call the academic’s delusion- the belief that a host of others share enthusiasm for the subject of his or her narrow field of study.

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Thanks, Bob McDonald, of Quirks and Quarks.

In this book, a New York millennial upstart with a background education in the film industry, on discovering that his mother has developed dementia, becomes an almost instant expert in neuroscience and nutrition, advising the whole world on how to avoid that fate, mostly by careful dining, exercising, and sleeping. He recruits a media-hungry private practice New York internist as coauthor to give his wild claims and generalizations some veneer of legitimacy (and presumably to share the revenue from the book sales). And he dresses it up with passing reference to such true experts as Robert Lustig and Nina Teicholz.

From this introduction, one could reasonably conclude that I did not find much to like here. But I really do enjoy books on controversial science subjects and none more than those related to uncertainties in nutrition science. Contrarian viewpoints that challenge what John Kenneth Galbraith called conventional wisdom always interest me and this book contains an abundance of iconoclastic assertions. The authors dish out distain for the conventional dietary recommendations of the medical establishment and governments which admittedly have an unenviable patchy track record in doling out poor nutritional advice that at times has proven to be completely wrong and harmful.

But once a reader sees through the wildly exaggerated claims asserted with certainty, there is abundant food for thought (pardon the double entendre) and a veneer of truth here. There are some exaggerated claims that will confuse readers, e.g. “Epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS, autism, and even depression are all conditions in which oxidative stress runs rampant in the brain, propagating the disease process.”

Convincing analogies of biological mechanisms to human decision-making and colloquial comparisons abound although some of them miss the mark. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor is described as “the brain’s natural anti-oxidant Miracle Gro”. Attributions of purpose to blind physical and chemistry processes are often difficult to conceptualize. Many social science studies claiming to improve cognition with this or that intervention are never replicated. There is not a word about the ecological consequence of the processes used in producing our foods, which is and should be a major and growing consideration. The recommended lean beef from grass-fed cattle only comes from ruminants belching and farting methane into the atmosphere.

The discussion of the need for an adequate consistent amount of quality sleep echoes what Matthew Walker has written in Why We Sleep, and that of skin care products and the importance of the skin biome that of James Hamblyn’s Clean. But to even suggest that we should reduce our use of anti-microbial hand cleansers now in the midst of a pandemic seems just plain foolish. And his view of our livers and intestinal tract’s susceptibility to injury seems grossly exaggerated as does the harm attributed to gluten in people without celiac disease. Many of the physiological mechanisms proposed for phenomena will no doubt prove erroneous with further research, and rest on correlations and plausible mechanisms without proven causes. But it is refreshing to see the reputations of dietary cholesterol, red meat, dark chocolate, butter, salt, and limited amount of whole milk at least partially restored.

The detailed regimens recommended to get on to the Genius Plan to fully protect your brain from dementia seems needlessly complex and the recipes at the end are arbitrary ones the authors like. Nevertheless, this book contains an abundance of good advice and information that makes it unwise to dismiss it as just another fad diet endorsement like the Adkin’s, Scarsdale or South Beach diets.

In the ebook edition, it was annoying that throughout, the many internal cross-references were all missing with only: “(see page.)”

Perhaps the worst takeaway message from this book is the suggestion that we are entirely in charge of our cognitive fate and not subject to the quirks of fickle nature- a ‘blame the victim’ attitude which is all too prevalent in many fields. I doubt that my significant cognitive decline over the last 18 months is entirely because I do not follow the detailed dietary, exercise and sleep regimen recommended here but the conclusion from this book is that I have brought it on myself by not doing so. I hope it is related instead to chronic neuroborreliosis which I almost certainly acquired by pure chance18 months ago due to a hostile encounter with Borellia burgdorfi, the agent of Lyme disease. It appears to now have set up shop in my cerebrospinal fluid.

Will my eating habits change after reading this book? There may be some tweaks around the edges, but certainly no major overhaul. Remember the adage about old dogs?

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Thanks, Book Bub

This is the autobiography of a still young elite bulimic self-loathing, New York State budding figure skater and Cornell student who descended into the depths of depravity, heroin addiction, prostitution, and poverty. She then served two years in county jail and various state prisons before cleaning up and dedicating much of her life to prison reform throughout the United States as a journalist documenting conditions in prisons and a dysfunctional corrections system.

The title has a double meaning in referring to corrections facilities and her love of writing and solving crosswords in ink. She provides a stark contrast between the local county jail in upstate New York and the more varied and crueller state prison system, although neither are at all focused on rehabilitation and corrections and both are beset with asinine rules, arbitrary cruel practices and sadistic staff.

The women inmates are certainly not portrayed as angelic victims and some of their deceptions to get drugs behind bars are ingenious; the jobs of guards and supervisors must be stressful as well, with the constant threat of violence. It seems that most of the inmates, including the author did not forgo sexual pleasures while incarcerated and became “Gay for the stay; straight for the gate” taking on transient clandestine same-sex liaisons that were never meant to be more than for the moment.

I can easily understand her consternation over the side-effects of her year-long treatment with interferon and ribavirin in 2010 for hepatitis C, having heard about these hundreds of times from patients, although my wife/nurse practitioner bore the brunt of their ire, but Blakinger never tells readers if it rid her of hepatitis C. (It often didn’t work and has since been replaced by safer more effective treatment with fewer side-effects.)

The chronology of her decline can be difficult to follow as chapters skip back and forth over the years between 2000 and 2012. Although foul language and graphic pornographic depictions may be totally appropriate in describing her troubled teen life, she seems to relish use of such language, even in describing inanimate objects and events that have nothing to do with body functions. She only obliquely addresses the controversy of viewing addictions as mental illnesses vs matters to be dealt with by the law.

It this tempting to assume that Canadian jails and Corrections Canada facilitates and staff must be more efficient, humanitarian and rehabilitation-oriented than those in the U.S, but such conclusions are probably smug unwarranted generalizations. I dealt with a lot of convicts and ex-convicts in the past and do not miss them, but they are often victims of fate and deserve respect as full human beings. This book puts a human face on them and gives readers deep insight into their plight. As an educational read, it is useful; fun it is not.

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Thanks, Book Browse.

The autobiography of the 33 year old Marvel actor/comedian with a very troubled past, this book provides interesting insights into the inside working of the film, television and theatre world, particularly in America. A single child, he was born and raised to age five by grandparents in rural northern China, his striving parents having achieved high-paying engineering jobs in Kingston and Toronto Ontario. They are also archetypical tiger parents, to the point of abuse, both psychological and physical, a la Amy Chua’s 2012 “Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother”, only more extreme.

“On more than one occasion, I wondered if they were just allergic to joy.”

No amount of hard work on his part ever satisfied their ambition to raise a famous, wealthy and prestigious son.

His discussion of Chinese politics and culture is cautious and uncritical to the point of seeming almost cowardly, afraid of retribution by the powers that be in China.

After obediently attending prestigious schools including Western’s Ivey Business School, he worked at a variety of corporate jobs including accounting at Deloitte, but hated the work, was fired, and alienated his parents as he aspired to become a famous Hollywood actor. Alternately self-assured and cocky or insecure and depressed, his emotional extremes do not paint a picture of mental stability. I, and I suspect most children of a certain age, can relate to his extreme need for parental approval, their lack of any any public displays of affection or even private expressions of praise. I cannot however relate to their dictatorial control of his every childhood decision. There must be some best balance between discipline and control of a child’s development and granting of freedom, although I certainly never found that balance. My parents were certainly strict but allowed all five of us to pursue completely different careers. (While my father made it clear that he would have preferred that I become a chiropractor, he accepted my decision to go to medical school).

The selfish focus on career advancement in acting with little regard for the greater benefit of society or moral consequences becomes a bit concerning as he constantly focuses on receiving praise, fame and fortune, although late in the book, he does promote, in a somewhat paranoid tone, the advancement of Asian individuals in performing arts. I am no fan of Marvel fantasy antics generally which may colour my judgement of this book, but I doubt that the world is better off because of either violent Marvel superheroes or this book. On the other hand, pursuing a career in a field you enjoy and feel passionate about may be preferable to purely capitalistic pursuits. Again, some balance is important.

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Thanks, Goodreads.

This is the short first person singular (pseudo?) memoir of a modern Reykjavik midwife in four generations of midwives married to generations of funeral directors. The focus is largely on the author’s Icelandic culture and philosophy as related to her by her eccentric midwife great aunt. She was fond of spewing her thoughts on anything and everything apropos of nothing, in conversation and writing, much of it found in old manuscripts left to the author. There is almost no plot. The strength of the book rests largely on the delightful symbolism of entrances and exits, darkness in the womb and the grave and light in between, even in the northern winter. These convey profound universal truths about the relationships of humans to other form of life (hence the title), and what it means to be alive. She seems to regard humans as just another species cohabitating the earth, in danger of extinction.

In the course of her reading the notes left by her deceased predecessor, she discovers manuscripts on understanding human’s helplessness at both ends of a lifespan with helpfulness in between, and seems accepting of and trying to understand both the beauty and the cruelty and randomness of the nature of life. “I’m trying to understand fleeting and dangerous phenomena such as life itself.” “She considered coincidence to be the most important concept in evolution.” “To her mind, details are just another word for fundamentals.”

“The baby draws a breath. I think, from now on he will draw a breath 23,000 times a day”, (I would add “until he doesn’t however long that takes.”)

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Although the existential almost nihilistic theme could be considered a downer, somehow the acceptance of life and death as they appear by random chance seem refreshing and uplifting, even in the absence of any invocation of any deeper spiritual meaning to life.

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Thanks, The Economist.

The peripatetic Canadian writer of various genres, now based in Kingston, Ontario addresses the whole history and evolution of paper, ink, printing, press, and reading from papyrus to eBooks and audio books. In chapters including experiments in making paper in her home, trying to mimic ancient methods of typesetting, the history of ink, the press and books, her enthusiasm for the whole process shines through.

I thought the process of attempting to produce paper in her home from various bits of vegetable matter was the most obscure, tedious, confusing and useless information any reader might seek until I read the 57 page second chapter on typesetting and formatting. Although I recognize the importance of choosing an appropriate paper, print size, typeface, spacing and layout of a book, I always left those details to my expert design lady, copy editor and proofreaders. I cannot even remember what fonts were chosen for my books and I doubt that many potential readers choose to buy a book based on the font of the text. I would like to, but can’t blame the layout, margin sizes, or font for my poor record of book sales. But apparently to a subset of professionals immersed in the business, certain fonts are a turnoff and others are magnets. In future blogs I may experiment with different layouts and fonts just for fun- there are hundreds to choose from.

The chapter on inks is a bit more interesting, but still loaded with trivia. I care about the aesthetics of written material whether a book cover, a magazine article or a letter, to the point that I at one point bought a very expensive Montblanc fountain pen which I used almost exclusively for my signature on consultation notes. I don’t know where it is now. It may be important to some fanatics that the ink used in eBook production is organically different than that for paper editions of the same book, but for whom? One bit of interesting trivia- the background in Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colourblind and blue is easiest to read for blue-green colourblind men.

The author’s widowed, obviously greatly admired friend and co-worker, Hugh Barclay seems to be the epitome of an eccentric poster child for obsessive compulsive disorder, although she and her son could compete for second prize in that category and she would easily take first prize if there was one for hoarding. Still, most of this chapter and much of the book is taken up by obscure and confusing details as they try to publish a book from scratch using only materials and methods they themselves control, much of it antiquated. Much of the description of this process was like a foreign language to me, e.g “The forms was moved into the chase and furniture and reglets fit all around it to position the text exactly on the page, with proper margins all around. When everything was tight and true, the quoins were tightened with the quoin key, locking up the chase.” (Quion would be a valuable word for Scrabble.)

The chapter titled Books was the most interesting to me as it details the numerous developments from serialization of books in magazines to the ingenious ways of modern promotion and marketing with elaborate gala book launches, to the ways to achieve bestseller status that could be considered almost a scam. I have experience with the vagaries of marketing of books- the sole publicist for the publishing house of my first book went on compassionate leave the day it came out so I got no help promoting it, and the publishing house for my second closed shop after contracting to publish it, leaving me on my own. And I am not a natural self-promoter. Writing a book is the easiest and most fun part of the business.

Although I read a lot of books of various genres in various formats (hardcover, paperback, ebook, or audiobook) the intricate details of the dozens of ways they are produced and the materials used in their production are of little interest to me. Gutenberg’s Fingerprint provides more of those details than I could possibly understand -or care about.

I thought that John C had recommended this poorly organized disjointed book to me, but on checking after struggling through all but 35 pages of it, it seems it was his wife Pat who was as confused as I was by it and hoped I could and would explain it to her. Alas, her faith in me is unfounded and I am sorry to disappoint her.

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“Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” Ken Boulding.

The past CEO of the consumer goods company Unilever and a business economist, thinker and writer together address the wide-ranging ancient philosophical question of what the purpose of a business is in this tome.

There is a positive optimistic tone about the future in the Blow Up Boundaries chapter. No one should deny that the campaign by Lifeboy, the oldest of Unilever’s 130 personal care products, to teach half a billion people the importance of hand washing has been a net positive for humanity. The Embrace The Elephants chapter provides a lot of counterintuitive advice for business leaders about abandoning short-term goals and Friedman economics in favour of loftier sustainable goals that benefit the company and the broader society rather than just shareholders. The nine point Stockholm Planetary Boundaries model that Sir David Attenborough discussed in A Life on our Planet is again referenced. I must try harder to understand it.

There is also a lot of mushy psychobabble about purpose, taken from the personal to the corporate level. There are hundreds of acronyms that can be confusing to readers who are not fluent in business lingo. There is a slight whiff of hypocrisy in the final chapter’s advice to challenge the supremacy of consumption and growth, from the ardent advocates for consumerism and business growth; that is difficult to work around although they try and partially succeed. It is loaded with all the business jargon that could possibly be dreamt up.

I can imagine this book being used as a primer for any business school M.B.A. course on sustainability, using Unilever as a case study. Although there is no doubt that Unilever is a world leader when discussing ethical business practices, much of this writing reads like a book-length ad for the global behemoth.

Good food for thought, but dry and certainly not for everyone.

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Thanks, The Economist.

The English Civil War and the roundup of the regicides of King Charles I after the Cromwellian “roundhead” parliamentarians are routed and the royalty was reestablished in the person of the nefarious whoring Charles ll forms the backdrop to this historical novel. Much of the action takes place in New England where the Puritan regicides Colonels Ned Whaley and Will Goffe have fled and are sought for return to England to be hanged, drawn and quartered, a process that is described in gruesome detail.

Every development seems to be interpreted as an act of God, with constant reference to biblical verses, often quoted out of context. John Davenport, a strict Puritan preacher and founder of New Haven, Connecticut, where the colonels sought refuge for a time, designed it as the home for Christ’s second coming in 1666, when by his unshakeable conviction, He would establish his Heaven on earth in America, as he interpreted various Old Testament and Book of Revelations texts. What must be Sleeping Giant Mountain, north of New Haven, within a couple of miles of where I lived for three years, is the site of one of the many cat-and-mouse narrow escapes for the regicides as they elude their pursuers, although it seems clear that many of these close encounters are far from factual. But the distances cited from their hideout to downtown New Haven, the harbour, and Long Island Sound are shorter than those lodged in my memory fifty years ago. However, the controversial attempt to establish New Haven as a chartered territory separated from Connecticut was real. If the Puritan founders had prevailed against the Crown, we would now probably have a separate New England state of New Haven, or perhaps a separate country, had the Revolutionary Army not defeated them 110 years later.

But the Dutch control over New Amsterdam (New York) was a distraction that had to be dealt with as did the latter battles with the Dutch in Britain.

The Black Plague and the Great Fire of London, following in quick succession are interpreted by the Bible-quoting Puritans as sings of the last times, as predicted in the Book of Revelations, and every event, for better or for worse, is seen through the cognitive dissonance of a benevolent Good with evil and hardship attributed to His working in mysterious ways, a non-explanation still prevalent in some circles.

An interesting and entertaining novel. Although the chronology of the major political events is doubtlessly accurate and has been carefully researched, this one seems to me to be far more fiction than history, and the author would probably agree. But reading it in 2022, with changes in Buckingham Palace raises new questions about the durability of the British monarchy. Not an historian, I nevertheless quite enjoyed reading it.

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Thanks, Mike I.

Flipping back and forth from the slavery-powered world of horse racing in Lexington, Kentucky, and cotton picking in Mississippi and Louisiana in the mid1800s and that of art curation and archeology at the Smithsonian Institution in 2019 makes for interesting cultural clashes in this new novel by the acclaimed Australian/American writer. The posh life of New York aristocracy, horsemen, and art connoisseurs and dealers over the ages is presented in detail; there is a Canadian connection as the slave groom of the famous horse eventually finds freedom and family life in rural Ontario.

Most of the story, though described as fiction, is based on facts, with the names of the characters, both human and equine being real heroes or villains of the sometimes corrupt monied horse racing community, and even the mystery of the skeleton that was found abandoned at the Smithsonian and is now at the Lexington International Museum of the Horse is factual.

The provenance and value of old paintings of a racehorse and a colt that had been lost and found several times forms the linking backbone of the plot which is intricately interwoven with tensions within a slave-owner/emancipation-advocating mixed family in Lexington, and of the chase to return a slave groom fleeing to the north on the prized steed he so loved. One painting is eventually found in the hands of a naive New York maid and is evaluated by the billionaire Mellons and Jackson Pollock, which seemed to me to be a somewhat contrived plot twist to include and discuss the lives of the rich and famous, but is apparently factual. The author has researched this story carefully. She also manages to weave the infamous Jesse James into the party of murderous Union horse thieves.

The equine hero of the story after a stellar but short racing career, became the famous ancestor of many real famous race horses, including General Robert E. Lee’s steed and even some recent famous racehorses. The disruption of many relationships and the alienation of friends by the Civil War is dramatically described, and the continuing racism is dramatized by the shooting of an unarmed star black Yale arts student by a cop in 2019.

The butchery of the English language in the lingo of the illiterate southerners is captured colourfully and the writing reflects the complex communication style of the times. The feverish excitement of the crowd of bettors in the grandstands, which I have witnessed at Keeneland in Lexington, but could not get enthused about, is memorably described. All of my early memories of horses were of Monty and Mollie, a team of black utilitarian Percheron farm horses pulling the sleigh with the big tank through the maple sugar bush to which we carried pails of sap, or taking the whole family wrapped in horsehair blankets to town in the cutter when the snow was too deep for cars, or pulling various farm implements not yet adapted to the tractor. But recreational bareback riding was not to their liking and I was thrown off more than once; horse races were only for the town fall fair.

The unwritten bond, communication, and love between horse and groom is heartwarming and well described with the slave groom choosing to remain in that role rather than buy his freedom and be separated from his steed.

An immense improvement over the author’s earlier rather self-contradictory Nine Parts of Desire, this tale is, in my estimation, right up there, in a totally different context, on a par with Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt and Jodie Picoult’s Small Great Things, when it comes to giving readers an account of the sordid history of slavery and continuing troubled race relations in America with deep insight into the elite snobbish world of thoroughbred horse racing added in. Well deserving of the Fiction of the Year award that Book Browse reviewers awarded it.

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Thanks, Book Browse.

A gift from my daughter, this short book documents the striking loss of biodiversity on earth caused by human activity, in a somewhat alarmist tone. But none of the facts are deniable and they are delivered in the same almost poetic lilting style that is so endearing about the now 96 year old’s television narration’s. I can almost hear the deep voice I recognized on BBC television, as I read on.

While Sir David addresses global warming with the same basic information as many other scientists have done, his emphasis, logically given his background as a globe-trotting student of all kinds of life forms, is on the loss of biodiversity as the reason to be concerned if not outright panicky. He introduces the Planetary Boundaries model with its nine components needed to maintain or restore earth’s stability, four of which we have already exceeded, a graphic depiction which was new and confusing to me. And in Part Three, he introduces the even more confusing nine component Doughnut Model also needed to restore earth’s sustainability adding an inner circle of societal and political changes to the Planetary Boundaries compass. I need to study these concepts in more detail to perhaps get close to understanding them, as they seem to be important.

The stakes for the future of Homo sapiens could not be higher if we fail to heed the warnings and sage advice in these pages, now also available on film

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Thanks, Andra.

There is no need to introduce the author of this book. This is not really the second part of her memoir so much as a self help advice book based on her own experience in coping with stresses, disappointments, and uncertainties. By the end of reading the introduction, I was disappointed as it seemed she was about to dish out almost 300 pages of trite aphorisms and fuzzy psychobabble a la Dale Carnegie, Mehmet Oz, or Oprah, comparisons I am sure she would not appreciate. But as I read on, I realized that even if it is read and interpreted as a self help book, it is by far the best one I had ever read or heard of, infused as it is with the unique brilliant insights of a remarkable woman. In places she plays the roles of parenting and marriage counsellor, but does it better than Dr. Spock or Ann Landers; she relates that she and Barrack, the public image of an ideal loving couple, have used the services of a marriage counsellor. And it would be very inappropriate and arrogant of me to dismiss her advice, having never experienced any of the discrimination, fears, and outright hate that has lead to her self-doubt, introspection, and sense of not belonging, shared by millions of others.

There is little of the political commentary and insights I was hoping for; nothing about her predecessors or successors as FLOTUS, not one word about her take on the Clintons, and far too much introspection and self analysis for my liking. She writes about living with a separate being called her fearful self and arguing with her. The abundant metaphors become a bit obscure.

“Rage can be a dirty windshield. Hurt is like a broken steering wheel. Disappointment will only ride sulking and unhelpful, in th back seat. If you don’t do something constructive with them, they”ll take you straight into a ditch.”

I can relate to the discussion of her parents, particularly her mother, but in the opposite way- I cannot recall my parents ever showing any public displays of affection nor praising any of our various accomplishments, although there is no doubt that they loved us. And although she does not name it as such, much of her adult self doubt seems to relate to the “imposter syndrome”, the conviction that, from her background, she is not deserving of her remarkable accomplishments, a feeling I have also experienced.

Much as I admire this remarkable woman, by far the most influential First Lady in living memory, I was a bit disappointed with this book. For me, it is not nearly as good as her earlier Becoming.

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Thanks, Alana.

A young New England writer here documents the long and convoluted history of the clothing industry in four chapters named Cotton, Silk, Synthetics and Wool

I found the detailed documentation of the four-way back-and-forth tussle between India, Africa, Europe, and America, for domination of the growing, spinning, weaving, bleaching, knitting and dying with toxic chemicals, and marketing of cotton over 500 years a bit hard to follow. Cotton growing in the U.S. south was linked to slavery, then sharecropping, and moving west to Texas, it is now depleting soil and the Ogallala Aquifer that runs from North Dakota to the Mexican border. Growing the thirsty plants, and harvesting them with cheap largely undocumented immigrant labourers and with added chemical fertilizer, it is a major cause of the massive dead zone of algae bloom in the Caribbean Sea, all so that we can buy cheap, nondurable cotton clothing. The interrelationship between the massive Chinese cotton industry in the Xinjiang Uyghur west and the forced labor and human rights abuses there are carefully exposed. On startling claim that seems like hyperbole “….it takes twenty thousand litres of water to make a pair of jeans.” Much of that water becomes polluted in the process and not reusable.

The chapter on Silk was easier for me to understand as we have visited a silk factory in China and our guide explained the ancient process of growing the worms and extracting the finer from their larvae. Silk clothing has been used since prehistoric times to signal social status as best documented by Thorsten Veblen in his 1899 The Theory of the Working Class, one of my favourite old nonfiction books . The Veblen Effect or Veblen Choice effect relates to the phenomenon whereby raising the price of certain consumer goods beyond any possible utilitarian value will increase sales because of the signal it confers of social class. It applies not just to clothing but to jewelry, accessories household decor and even pets. Think of of Rolex watches, Hermes handbags, etc. Veblen is not mentioned here.

In Synthetics, only Rayon or viscose, and Nylon or polyamide, both twentieth century inventions are discussed in detail, but DuPont dominated in the production of both along with acetates, fluorocarbons, polyesters, Spandex, Lycra, Orlon, and Dacron, all derived from petroleum products or coal. Rayon production is based on plant fibres but involves extensive use of the very toxic carbon disulfide, also used in vulcanization of rubber, exposing thousands of workers to the risk of fainting, psychosis, and often death, especially in southern United States nonunion factories. The toxic exposure continues to this day, although the acceptable exposure limit of 20 parts per million in the U.S. has been lowered to 2 ppm in China, where much of the rayon industry has been outsourced to cheaper labourers.

In the Regan era, Taiwanese, South Korean and Hong Kong companies used Caribbean sweat shops paying below subsistence wages to produce garments for J.C. Penny, The Gap, Saks Fifth Avenue, Calvin Klein, Victoria’s Secret, Christian Dior, Eddie Bauer, J.Crew, Kmart and other American retailers. Those shops also pollute local rivers and seas with toxic dyes and massive amounts of microfibres, especially from polyester production. The same companies develop an ever-accelerating fashion cycle to stimulate unnecessary consumer demand a la Veblen effect. Meanwhile U. S. politicians, the World Bank, and USAID boasted of supporting the Caribbean economies and their right wing dictators through the tariff-free Export Processing Zones, while insisting that they use only U.S. raw materials. The real agenda was usually to prevent any socialism or communism reaching the West. Such hypocrisy!

The chapter on Wool brought back fond childhood memories to me. One of my earliest memories is of my father dipping his Shropshire sheep and those of several neighbouring farmers one at a time in the sheep dip filled with green malodorous fluid, undoubtedly some toxic pesticide, holding them back from the exit ramp with a long crook and using it to immerse their heads. And I watched my uncle deftly holding a ewe between his legs as he sheared her and put the intact one fleece in a large bag. The assertion here that wool production is a net benefit for the environment with manure and wool sequestering carbon in the soil must be partially or completely negated by by the fact that sheep, being ruminants, belch and fart methane. The discussion of the cruel persecution of native Navajo weavers of rugs and tapestries while interesting, seems peripheral to the subject of clothing, and several other such digressions make the book much longer than it needed to be.

As a lifelong severely wardrobe-challenged senior, (possibly only outdone in that category by Gordon Lightfoot and Ronnie Hawkins who were known to host 1960s parties in their birthday suits) I enjoyed reading this well researched and very educational and thought-provoking book. In profound ignorance, I had not previously thought of textile workers and garment workers as separate forces, but this book shows how important this distinction is in history, demographics, skills, and location. The natural byproducts of rayon are often used to make sausage casing.The etymology of dozens of common words and phrases related to clothing is delineated.

Will reading this change my wardrobe choices in the future? Not in the least. My wardrobe committee (my wife) often vetoes my choices and if I get a new piece of clothing, I always discard or preferably donate an equivalent piece to a charity.

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Thanks,

The Atlantic, The New Yorker.

This is the most famous and durable of the prolific Ukrainian-born Polish/British novelist and short story writer’s works. The copy I borrowed is a 1996 edition in booklet form in inexplicably small print, accompanied by the earlier short story Youth, (also narrated by Marlow) and the later novel The End Of The Tether, with which it was published in a 1902 edition. It was not as popular as the latter two during Conrad’s life. I cannot recall who recommended it to me other than that it was lavishly praised in Salmon Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton.

The single-named seaman Marlow narrates the tale to his fellow adventurers as they await the high tide to sail down the Thames on their next adventure. He was somehow assigned to operate a steamboat for the Belgian “Company” between stations on the Congo River. After many delays including gun battles with shore-bound natives, and taking on cannibalistic natives as crew, he reaches the last station where the also single-named Kurtz has resided, trading in plundered ivory and murdering natives who nevertheless are in awe of him and worship him as a god. Marlow observes of his crew “Fine fellows-cannibals-in their place.” Kurtz also produces a document for the Company called “Suppression of Savage Customs.” His charisma is so overpowering that everyone seems to admire him. The ruthless plunder of the pristine land and the murder of native Congolese is described graphically but so is the allure of the uncertain and dangerous life in the jungle for single adventurous white men.

The plot has many twists but is not difficult to follow. For me, the beauty of the story lies in the vivid description of the characters, scenery, and cultures. A quote to illustrate this:

“ His head was as bald as the palm of my hand, but his falling hair seems to have settled on his chin, where it prospered, as his beard reached his waist.” As Marlow reaches Kurtz’s station, the latter is very ill and he dies en route with Marlow as they sail downstream to return to England.

The last few pages describe Marlow’s philosophizing about the nature of human loyalty and the meaning of his life. He sees both sides of Kurtz’s life but can’t help but admire him and feel some loyalty to his memory. A year later, on visiting Kurtz’s betrothed in London he describes him in superlatives and lies about his double life and his last words.

The primitive violent nature of the jungle natives is detailed but so are the horrors inflicted on them by the would-be white empire builders, with equal moral condemnation.

This tale has been loosely adapted to film three times including Apocalypse Now, starring Marlon Brando.

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Test Your Diagnostic Acumen

This is the definitive history of the earth’s evolution from the Big Bang to the present in eight chapters by a Harvard professor of Natural History. Scholarly and detailed but dense.

Neither the Oxygen Earth chapter on when the earth first acquired oxygen through the proliferation of Cyanobacteria nor that of Animal World about the first arrival of animals did much to enlightenment me. While obviously important their confusingly detailed and speculative nature is probably of little interest to most of the general public. Knoll scornfully dismisses the panspermia hypothesis that life on earth came first from another planet, which some other scientists take seriously, which just shows how little we really know for certain about where and how life started.

The distinctions between eons, eras, periods, and ages in the evolution of the earth are arbitrary and also impotant but I can never remember how far back one must go to make these distinctions, even after reading this book, and I doubt that I am alone in this.

Over 50 black and white photographs, many of fossils and and rock formations taken by the author do little to clarify details. The sparse charts are a bit more helpful.

The final chapter, Human World is a pessimistic but probably realistic recital of the ever accelerating damage we are doing to the earth since our arrival and proliferation but with an interesting addition I had not head of before. By citing analysis of carbon isotope ratios in earth’s atmosphere, Knoll claims that almost all of the carbon dioxide being added to the air since the onset of modernity comes from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, not other sources, a finding that, if true, deserves emphasis.

Emphasizing the ever changing nature of our home, there are abundant facts to cite at a cocktail party to impress someone, such as alligators once roaming the Arctic and the distance between Boston and London shrinking by an inch every year, but they hardly make up for the unfamiliar and forgettable names of species.

One memorable quote: “Earth writes it’s history with one hand and erases it with the other.”

Outside of to the rarified world of research natural scientists, encompassing cosmologists, geologists paleontologists, anthropologists and perhaps a smattering of general biologists, I cannot recommend this book. For the rest of us it’s chief redeeming feature is it’s brevity. (Too be fair, I am not sure the author wrote it with the general public readership in mind, in site of the reviewers comments)

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Thanks, Book Bub.

A long recent analysis of the book and discussion with McEwan in The Atlantic drew my attention to this, his latest novel.

Poet, talented musician, and restless manual labourer Roland Blaines and his son, Lawrence are principle characters in this British and German tale. It begins in 1986 when Roland’s wife Alissa leaves them to become a famous novelist. (A subtle underling theme throughout concerns the inherent conflict of highly ambitious professionals between achieving fame and advancing in a career and the inevitable sacrifices one has to make to properly raise children.) But the story then reaches back several decades and forwards to mid 2021. In his youth, Roland, like McEwan, is sent by his military family in Tripoli to a strict English boys boarding school in Ipswich, which makes me wonder how much of the rest of the story tale is also autobiographical. Later, Roland also works to free a East German couple and their two girls from the tyrannical punishment of the Stasi for saying something intolerable, and particularly grieves over the punishment of the children.

Roland’s criminal seduction at age 14 by his female piano teacher, Miriam, (hence the title) has lasting long unrecognized psychic effects that make him into a sex-obsessed misfit who can never find satisfaction in other activities or with other women, and she is portrayed as a very manipulative, controlling nymphomaniac.The description of the many sexual encounters is unnecessarily pornographic and the frequency of their gymnastic sex is a also bit unrealistic. Exploitation of children and their vulnerability is a recurring theme in McEwan’s novels and made me wonder if it is also reflects his personal experience. (The Atlantic article refers to this book as his anti-autobiography.)

Roland’s muddled bemused understanding of the modern physics of time, space, light, matter, gravity, quantum mechanics, wave theory, the alternate or multiple universes theory, and the thought experiment known as Shrodinger’s cat reflect my own limited comprehension of such complexities.

The slow painful death from cancer of Roland’s late wife is described with too much sentimentality for my liking but it also constitutes a passionate and compelling plea for legalizing medical assistance in dying. The deathly fight between Roland and her ex over where to scatter her ashes is entertaining and imaginative.

The fluid engaging writing rescues this book from any risk of boring readers. It includes memorable descriptions from the culture, history, and customs of 1950s including the rigid rules of British boarding schools, being at Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate when the Berlin Wall fell, the fear gripping the world during the Cuban missile crisis and the Chernobyl meltdown, Thatcherism, but also overly vivid descriptions of the many sexual encounters of the characters. Some of McEwan known atheistic nihilism appears in Roland’s musings. Roland “….”steps out of ordinary existence to be reminded…that he was an insignificant being on a giant rock rolling eastward at one thousand miles per hour as it hurtled through the emptiness among the remote indifferent stars.” Onhuman existence: “How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life in a succession of reactions to events.” Of the views of children in the 1950’s: “ They were not beings in their own right….transient proto-humans endlessly, year after year in the graceless act of becoming.” Roland is slow to acknowledge his mother’s descent into dementia until he discovers a bar of soap in her refrigerator and the decline thereafter is described in realistic detail. Her surprising activities during WWll is revealed only after her death. Roland’s bleak assessment of the current world situation in the last chapter hints at a future book about dystopian 22nd century.

The convoluted story includes the overused tropes of writing about novelists and novels within novels, and includes discussion of several dozen novels and old music pieces, which seems like a kind attempt of the author to prove that he belongs to the literati and intelligentsia. There is at least one blatant anatomical error: “Her irises were pinpricks.”

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Thanks, Din Lal

In the Introduction this explanted Canadian professor of Economics and Political Scince at the University of Chicago defines war very differently than does Richard Overy in Blood and Ruins. For him, war is any prolonged, violent, conflict between groups of people whether they be nations, religious sects, or Chicago street drug gangs.

In part I, he lists five factors which he sees as contributing to the likelihood of war- unchecked interests, intangible incentives, uncertainty, commitment problems, and misperceptions. Some of these rather fuzzy concepts are clarified by numerous examples from wars throughout history, by his observations from everyday life experiences, and from social science studies. The latter are often limited by inclusion of only unrepresentative undergraduate university students as subjects. His pie diagrams of two rival groups with a shifting bargaining space between them is used extensively but works best as a concept when there is rivalry only between two groups.

Chapter 5, entitled Committment Problems, purports to explain the reasons for the Peleponesian War (along with a very confusing map), WWI, genocides, the American invasion of Iraq, and the long Columbian civil war. It coveys a lot of factual information but I found it also vague and confusing.

Part II, titled The Paths To Peace, also comprises five chapters, discussing interdependence, checks and balances, rules and enforcement, interventions, and wayward paths to war and peace. In the latter, some myths about both the causes and the supposed benefits of war are exposed. The assertion that “….the solution to world peace is universal cognitive behavioural therapy.” seems like a gross oversimplification.

The concluding chapter titled The Peacemaking Engineer is composed of trite Ten Commandments for everyone on how to contribute in some small way to world peace that reads like common sense, which seems to be an uncommon commodity in the world of politics.

I am ambivalent about recommending this book for the general public but it will be of value to international diplomats and negotiators. There are interesting historical facts from around the world and some fresh concepts and perspectives. But there are also long barely relevant diversions such as the history of Henry VIII’s successors in an attempt to answer the question of whether women leaders are more or less bellicose than men- with the conclusion that we do not know. Almost none of the wars and potential wars he discusses are current such as that in Ukraine and the tension between America and China over Taiwan. And the writing style is unimaginative and bland; it is also much too wordy, and humourless.

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Thanks, The Economist.

Almost exclusively addressing the part of the huge fitness industry aimed for women, this begins as a negative rant about what the author considers to be the misdirected modern trends in self-care and relieving stress, from yoga in all of its forms to jogging and meditation, not that these are harmful but because they are only partial solutions to underlying deep rooted uniquely American societal problems.

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Exaggerating the stresses imposed on of modern young American women’s lives, Chapter 1 has a whining personal negative tone with almost no proffered solutions and a distinctly man-blaming undercurrent. It also conveys a anti-capitalist hint about the underlying societal causes of workplace stress.

Chapter 2 delivers an equally negative but more logically argued assessment of the multibillion dollar diet and weight control industry, largely promoted by market specialists with no nutrition expertise or celebrities with expertise limited to self-promotion. The unscientific body mass index comes in for justified scorn, based as it is on limited old data from studies of white adult males.

Chapter 3 focuses first on the huge recent industry devoted to looking after your skin with a huge array of products, then switches to express the many ambiguities and the false dichotomy between natural and chemical products. The author does not doubt the need for almost any skin care products, as does James Hamblyn in Clean.

In Gym as Church, details of the limitations of the entrepreneurial business model of charismatic stars such as Oprah of SoulCycle, pastors of exercise believers, strengthening faith muscles and replacing the older roles of religious communities are exposed. There are limits to how much exercise and meditation clans can relieve the loneliness of modern American society detailed in Robert Putman’s Bowling Alone, filled in the past by faith groups and institutions like the Women’s Institute in rural Canada, Britain, and South Africa (but not the U.S.A.)

Goop conferences, Gwyneth Paltrow and the huge unregulated alternative medicine industry get an uncritical hearing in A Plea to Be Heard, even as some of the practices are shown to be bizarre, ludicrously expensive, and totally unproven or even harmful. Their success is based on clever, but lucrative marketing and dissatisfaction with traditional medicine, more than any scientific evidence,(and on a regulatory failure to restrict false advertising). Voodoo witchcraft of rose quartz crystals under the hardwood floor seems harmless by comparison, even if a waste of money and resources. But the trashing of traditional medicine as a paternalistic, uncaring, misogynistic, male domain seems a little overdone, as now more than 50% of medical school students in the U. S. identify as female as do 37% of their practicing physicians. The vast gap in knowledge, research funding, and standards development between men and women is attributed solely to gender bias in the medical establishment, without acknowledging the unique challenges that potential pregnancy, pregnancy, cyclic hormone fluctuations, birth trauma, and lactation presents to those trying to design proper scientific trials.

The Nutritionmania chapter provides the best, most accurate, balanced information in the whole book, in my opinion. Ancel Keys in the 1950s probably did more than anyone else to throw confusion into the world of nutritional recommendations, and his advice remains influential. The resulting uncertainty opened the door for Big Food’s $14 billion advertising budgets and popular stars such as Vani Hari (Food Babe) with no nutritional science background to further pseudoscientific eating habits such as irrational avoidance of gluten by people without celiac disease and the shunning of GMO foods. For the huge supplements and health food industry, such terms as “clinically proven”, boosts, supports, enhances, renews, rebuilds, revitalizes, rejuvenates, and restores are exposed for what they are- meaningless buzz words but very effective marketing tools that prey on grocery shopper’s anxieties.

The chapter on the burgeoning new spirituality discusses the phenomenon of mostly young well-off white American women who feel unfulfilled indulging themselves from a menu of meditations, astrology, reiki energy cures, Christian Science, alternative medicine, and selective bits and pieces of traditional religions along with visits to psychics, mystics, and “Manifestation experts”. This must lead to fragmentation of societal cohesion and deepening of a selfish inner focus, as the author acknowledges. For me, these practices seem as zany as outhouse flies. But I do not have a magic formula to get people to become less self-centred and to refocus on bigger issues. The same shaming marketing strategies and the same self-focus outcomes apply to the numerous Fitbit-addicted “fitfluencers” providing “fitspirarion” toward deliberately set unattainable goals. Most of these are celebrities with no expertise in exercise physiology, but are expert at doling out a kind of toxic positivity of expectations with simplistic reductionist advice.

Some of the unscientific flashy “bio hacking” trends such as “atmospheric cell training” to “massage your cells from the inside out” seem totally whacky to me, but as Raphael points out, do give people a perception of control which has its own scientifically proven benefits. But do not count on these to delay your encounter with the Grim Reaper, and they potentially can delay or deny use of proven treatments that do just that.

Raphael points out in the closing chapters that scientist have historically done a very poor job of communicating facts about fitness and health and that that deficit leaves the advertisers and self promoting quacks free to fill the gap with nonsense. That needs to change. For my part as a scientist, my advice is accept that life is rife with unfairness and uncertainties, to exercise vigorously, monitor every body function, gobble supplements, restrict your diet, meditate etc, only if it gives you pleasure or is recommended by a knowledgeable health care expert. And don’t bother with the gluten free shampoo. (Yes, it is a real product sold in Walmart.)

It might seem from my negative comments above that I did not like this read, but I really did enjoy it. The writing is laced with humour, personal anecdotes and quirky metaphors as the author, a Los Angeles journalist, indulges in many of the practices she studies and tries to understand. She interviews many of the leaders of these and more scholarly academic experts.

Her approach combines insight into the psychology of the trends she studies with an open mind, although from a limited female American perspective.

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Thanks, Book Browse.