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NonfictionScienceAnimals

If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

We may think we know what intelligence is. After all, human intelligence is what enables us to read intriguing nonfiction books such as If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity by animal behavior and cognition researcher Justin Gregg, who works with the Dolphin Communication Project at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. But as Gregg makes clear in his engaging third book, we might not know as much as we think about intelligence. In fact, we might be entirely wrong in our assumptions. It might be time to seriously question “human exceptionalism” and what it means for our species and our planet. To do that, Gregg sets out to answer the question “What good is human intelligence?”

Justin Gregg, author of ‘If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal,’ extols the virtues of stupid animals.

The author begins with a chapter about humans as “why specialists.” Anyone who has been in the presence of a toddler will recognize the “Why?” stage of development. While we may automatically assume that this ability to ask—and discover answers to—every question under the sun is uniformly positive, Gregg asks us to look at this human characteristic through a different lens: “I propose we consider a provocative premise: does asking why give us a biological advantage?” Gregg then takes readers on a time-travel expedition, from 240,000 years ago until today, to demonstrate why certain qualities associated with human intelligence have not, evolutionarily speaking, benefited either our species or the Earth. When humanity’s answers to “why questions” are wrong, Gregg explains, they lead to some truly terrible outcomes, including white supremacy and genocide.

Gregg takes readers on a wide-ranging, entertaining journey of discovery in If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, challenging them to reexamine their assumptions about animals and humans. Along the way, he explores aspects of human experience (such as language use, morality, awareness of death and our capacity to wonder about virtually everything in the universe) and reveals ways in which nonhuman animals experience consciousness themselves. All together, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal is a timely, thought-provoking and often sobering book that will make you look at humans, animals and the future of our planet with new eyes.

According to cognitive scientist Justin Gregg, we might be entirely wrong in our assumption that human intelligence is a good thing.
NonfictionTrue CrimeScienceLiterature

Agatha Christie looms large in two true-crime books about the science of murder

Feature by Anna Christensen

A scream in the night. A tangle of clues. Befuddled police being led by the nose as a sharp-eyed and unlikely detective examines the evidence. The drawing room denouement. All these are, of course, well-known tropes of the classic murder mystery—a genre made famous in part by the queen of the sleuthing story herself, Agatha Christie.

Christie’s works are so engrossing, and enduring, because they manage to tread that thin line where the cozy mystery and the high-stakes whodunit meet. While readers are wrapped up in the fantasy of an English country home or hamlet, the imminent danger is truly spine-tingling. Somewhat less examined, however, are Christie’s reputation as a meticulous researcher of forensics, a field that was newly developing in the early 20th century, and her medical and pharmacological background. A perfectionist who volunteered as a nurse and pharmacist during World War I, Christie was businesslike about blood and gore, more than aware of the effects of certain chemicals on the body and keenly curious about the new scientific methods being used to investigate real-life murders. Her appetite for the crossroads of science and crime was so great, in fact, that she co-founded the Detection Club, a social club of crime writers who gathered for supper and lively discussions on murder.

In The Science of Murder: The Forensics of Agatha Christie, Carla Valentine, a longtime mortician, curator of a museum of Victorian pathology and voracious Christie reader, expertly moves through the study of fingerprints, toxicology, ballistics, blood spatter and wounds. (A memorable example: The practice of “gloving” involves the autopsist wearing the skin of the deceased’s hand like a glove in order to collect fingerprints.) Christie ignited Valentine’s own curiosity about the forensic sciences, and with the enthusiasm of the true fan, Valentine illuminates Christie’s meticulous genius by dissecting some of her most famous fictional murders and illustrating how both the crime and the solution are supported by science. It’s an engrossing read for any Christie lover, or simply any true-crime obsessive. However, a strong stomach is recommended; Valentine, like Christie, has no qualms about gore.

The best murder is the well-researched murder. Happy reading.

Of all the ways there are to kill a person, poison is the one most inextricably associated with Christie. Dispatching over 30 of her victims in this way, Christie was well versed in toxins from her wartime days in a pharmacy. In fact, she wielded her toxic substances with such descriptive accuracy that her novels have been used to detect symptoms of poisoning in real murder attempts. Author and toxicologist Neil Bradbury pays homage to this fact in his book A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them by opening three of his chapters with excerpts from Christie’s novels. All together, this is a book that Christie herself would have found excellent fireside reading material, as Bradbury devotes a chapter each to 11 major poisons used throughout history, including real-life murder cases in which they were used and, sometimes gruesomely, how they work on a molecular level to kill their victims.

Bradbury’s poisons run the gamut from the unexpected (insulin) to the gothically romantic (belladonna and wolfsbane). There’s even a section on polonium, the radioactive poison carrying a very famous victim count of one. Far from being dry molecular science, A Taste for Poison makes the reader horrifyingly aware of the devastating effects these substances have on the body’from corroding their organs to interrupting their essential electrical impulses to death. Yet it is with an excitement and love for his subject matter that Bradbury discusses these baneful materials, frequently reminding us that they are themselves blameless and often used in smaller doses to heal.

Christie’s murder mysteries were so steeped in science and so brilliantly complex that some think her novels were used as manuals to carry out attempts at the perfect murder. (Note: The would-be criminal masterminds failed in every known case.) Both Bradbury and Valentine seem to nod at this with their own warnings to readers who might use the knowledge their books impart to nefarious purposes. Forensic science will catch you, warns Valentine. Bradbury absolves himself in the appendix with a note informing us that his book is educational in nature and strictly not for the encouragement of murder. However, as Christie knew, the best murder is the well-researched murder. Happy reading.

Poison, fingerprints and toxicology—oh my! Carla Valentine and Neil Bradbury reveal how murderers have wielded chemistry and biology.
NonfictionScienceAnimals

An Immense World

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Readers may be most familiar with Ed Yong from his Pulitzer Prize-winning science writing for The Atlantic. His first book, the New York Times bestselling I Contain Multitudes, explored the world of microbes. In his new work of nonfiction, An Immense World, Yong tackles the realm of animal senses, taking readers on a fascinating journey backed up by impressive research.

Yong’s scope is far-reaching, and the issues and scientific concepts involved are sometimes complex. But much like a skilled mountain guide, he takes the time to prepare readers for what lies ahead. In the introduction, Yong not only identifies basic terms (such as stimuli, sense organs and sensory systems) but also provides guideposts for the journey ahead, challenging readers to use their imaginations in order to overcome the blind spots humans inevitably have when trying to understand sensory systems immensely different from our own. As Yong writes, “Our intuitions will be our biggest liabilities, and our imaginations will be our greatest assets.”

Subsequent chapters do indeed engage the imagination. Yong’s book is organized by different senses, some which are familiar—such as smell, taste and sound—and others much less familiar. In a chapter titled “The Rippling Ground: Surface Vibrations,” we learn about scientist Karen Warkentin’s groundbreaking discovery that embryonic tadpoles can hatch early if they sense a snake attack. Other such fascinating anecdotes abound throughout this book, and it’s safe to say readers will have a hard time not sharing newfound knowledge in daily conversation. For example, did you know that Philippine tarsiers emit sounds with frequencies above the ultrasonic boundary, or that 250 species of fish can produce their own electricity?

Yong brings to this project a supreme mastery of science writing for the general reader, so don’t be intimidated by the nearly 50-page bibliography. An Immense World is an accessible, illuminating and endlessly exciting reading experience. Yes, nonfiction about science can be page-turning!

While this title is perfect for adult nature lovers, the accessibility of Yong’s approach also makes this a wonderful gift for high school or college students interested in science. For at its heart, this treasure of a book is a sober reminder of what’s at stake in the 21st century—and today’s students will be tomorrow’s researchers and citizen scientists. “A better understanding of the senses can show us how we’re defiling the natural world,” Yong writes in his closing chapter. “It can also point to ways of saving it.”

An Immense World is an accessible, illuminating and exciting reading experience. Yes, nonfiction about the science of animal senses can be page-turning!
NonfictionScienceEssays

Virology

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic have left us with many lingering questions: How long can a virus live? Why weren’t we better prepared to handle the virus? How long will vaccines keep us safe from the virus and its variants? How can we distribute vaccines and other medical interventions equitably to protect and save human lives? What kinds of robust public health policies do we need in place to help us mitigate the effects of widespread outbreaks in the future? Scientist Joseph Osmundson answers these and other questions in his luminous and stunning Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between.

As Osmundson dives into the intricacies of science and medicine, he also takes time to consider the emotional toll of gauging health risks. In a world full of viruses—and especially in light of the most recent pandemic—we will always face the risk of infection, he says. He thus challenges readers to “reframe the very notion of risk, of fear” since “the more we all minimize risk, the less there is to fear.” Though perhaps eschewing this fear is easier said than done since, as he writes, “there are 250 million viruses in every 0.001 liters of ocean water, and so 7,393,387,354, more than 7 billion viruses, in 1 single fluid ounce, a mouthful.” Moreover, all viruses are so different from one another that what we learn about HIV or Ebola, for example, may not help us understand or diminish the effects of coronaviruses.

As a queer person, Osmundson candidly shares the moments he has calculated the risk of contracting HIV while having sex. At the same time, Osmundson points out that being queer provides him and others with a “legacy and a history of care even in the face of systemic oppression.” Queer people, he observes, have been “training for this moment—to sacrifice, in the face of a virus, to care for one another.”

Despite the ubiquity of viruses and their variety, Osmundson illustrates that humans and viruses evolve together. Recognizing this provides hope for all of us, he insists, especially through the development of vaccines. In addition, we can learn from our responses to HIV and COVID-19 and find the paths we need to follow for more robust public health: research into each virus, development of drugs and vaccines, community-led vaccination and health programs, and universal healthcare.

A collection that weaves together the raggedness of the personal with the chaos of the political, Virology will take its place next to Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journal as a model for cultural criticism. Sparkling prose, glittering insights, lucid thinking and accessible writing about sometimes difficult topics makes Virology a must-read. It’s one of the best science and medicine books of the year.

Sparkling prose, glittering insights, lucid thinking and accessible writing about difficult viruses make Virology one of the best science books of the year.
NonfictionScienceMemoir

Wired for Love

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Interspersing memoir with science writing, Stephanie Cacioppo leads readers through the brain science of love and connection in Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection. At 37, Cacioppo was already a lauded neuroscientist. She’d chosen to study the neuroscience of love, even though her faculty adviser in Geneva had warned her against it, calling it career suicide. Still, she persevered, earning research spots at Dartmouth and the Swiss National Foundation. She and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to create a “map of love,” showing that the brain reacts to love in complex ways and that romantic feelings of love affect the brain differently than friendship or parental love.

Even so, Cacioppo had never fallen in love, or even had a serious boyfriend. Instead, she decided that her passion would be for work. Then, at a conference in Shanghai, she met John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago social neuroscientist who’d done groundbreaking work on loneliness, establishing it as a dangerous health condition that is as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. She felt an instant connection with him, despite the 20-year age difference. After a period of emailing, they began dating long-distance and meeting up at conferences.

They were married soon after. “Looking back, it’s unbelievable to me that neither of us were struck by the irony of our situation, that John and I, which is to say Dr. Love and Dr. Loneliness, were not practicing what we preached,” Cacioppo writes. “Our research, from opposite ends of the spectrum, emphasized the human need for social connection. And yet both of us had the hubris to think we could go it alone.” Once connected, each spouse’s work informed the other’s. They shared a desk at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, where they both worked, and at home.

A few years into their marriage, John was diagnosed with a deadly form of cancer. Cacioppo details the closeness they felt during his treatment, as well as her complicated grief after his death and her slow return to life. She is an engaging guide through the scientific portions of the book, and her own experiences of connection and loss enrich the narrative. Together, these intertwined strands of science and personal narrative make for a sprightly, illuminating book.

Interspersing memoir with research, neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo offers a sprightly, illuminating look at the science of love and connection.
NonfictionScience

Vagina Obscura

Review by Linda Castellitto

For an entire month in 2018, science journalist Rachel E. Gross’ “vulva had felt on the verge of bursting into flames.” There were few options for contending with, let alone eradicating, the bacterial infection plaguing her nether regions. Her best hope? Boric acid—or, as her doctor put it, “basically rat poison,” which has been used since the 19th century in vaginal suppositories, as well as for killing roaches. Gross’ understandable alarm, as well as her frustration with her own anatomical ignorance, spurred her onto the wide-ranging investigatory journey she chronicles in her engaging and enormously fascinating debut, Vagina Obscura.

Thanks to entrenched sexism, any book about female anatomy and medical history is bound to have physically and psychologically harrowing passages. Gross’ is no exception. After all, it wasn’t until 1993 that a federal mandate forced doctors to include women and minorities in medical research. “Women—and especially women of color, trans women, and women who are sexual minorities—have historically been excluded from this supposedly universal endeavor,” she writes.

In addition to offering valuable historical context about the medical field’s reluctance to properly study cervices, ovaries, uteruses, et al., Vagina Obscura also serves up optimistic evidence for a more equitable future. Gross writes with enthusiasm about pioneering doctors and researchers and shares stories of the people who’ve benefited from their work. To wit: Australian urologist Helen O’Connell’s research on clitoral anatomy laid the foundation for reconstructive surgeries for genital-cutting survivors. Biologist Patty Brennan’s realization that female ducks’ vaginas rotate opposite to males’ corkscrew penises challenged scientific assumptions about copulation. The activism of Cori Smith, a 28-year-old trans man, has drawn attention to trans and nonbinary people with endometriosis. Gender-affirmation surgeon and transgender woman Marci Bowers is “pushing the boundaries of what surgeons can do to give patients the appearance and sensation they desire.”

Gross makes it clear that, if we want to advance our understanding and medical treatment of the human body, it’s going to take a village—one filled with people who are curious, compassionate and persistent. She’s certainly identified lots of them in Vagina Obscura, a book that is impressive in its scope and thrilling in the hope it offers to those whose bodies have previously been overlooked.

Vagina Obscura is impressive in its scope and thrilling in the hope it offers to those whose bodies have been overlooked by the medical establishment.
NonfictionSelf-HelpScience

Increase your EQ

Feature by Julie Hale

Focusing on emotional intelligence and self-awareness, these titles offer insight for managing emotions, handling stress and boosting communication skills. Here’s to a transformative new year!

Readers looking to cultivate a more peaceful mindset will find helpful strategies in Julie Smith’s Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? Smith is a clinical psychologist, educator and writer who has been featured on CNN and the BBC. After gaining a robust social media following with her content about mental health, Smith decided to write a book so that she could delve deeper into some of the issues she often addresses with her patients in therapy.

In her warm, welcoming book, Smith focuses on weighty topics that we all contend with, such as stress, grief, fear and self-doubt, and provides suggestions for how to work through these feelings. She also encourages readers to find out what motivates them so they can use it to implement important life changes. Throughout, she takes a proactive approach, offering methods for dissolving anxiety, using stress for positive ends and managing low moods. She includes writing prompts and easy-to-do exercises to help readers explore how they respond to criticism, how they can confront anxious thoughts and more.

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? is briskly written and seasoned with compassionate insights. “When we understand a little about how our minds work and we have some guideposts on how to deal with our emotions in a healthy way,” Smith writes, “we can not only build resilience, but we can thrive and, over time, find a sense of growth.” Readers who are eager to achieve emotional balance and make a fresh start in 2022 will find the direction they need in Smith’s empowering book.

Popular science writer Catherine Price offers more ideas about how to start this year off on the right foot.

In Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, Leonard Mlodinow considers the seemingly diametrical relationship between emotion and logic and shows that these two facets of human nature are not as opposed as we might imagine. A theoretical physicist and mathematician, Mlodinow has previously co-written two books with Stephen Hawking. So what can a physicist tell us about emotional intelligence? Taking a science-supported approach, Mlodinow examines the nature and usefulness of our everyday feelings. He demonstrates that, when it comes to important processes such as goal-setting and decision-making, our emotions play as key a role as our ability to think critically.

“We know that emotion is as important as reason in guiding our thoughts and decisions, though it operates in a different manner,” Mlodinow writes. Over the course of the book, he explores the way emotions work by looking at how they arise in the brain and inform our thought processes. He also investigates the history and development of human feelings, including how they’ve been regarded by different cultures in the past. Mlodinow shares a wealth of practical advice and guidance on how to monitor, and even embrace, emotions in ways that can lead to self-improvement. The book includes questionnaires that allow readers to determine their own emotional profiles, as well.

Synthesizing hard research, lively personal anecdotes and input from psychologists and neuroscientists, Mlodinow tackles complex topics in a reader-friendly fashion to create a narrative that’s wonderfully accessible. Understanding our emotions is a critical step in the journey toward personal growth, and Mlodinow’s remarkable book will put readers on the right track.

If you’ve resolved to get in touch with your feelings in 2022, then we have the books for you.
NonfictionScience

Revelations in Air

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Smell is such an integral part of being human, yet it’s probably our least thought-about sense. We take it for granted, often focusing instead on what we can see, hear, taste and touch. But what if we had a guidebook on how to approach life through smell and take advantage of the aromas that confront our noses throughout the day?

This is essentially what author Jude Stewart (Patternalia) provides in her new book, Revelations in Air: A Guidebook to Smell, a comprehensive handbook chock-full of guidance, advice and new ways to experience a sense that is barely understood. Stewart writes that smell’s “liveness,” its dynamic and embodied nature, is what drew her to it and led her on a journey to sniff with more intention. Along the way she realized that “smelling is a kind of meditation turned inside out.

Starting with the science of smell, Stewart discusses the nose’s function and purpose, outlining the chemistry required for smell “to reach us,” the anatomical role of the body’s olfactory bulbs and smell’s emotional connection to the brain and memory. She then breaks various smells into categories such as sweet, savory, earthy and funky. The usual suspects are featured, such as rose, vanilla and bacon, as well as some surprising scents many of us will never get a chance to experience, including cannon fire, melting permafrost and extinct flowers.

Stewart effortlessly combines the fascinating science behind smell with historical examples, musical comparisons and cultural differences in how smells are viewed and experienced. Revelations in Air gives a fresh perspective on and appreciation for this often-ignored sense.

Jude Stewart provides a guidebook to smell that’s chock-full of guidance, advice and new ways to experience the aromas around us.
NonfictionScience

Free toilet paper with purchase!

Behind the Book by Mary Roach

When I do book talks, I always take a moment to display to the audience the special free giveaway for everyone who buys a book. For Spook, purchasers received an “Ectoplasm Bookmark”! Spiritualist mediums in the 1920s used to swallow tightly wadded cheesecloth and covertly regurgitate it during séances. (Spread out in the dark, it looked ghostly and filmy.)

You might not think that a 1″ x 4″ strip of unadorned cheesecloth would motivate a person to buy copies of a $32 hardback, and there you’d be mistaken.

You might not think that a 1″ x 4″ strip of unadorned cheesecloth would motivate a person to buy copies of a $32 hardback, and there you’d be mistaken. I personally have always been a sucker for this kind of thing. I am a child of the Cracker Jack era, back when the prize inside was a tiny metal or plastic toy, not a goddam rub-on tattoo.

With Bonk, I had colorful travel toothbrushes custom-printed to say KEEP YOUR CAVITIES FILLED (and a website URL). In Salt Lake City, a man handed it back, saying, “I’ll just throw it away when I get home.” I recall sitting there at my signing station, carrying on a conversation with the next person in line, all the while thinking, “Who would throw this away? Doesn’t everyone need a colorful travel toothbrush?”

Packing for Mars readers got a spoonful of genuine simulated moon dust, the kind NASA was purchasing in great heaps to be sure dust particles weren’t going to gum up rover engines or scratch camera lenses when we went back to the moon. We never did go back there, so the whole enterprise was something of a bust. Your taxpayer dollars at work for Mary Roach giveaways.

For the new book Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, I tracked down the manufacturers of the tiny toilet paper packets that go into every US MRE (Meals-Ready-to-Eat—combat rations). They’re made 10 miles from my home, in a warehouse run by the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind. Elsewhere I had stickers made up that say GRUNT, plus a website URL. I’ll give the packets out at the signing table during the book tour, but I also plan to leave them in airport and restaurant bathroom stalls. The juvenile double-entendre seemed to dovetail nicely with my reputation.

When I went to pick them up, manager Skip Foster showed me how they’re made. A five-foot-wide roll that the people there call the “King Kong toilet paper roll” is mounted on a machine that feeds it into “slitters” that make a row of normal-TP-width strips. The machine then stacks, folds, and compresses these strips, which are then separated into units, wrapped, and spit into a waiting box at a rate of a thousand per minute.

Military TP is made to US Government Toilet Paper Specifications, and as such is stronger than most commercial brands. Servicemen and women complain about it because they want more of it. Skip tried to persuade the military to include two packets in each MRE, but had no luck with that.

I don’t know how many books it will move, but it certainly made for an interesting morning.

Read our review of ‘Grunt.’

Mary Roach shares the curious marketing strategy for her latest book, Grunt.

NonfictionScience

10 unexpected aspects of space travel

Behind the Book by Terry Virts

Terry Virts shares 10 of the wildest, most surprising aspects of going to space—and he ought to know. He’s done it twice!

I had two goals for How to Astronaut: to make the reader say “Wow!” and to make them laugh. I didn’t want to write another typical astronaut book—say, an autobiography or a technical guide. I wanted a book that would be easy reading—something for the beach or the nightstand, a kind of literary comfort food. Here’s a taste, with 10 things about space travel you may find interesting, surprising or funny.

1. Learning Russian 

Whenever a new astronaut shows up at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, they probably think they’re pretty good at a few things. They were either the hotshot jet pilot at their military base, the top doctor at their hospital or the nerdiest computer nerd at their engineering job. But one thing I learned during my time as an astronaut is that whatever you think you’re good at, there’s always someone better. For example, I thought I was pretty decent at foreign languages until I had to learn Russian, which was probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. It’s a required language because the Russians are such important partners in the International Space Station (ISS) program, and it ended up being something I loved; but I must admit, the first 10 years were the hardest.

2. Chez Terry

When I signed up to be an F-16 pilot many years ago, and when I joined the astronaut corps some years later, there were a lot of things I expected to do. Cutting women’s hair was not one of them. But when Samantha Cristoforetti was assigned as my Italian crewmate, that was exactly what I had to learn to do. It was the most hair-raising thing I did in my seven-plus months in space. You’ll have to ask Samantha if I did OK, but I never heard any complaints.

3. Rodent research 

Everyone knows that astronauts do science in space. After all, that is the purpose of the ISS and the reason that our 15-nation partnership has spent tens of billions of dollars over decades on the station program. Honestly, though, this fighter pilot never expected to dissect mice in space—but that’s exactly what I did. Ultimately it was worth it because the rodent research we did is very important for the pharmaceutical industry and will hopefully lead to better medications down here on Earth.

4. The red button

 I wish you could have seen the look on the face of the poor guy at the Kennedy Space Center who was giving my astronaut class their first tour of Cape Canaveral. It was an innocent question that I asked: “What’s that red button for?” The answer was a little surprising, to say the least. It was the button he would use to blow up my space shuttle, with my butt on board, if we went off course during launch. It reminds me of a song: “Don’t ask me no questions, and I won’t tell you no lies.”

5. Potty talk 

Well, what can I say? There are several chapters in How to Astronaut on this topic. Frankly, it’s the most popular question we get as astronauts. To put it succinctly, yes, astronauts do wear diapers.

6. Making movies in space

When I learned that we would be filming an IMAX movie during my mission, I was beside myself with joy. Helping to make A Beautiful Planet was my favorite thing I did while in space. Plus, I got to learn the craft of filmmaking from my director, Toni Myers. It’s a skill I’ve transitioned into my post-NASA career.

7. Doing the deed

This is the second most popular question we get. Have astronauts done it in space? You’ll have to read the book to find out, but as for me and my time on the ISS, it was a long 200 days . . .

8. What to do if you’re stranded in space

It’s a bit of a morbid subject and not one that we talk about very often, but if your rocket engine doesn’t light up to fly you back to Earth while you’re in orbit or on the moon, you have the rest of your life to figure out what to do.

9. What to do with a dead body 

I don’t remember discussing this subject in any of my NASA training, but the astronauts we fly are not exactly spring chickens, and in any case, humans don’t have a good record of being immortal. On top of it all, the space environment isn’t the safest place to be. If we continue to travel beyond our planet, future space crews will eventually have to reckon with this question.

10. Juxtaposition between the sublime and the mundane

This is the best way I can describe space flight. During the first minutes of my first shuttle flight, when I was busy helping to fly Endeavour as her pilot, I saw the most amazing sights out the window—things humans weren’t meant to see. I experienced this dissonance a thousand times during my seven months in space: 99% of my time was spent on mundane, mechanical tasks, but 1% of the time I felt like I was seeing God’s view of the universe.

 

Author photo credit Jack Robert Photography

Terry Virts shares 10 of the wildest, most surprising aspects of going to space—and he ought to know. He’s done it twice!

I had two goals for How to Astronaut: to make the reader say “Wow!” and to make them laugh. I didn’t…

AudioScienceHistory

Empire of Pain

Review by G. Robert Frazier

New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s exhaustive research for Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (18 hours) makes him the natural choice to narrate his own audiobook. Keefe knows exactly which points to stress for listeners of this story, which he calls “the taproot of the opioid epidemic” in America—not that added emphasis is really needed, as the book’s content is shocking enough.

In jaw-dropping detail, Keefe recounts the greed, deception and corruption at the heart of the Sackler family’s multigenerational quest for wealth and social status. Renowned for their philanthropy, the Sacklers built their fortune through the pharmaceutical industry in the 1940s and ’50s, making calculated moves in medical advertising and with the Food and Drug Administration. Keefe brilliantly traces the Sacklers’ path toward developing controversial pharmaceutical products such as the anti-anxiety medicine Valium and the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin via their company, Purdue Pharma.

The 18-plus hours that it takes to listen to this mind-blowing history may seem intimidating at first, but Keefe’s masterful storytelling makes it worth every minute.

New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s exhaustive research for Empire of Pain makes him the natural choice to narrate his own audiobook.
NonfictionScienceBiography

Hidden Valley Road

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Twelve children. Six diagnoses of schizophrenia. Two parents navigating a meager mental health care system in midcentury America.

At the center of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family are the Galvins, who are unlike any family you’ll ever read about. “This could be the most mentally ill family in America,” writes author Robert Kolker. 

Hidden Valley Road blends two stories in alternating chapters. The first is about the overwhelmed Galvin parents, Don and Mimi, and how raising a boisterous Catholic family of 10 sons from the 1950s to the ’70s may have allowed mental illness to hide in plain sight. A “boys will be boys” attitude excused much aberrant behavior.

Hidden Valley Road is a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand how far we’ve come in treating mental illness—and how far we still have to go.

The Galvin daughters, the two youngest, provide the emotional heart of the book. They grew up watching their brothers suffer, while also being terrified of—and terrorized by—them. Granted access to the surviving Galvin relatives, Kolker brilliantly shows how mental illness impacts more than just those who are sick, and how festering family secrets can wreak generational damage.

The second story in Hidden Valley Road details the thankless psychiatric research that has gone into defining schizophrenia and establishing treatments. This research has run parallel to the Galvins’ lives—from early beliefs that bad mothering caused schizophrenia to an institutional reliance on Thorazine, an antipsychotic medication, to more contemporary treatments involving talk therapy and other medications. Kolker walks readers through to the present day, where genetic research into schizophrenia happens largely at the whims of pharmaceutical companies. 

The author creates a powerfully humane portrait of those diagnosed with schizophrenia. The Galvin brothers have done terrible things—sexual abuse, domestic violence, murder—but Kolker is a compassionate storyteller who underscores how inadequate medical treatment and an overreliance on “tough love” and incarceration underpin so much of the trauma this family experienced. 

Hidden Valley Road is heavy stuff, especially for readers with mental illness or sexual abuse in their own families. But it’s a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how far we’ve come in treating one of the most severe forms of mental illness—and how far we still have to go. 

Twelve children. Six diagnoses of schizophrenia. Two parents navigating a meager mental health care system in midcentury America.

At the center of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family are the Galvins, who are unlike any family you’ll ever read about. “This could…

NonfictionScience

Lost in mazes of the mind

Review by Kelly Blewett

You might guess that Helen Thomson, a journalist who studies neuroscience, would be a fan of the late Oliver Sacks. And you’d be right. Like Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Thomson’s Unthinkable features case studies of people who inhabit unimaginable realities, among them a man who believes he is a tiger, a woman who is continually lost and a man who feels the bodily sensations of others as he observes them.

Thomson brings to the project an eye for detail and narrative prowess, and unlike a scientific investigator such as Sacks, she does not seek to study these astonishing minds in clinical settings, but instead in more natural ones. Based in England, Thomson travels thousands of miles to meet her contacts and visit their homes. She asks the kinds of personal questions scientists might avoid. For instance, she queries one subject, who strongly associates people with colors, what color he associates with his mother—and even with Thomson herself.

Yet Thomson’s aim, ultimately, is to shed light on what each case can tell us about our own life experiences, particularly as they are mediated by the three-pound lump of flesh in our heads. How do we find our way around, perceive our bodies and record our memories?

Neuroscience has exploded in the last two decades as imaging technology and a renewed exploration of human cognition have illuminated the inner workings of our minds like never before. Thomson traces the roots of this enterprise and shows how these extraordinary cases relate to ongoing investigations into the nature of perception. Fans of Sacks will enjoy and quickly devour this insightful and very readable book.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You might guess that Helen Thomson, a journalist who studies neuroscience, would be a fan of the late Oliver Sacks. And you’d be right. Like Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Thomson’s Unthinkable features case studies of people who inhabit unimaginable realities, among them a man who believes he is a tiger, a woman who is continually lost and a man who feels the bodily sensations of others as he observes them.

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