The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--And Why

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Amanda Ripley, a writer for Time magazine has written a fascinating exploration of The Unthinkable:  Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why. 

This isn’t a Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook, although Ripley certainly advocates planning ahead to meet the disasters you’re most likely to face in your life, since in a catastrophic situation you may not be able to rely on emergency response teams. 

It’s more about the reaction process people go through as they face sudden disaster and how each individual’s combination of instinct and experience and training can be lifesaving or fatal in the circumstances.

Through interviews with experts and with survivors of well-known disasters—9/11, the 2006 tsunami, Katrina, the Columbine shootings, and even the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire—Ripley tries to trace the common factors in people’s reactions to catastrophe. 

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others

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I picked up Mirroring People:  The New Science of How We Connect with Others thinking it was going to be about the phenomenon that TV documentaries sometimes cover, that people who interest each other subconsciously mimic each other’s gestures and even synchronize their breathing and heartbeats.

Well, neuroscientist Marco Ioacoboni’s fascinating book touches on that topic, but it turns out to be about much more. 

He describes the discovery, led by a team of Italian scientists, of “mirror neurons,” motor nerves that appear to play a basic role in the ability of people (and other animals) to recognize each other’s intentions, anticipate each other’s actions, feel empathy for the emotions of someone other than themselves, develop language, and participate in the whole complex process of social cognition.

Pretty cool, huh?

From the Bohemian Rhapsody to the Big Bang with Brian May

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A rock musician who has made his mark in the world of popular culture turns to his more 'academic side' as he completes a doctoral degree in astrophysics.  His dissertation focuses on the study of 'interplanetary dust'.  Yeah, right, you say.  For real, I say.  Highly-respected former Queen guitarist Brain May has an amazing life story to go with his new book,  Bang! The Complete History of the Universe.   Written with fellow scientists Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott, Bang! does indeed provide an enjoyable and accessible look at the 'big bang' - in less than 200 pages. Listen to an interview with Dr. May from npr.org, dated 5.8.08.

The Ends of the Earth

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I’m partly through this new book and I just noticed that it has two front covers, two editors, two tables of contents, two introductions, and two sub-subtitles.  On one side, it’s called The Ends of the Earth:  An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic:  The Arctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert.  On the other side it’s called The Ends of the Earth:  An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic:  The Antarctic, edited by Francis Spufford.

Okay, so the publishers will be disappointed that I missed the clever upside-down, half-and-half presentation, but they should be pleased how much I’m enjoying the first inside half. 

I started with the Antarctic, since as you may remember I’m a big fan of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Birthday Boys. 

An Anthropologist on Mars

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Neurologist Oliver Sacks is back after a five-year writing absence with a new book currently on the New York Times Best Sellers List called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.  I’ve just picked up my library copy and am excited to read it.  In the meantime, I thought I’d write about one of his earlier books. 

In An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Sacks discusses seven medical cases that challenge our understanding of the brain and how it works.  Here are a few:

• An artist loses all color vision after a car accident and now sees and paints only in black and white
• A young man has a brain tumor that leaves him with no memory of events past 1970
• A surgeon experiences the compulsive tics of Tourette syndrome except while operating
• An autistic boy named Stephen Wiltshire uses his extraordinary drawing skills to communicate with the world

Fire or Ice OR Trouble in the Horse Latitudes OR In the Year 2525

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Alan Weisman's provocative and deeply depressing book The World Without Us does offer a few optimistic scenarios. The good news (1) Look at the New England forests.  Early settlers chopped them down but later abandoned their farms, and now the trees are all grown up again.  In a few more generations the forests will look pretty much like they did before the European settlers came.  Already, three coyotes have made their way across bridges from New Jersey and into Manhattan.

The other good news (2) In the long run, global warming isn't that big of a deal, because in 5 billion years the sun is going to expand and suck in all the planets, anyway.  Also, given the wobble of the earth and its slightly erratic orbit, unless we've really screwed things up, another ice age is inevitable no matter what we do, and it certainly would be more convenient to have one in 14,000 years rather than in 1,000 years.  Think of New York City and England as tundra, for example.

Isaac's Storm

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It’s hurricane season once again, with the recent anniversary of Hurricane Katrina serving as a grim reminder.  On September 8, 1900, an even deadlier hurricane swept the coast of Galveston, Texas, killing as many as 10,000 people and changing the city forever. 

Erik Larson, bestselling author of The Devil in the White City, tells the story of this hurricane and its impact on Isaac Cline, the meteorologist who believed no storm could ever seriously damage Galveston.

Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History combines the science of weather with personal accounts of survivors to track the hurricane from beginning to devastating end.  At the eye of the storm are Isaac Cline, the rivalry with his fellow weatherman (and younger brother) Joseph, and the overconfidence of the age, when turn-of-the-century meteorology (and the newly formed United States Weather Bureau) could not prepare the residents of Galveston for a hurricane of this magnitude.  By the time they realized evacuation was necessary, it was too late. 

A Head Full of Ideas / That Are Driving Me Insane OR: WonderDrugs

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I need to be vague so a Major Corporation won't slap me with a SLAPP suit, but I used to be a contractor in the library there.  The library was right across from the large auditorium, and one day I noticed everyone from the [censored] wing of the building going in, which was not unusual.  But this time, it turned out that 300 [censored] were being told they would no longer have jobs with the Corporation in [censored] months, and that a certain kind of research would no longer take place there.  

Everyone took the news pretty well except for one guy who must have found out beforehand what was going on and refused to enter the auditorium.  He sat in one of the nice chairs by the library yelling things like, "It's a lot cheaper to hire a PR person than to invent a product that will keep someone's [censored] in their [censored] for their whole life!"

That's the man I want to marry, unless he already is married. 

One of my points here is that it's a good thing the companies involved with researching sulfa drugs and the even better antibiotics didn't drop out because the research involved was expensive.

Lenin's Embalmers

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1958 was an interesting time to be born, because World War II, though long past, was still a part of everyone's collective memory, and the Cold War was really gearing up.  Most of my friends and teachers believed Hitler had been a communist, and our games of Russian Interrogation and Nazi Interrogation were identical:

Those were simpler times when children played healthy outdoor games like this rather than evil videogames.

A Surgeon's Notes

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If you’re a Grey’s Anatomy fan like me, you know all about Meredith Grey, McDreamy, McSteamy, and the rest of the surgical staff at Seattle Grace Hospital.  But you might not know about a heart-pounding book called Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande.   

In this collection of essays--a National Book Award finalist—Gawande candidly admits that doctors make mistakes because medicine is a human endeavor, and humans make mistakes.  We follow Gawande making his rounds as a surgical resident at a Boston hospital: fumbling a central line or an emergency tracheostomy; missing a deadly aortic aneurysm.  His own missteps and those of others illustrate his central theme--that medicine is not a perfect science but one full of uncertainty, guesswork, intuition, and oftentimes, mystery. 

Therapy of Last Resort

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The Lobotomist, by journalist Jack El-Hai, is a biography of Walter Freeman, the doctor who popularized a treatment that many people find very repellent today.  The idea was that severing the nerves between the brain's frontal lobes would decrease anxiety and depression in patients with severe mental illness.  Sometimes it worked. 

Very often it didn't, of course, especially for patients with schizophrenia.  Often, although not always, lobotomy made patients more docile and quiet.  These patients were then able, if not always to live productive lives, at least to leave warehouse-like mental institutions and return home.  Too many times, though, lobotomies were given to patients simply to make them less troublesome. Fifty-thousand people received lobotomies, mostly, according to an NPR feature, between 1949 and 1952.