I Contain Multitudes, by Ed Yong: Microbes! I started this before January 1st and thoroughly enjoyed reading it on the cold, quiet days following.
Sick, by Porochista Khakpour: Super engrossing and beautiful in its structure. I’ve read a few books that investigate or narrate experiences with the long-term effects of Lyme disease (see, I’m even afraid to say chronic Lyme because it’s so controversial!) I’ve read intelligent, considered arguments on both sides and my only certainty is that it would be terrifying to have a disease or condition with clear and extreme health effects and to have your experiences dismissed. That, and you will not find me anywhere in the northeast outside of the city without long pants and high socks.
In Order to Live, by Yeonmi Park: I started and finished this on the same day, which is to say it’s a quick read. It’s very compelling, though it’s a book you read for the story rather than the writing. There’s some controversy about Park’s memory and/or retelling of her escape from North Korea and her two years in China, but that really doesn’t make a difference to me–yes, if her story somehow undercut the stories of others who have fled NK (AND it were untrue or embellished), that would be problematic, but if she has inconsistencies in her memory because of trauma…well, that frankly makes perfect sense.
She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, by Carl Zimmer: I hadn’t read any Zimmer before, and his voice quickly became one of my favorites among science writers. This is a delightfully huge brick of a book that I persisted in taking on the subway anyway. Parts of it engaged me much more than others–the history of how we’ve misperceived and misunderstood heredity, studies of human behavior, chimeras and DNA tests were high points, while more general information on genes, the microbiome, and botany covered material that’s been thoroughly covered elsewhere and could have been condensed.
Concussion, by Jeanne Laskas: It’s easy for me, as someone with no interest in the sport, to criticize football. Not that I think it’s wrong to criticize it – it seems obviously, unbearably damaging. And a third adjective: inevitably. That’s the one – in conjunction with the sheer magnitude of the damage done to a person by CTE – that really makes carrying on with football inexcusable to me. Any sport has a risk of injury. The only sports I have any kind of entertainment investment in are gymnastics, tennis, and large swaths of the Summer Olympics. Let’s look at gymnastics, which currently clearly has numerous problems beyond injury, but let’s focus on injury. It’s common in gymnastics, yes. Occasionally gymnastics injuries can be severe: paralysis, even death. More frequently, they’re inevitable (or close enough – there will always be gymnasts whose body composition/conditioning regimen/sheer luck will save them from chronic pain later in life). But the middle of that Venn diagram is virtually empty. The inevitable injuries are not life-threatening, and the life-threatening injuries are vanishingly rare. Even so, we should continue to evaluate skills that are too dangerous (like roll-out double flips on the floor exercise, which are banned for both men and women) and to improve the equipment for better safety. But with football, it’s become increasingly clear that a significant percentage of professional and college football players (and even younger players…) WILL suffer devastating effects from repeated concussions and “subconcussions,” and it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to prevent that via equipment. I’m not trying to take football away from those who enjoy it if there’s a solution, but frankly it seems to me that a true solution would involve flags. And as for the book…I didn’t dislike its focus on the issue via the story of the forensic pathologist who played one of the most significant roles in discovering and publicizing it, but I didn’t love the way it was implemented. There are passages in the subject’s own voice, and that’s okay, but sometimes the author seems to write half in his voice and half in a more distanced voice. I wouldn’t have minded more history and background on concussions and the football industrial complex, also.
