Thank God for Evolution - book review

I think it is a brilliant choice of titles when, without their opening the book, hundreds of thousands of readers can be offended.  Author Michael Dowd has done just that with his book "Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World"  

My first thought at seeing the title was:  " Is he kidding?  

My second thought was:  "I have to read this!"  Pretty effective title, I'd say.

Indeed, Dowd is serious.  Without losing one whit of his fundamentalist Christian faith, Dowd reinterprets and redefines until he can reconcile his faith with Darwin's "Origin of the Species" as well as hundreds of books that have reinterpreted and extended Darwin.

To begin, Dowd defines "private revelation" as that given to one person.  It cannot be proven or disproven - it just is.  It is often passed through oral traditions until it is written at which time it is solidified, "written in stone" so to speak.  It becomes scripture and is often worshiped as much as the God who reveals himself in such writing.  It, of course, cannot be scientifically proven nor disproven.

In contrast Dowd defines "public revelation" as scientific discovery.  This class of revelation can be scientifically proven.  In fact, it can only be public revelation if it is disprovable.  In this way Dowd hi-jacks science to service religion and opens  away for science to use religious scripture.

Dowd also defines "night language" and "day language" as you would expect - the former to talk about mythic history and oral traditions, the latter to talk about data and experiments and provable theories.  God is then transformed to the greatest of all things, namely the Universe, and the Gospel (the Good News) is superseded by the Great Story, the multi-billion year story of the universe from the Big Bang to whatever the end is.

His wife, a scientist, and he, a Christian fundamentalist, have even developed their own religion.  They spell it the same but emphasize a different syllable: She is a CreAtheist.  He is a CreaTheist. Clever, huh!

Dowd's claim is that all religions can be overhauled and woven into the great story which will continue to develop as the universe evolves into it's destiny.

Dowd and his wife are on a multi-year traveling mission explaining his Great Story to all who will listen.  Not surprisingly, liberal Christians and believing scientists are the most likely to listen to their work.  

I found the book well written and well thought out.  However, the reasoning is not particularly compelling.  From a personal, caring God to a Universe as God may keep God in science but at what cost?  

13 Things That Don't Make Sense - book review

In his book "13 Things That Don't Make Sense" Michael Brooks has certainly given us something to think about.  And something to say the next time someone asks you to name something that scientists are still working on.  By it's nature, every time science makes a discovery, the boundary of knowledge increases and simultaneously the interface area between known and unknown must increase.  So we shouldn't be surprised that there are still significant mysteries of the universe.  I can't describe all of them that Brooks covers of this review would be the size of his book.  The list is as follows:

1. The missing universe - dark matter & dark energy
2. The pioneer anomaly
3. Varying constraints - natural constants
4. Cold fusion - more than PR
5. Life - what is it
6. Viking - life on Mars
7. Signal from space
8. A giant virus
9. Death & evolution
10. Sex & evolution
11. Free will
12. The placebo effect
13. Homeopathy

To start with Brooks picks a high profile puzzle - where is 94% of the universe?  We all learned in high school or college that the universe is made of electrons, protons, and neutrons.  If we took higher physics or chemistry classes we learned about several more particles.  But it turns out that all those particles don't account for the mass of the universe that has recently been calculated.  It turns out we have to mess with the force of gravity or define some "dark=unseen yet" mass.  Same problem with energy.  And scientists are having a field day trying to define and reconcile the various theories and calculations.

In other sections Brooks is on shakier ground.  The last chapter, for example, discusses homeopathy, the idea that water could retain an imprint of molecules that once were there but have been diluted out of the mix.  He makes the intriguing statement that we know little about water in the liquid state such as what molecular structures and substructures might exist and for how long.  It seems impossible that liquid water has a memory or does it?

And in-between Brooks covers topics such as life on Mars and whether we found it before we lost it or at least the funding to resolve the issue.  He hints big that not all of these 13 items need remain mysteries for long if we but have the will and the budget.  Others, such as universal constants may require a visit to an alternative universe to resolve - something that won't be in our budget soon.

I found the book interesting and readable.  If a piece got too deep or complex you just skip to the end of that section without losing much.  I'd like to see a follow-up book in 20 to 25 years and maybe even a "pre-quel" of what "didn't make sense" 50 or 100 years ago.  To see science changing is to see science living.

Handle With Care - book review

"Handle With Care" by Jodi Picoult is one of those  books that pushes my hot buttons, a lot of my hot buttons.  The story revolves around a 6-year old girl Willow who was born with osteogenisis imperfecta, OI, or brittle bone disease.  Her body lacks the collagen necessary to produce strong, properly formed bones so that the least amount of pressure at the wrong point produces a fracture and  severe pain.  We join the family just before they discover a process available in about half the states in which parents of a child born with severe disabilities can sue for "wrongful birth".  The parents have to affirm that they were not notified soon enough of the disability and, had they known soon enough, they would have taken steps to terminate the  pregnancy.

In this book Jodi pushes Willow's mother Charlotte to such an extreme that she alienates her husband, her best friend, other OI patients and support groups, and worst of all Willow herself.  Her only reason is to get sufficient funds for Willow to have adequate treatment for her entire lifetime.  This is the first and biggest hot button for me -- if situations like Willow need the "playing field leveled" using medical malpractice as the bulldozer is legal malpractice in my opinion.  This should be a matter remedied by legislation so it is not left  up to the whims of a jury and the talent of attorneys.  I am furious that this option was not even mentioned in the book leaving the impression that suing is appropriate in these cases.

The book is done in alternating narrative form with each of the characters in turn talking to Willow and explaining things from their point of view.  This lets  us see things that a single point of view could not but gives us the intimacy you miss in a universal viewpoint.  There are baking hints and recipes strewn throughout the book that I personally found annoying.  They interrupted the flow of the plot with no redeeming virture.

The authors seemed to be trying for a satisfying if not happy ending.  I think she failed.  This was a lose-lose-lose situation.  It also demonstrated a lack of knowledge of insurance accounting and risk assessment.  Earlier in the book Willow's sister is depicted as having bulimia and some of her symptoms and manifestations didn't quite ring true.

We Are All Welcome Here - book review

In the forward to "We Are All Welcome Here" by Elizabeth Berg, the author makes the unusual admission that the idea for the novel was proposed to her by a woman who wanted her mother's story to be told. Naturally, Ms. Berg told the woman that she didn't work that way and that the woman should write her own story. In the end Berg was convinced the woman would not or could not write the story and was also convinced that there was really a story to be told. Berg then concludes with the assurance that the book is a complete work of fiction, none of the characters are real, any similarity blah, blah, blah. For me this forward sounded too much like a politician promising he won't raise taxes and the more he talks the more worried you should be.

The story's main characters are Mrs. Paige Dunn who contracted polio while pregnant and actually delivered her daughter while in an iron lung, and the daughter Diana, and the black housekeeper/substitute mother Peacie. The daughter is pretty much the narrator so the action is all from her point of view. She is a responsible young lady on the verge of puberty but not yet boy crazy. The action takes place in the late 1950's and early 1960's and is very real for those of us who remember the polio scare, the freedom marches for school integration in the south, and even the early years of Elvis Presley. Berg is able to weave all of these very real historical stories into a personal quest of a young mother, abandoned by her equally young husband, to raise her daughter "right" in spite of horrendous handicaps.

Berg develops each character so that you're sure you would recognize them on the street or in the corner grocery store. Like a good writer and observer of humanity, she also shows the warts and wrinkles, sometimes to our shock and disappointment. And the "evil" social worker is defended as really only wanting what's best for the mother and the daughter.

There are no fairy tale answers for the problems that arise in this "truer than life" novel. But the answers are acceptable, realistic, and probably the best that could have been done. Only those of us who saw some of the film clips of the freedom marches or walked arm in arm with blacks who had only a brutal beating to look forward to can really read into this story what awaits Peacie's husband LaRue in Mississippi. And only those who have known and loved a person chained to an iron lung or even its more portable successor can appreciate the helplessness of Mrs. Dunn. But Berg does an excellent job of reminding us all of the genuine work of humanity. I say if this story isn't true, it ought to be.

Dream When You're Feeling Blue - book review

If "Dream When You're Feeling Blue" sounds like the title of a song right out of the 40's, it should. Frank Sinatra released it seven times between 1940 and 1949. But in this particular case "Dream When You're Feeling Blue" is the title of a book written by Elizabeth Berg about that time period. Three young women in the Heaney family represent the women left behind in World War II. They then spend their otherwise lonely evenings and weekends at the USO dancing and entertaining soldiers preparing to leave or on leave. They also write letters and send care packages to let their boyfriends and others know that somebody cares.

There is a good mix of humor and sadness, birth and death. One of the girls even becomes a "Rosie the riveter" to show her patriotism and not incidentally earn a lot more than she would as a salesclerk. Many times the reader gets the idea that Ms. Berg talked with several people about their recollections of the war years and then tried to include as many as possible. We learn about rationing of commodities, censoring of letters from the battlefield, discrimination of Jews, Germans, and Japanese, blue and gold starts in the windows to signify sons in the service.

I found the ending weak, as if Berg just got tired of this project so she wrapped it up as fast as possible.It was almost as if she wanted to make some more political comments on the era but didn't want to get in the way of a good story. She failed. But the rest of the book is an interesting and educational read.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife (book review)

When I picked up "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife" by David Eagleman, I was doing what I always do - judge a book by it's cover. From the word "Afterlife" I expected a book where people were telling credible but non-verifiable beyond-death stories.

Instead, what we have here is 40 speculations about how our universe works and what we'll find out in the afterlife to confirm or contradict that speculation. Although it consists of pure, unadulterated, speculation (or "mysteries" as they used to tell my dad in Sunday School) I still found the book interesting . I can't remember now, but there is one branch of philosophy that predicts ALL our views will be confirmed in the afterlife. Thus, Mormons in the afterlife will be whisked away to their multi-staged heavenly kingdom and won't really think about where the others went. And those who haven't believed in an afterlife will simply sleep forever. In effect, he, too, will have his belief confirmed.

I digress. Sum's speculations go from the universes where the creator i s a whimsical fellow who "experiments" with various universal constants to another where the creator intended the human species to be little mapmakers.

Another intriguing scenario has "heaven" populated only by those people whom we knew ion Earth. The beter we knew someone or something, the more prominent part they played in our afterlife.

Another chapter and David Eagleman is describing a type of Indian Reincarnation where your progress is not based on moral purity or spiritual growth but on our intellectual growth and choices.

As a discussion stimulator, this book is good. But most people will find the speculations too unbelievable. But that's the point. A god who is bigger and more powerful than this universe and controls all tha goes on in it is also difficult to conceive. The question becomes which is the more unbelievable.

The Really Inconvenient Truths - book review

This is the kind of book you know instinctively that you'll have to handle with protective gloves and long-handled tongs. It's just going to be that messy. Iain Murray"s book's title with complete subtitle is "The Really Inconvenient Truths, Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About --- Because They Helped Cause Them". Is that a mouthful or what? And doesn't it just remind you of the little kid yelling to his mother, "Mom! Johnny hit me back first!"

Even if all the events are the environmental catastrophes promised and even if the "Liberals" (whoever they are) helped cause them (more on that later), what does that have to do with the target of the book's title, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"? I can't make our human rights record better by pointing out that China's is worse. It doesn't work that way.

The seven catastrophe's roughly paraphrased are as follows:
1. DDT vs Malaria
2. Ethanol vs gasoline
3. Birth control pill as a pollutant
4. Fire control in Yellowstone
5. Cuyahoga River pollution
6. Endangered Species Act
7. Communism's record - death of the Aral Sea.

To summarize a couple of these. There is compelling evidence that the use of DDT caused the elimination of several species and the near extincting of several others. Would the continued use of this very useful pesticide have resulted in a "Silent Spring" as Rachel Carson had predicted? Hard to guess. But discontinued use has allowed some species to return from the brink of extinction. Could we have found an alternative to DDT before banning it? Perhaps. Do we now have alternatives? Yes but they are more expensive and have their own side effects. But rather than use these, it appears at least this conservative would rather just play the blame game. And, by the way, do we really know how many Liberals vs non-Liberals voted to eliminate the use of DDT? I think not.

People seem to have forgotten why ethanol was chosen as AN alternative to gasoline. It wasn't because it was the only one or even a particularly good one. But it did have the redeeming characteristic that it was RENEWABLE. Corn and other crops can be planted again and again to produce ethanol where gasoline generally comes from non-renewable crude oil deposits. So for author Murray to now complain about all the detraction of corn is to show his lack of memory, not the conservatism of his ideas.

The use, misuse, management, and mismanagement of national parks, reserves, and all other limited use resources is undoubtedly the subject of hundreds or even thousands of books. Which books and whose research you cite depends on how you want to spin it. There are state and national monuments which are pig sties and some that are jewels. The same can be said about privately owned and operated areas. In general, however, you can do something about public land use that you can't with privately owned areas - use elected representatives to change or upgrade that usage. What Iain Murray chooses to show is that the best of privately run assets is done better than the worst of publicly run assets. No contest.

To summarize: this book reminds us that there are other things to cause alarm and make us mad besides global warming. Take the book with a grain of salt then start writing your elected representatives with a copy to all your friends.

Let Them In - Book Review

"Let Them In - the Case for Open Borders" is written by Jason L. Riley, maember of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board and on the Fox News Editorial Report. It seems that he has established his conservative credentials solidly. So why is he so openly vocal about illegal immigration, saying that most of our conventional wisdom isn't so?

Illegal immigrants are common straw men political opponents these days. One can almost plot the ups and downs of their popularity. Right now in any batch of 10 political spams I receive, I can count on one of two of them being anti-immigrants, legal or otherwise. They make good opponents, too. They rarely speak for themselves. Being illegal or undocumented, the statistics are lousy. Statistics pulled out of the air will be believed even if they're unbelievable, maybe since they're unbelievable.

Riley recounts six of the more popular arguments for closing the borders and sending all the immigrants (sometimes just the illegal ones) home.
1. America is overpopulated but wouldn't be without the immigrants.
2. (Illegal) immigrants steal jobs.
3. Illegal immigrants consume more services than their taxes pay for.
4. There will soon be more of "them" than "us"; we'll lose our national identity.
5. Immigrants vote a straight Democrat ticket
6. Immigrants are a threat to our national security.

To give you some idea of some of the "common knowledge" that Riley takes apart and puts back together consider #5 Immigrants vote a straight Democrat ticket. (Note here that this point is blatantly racist as we aren't talking about illegal aliens because they can't vote.) President Bush (43) showed that was patently false. As a very successful governor of a border state and one who can converse in Spanish, he was able to get a significant portion of the Spanish vote in Texas. When the national Republican organization emphasized "family values" this also resonated with the immigrant population.

Another example is number 4, the loss of our national identity. Studies have shown that indeed first generation immigrants have a difficult time learning English although if it is necessary for work, they do learn it. Second generation (who are technically no longer immigrants) are usually bi-lingual and often very capable in both languages as they have had to translate for their parents. The third and later generations have as much or as little capabilities with the foreign tongue as you or I. There is certainly no threat of losing our national identity. None of the immigrants sees any advantage in not learning English.

Naturally I can't respond at length to each of these statements or my review would look more like Riley's book than a review. I'll just say that Riley answers each point completely. While a little sparse in footnotes as they tend to scare away the average public reader, Riley has included a good bibliography and index. After reading his book one is left with the question, Why don't we advertise for more foreign workers to come here rather than be in a total reactive state?

This is an excellent source book for those interested in this topic. You'll love it if you agree with Riley and even if you're sure your opinion won't be changed, this is a good book to read to see where your arguments might be vulnerable.

Manhunting - book review

If radio were still a popular source of "program" entertainment and this book had been a program on radio, this would probably be the closest thing possible to the audio equivalent of "chick flick". However, I know of no such alliterative nick name for audio books.

Jennifer Crusie in her book "Manhunting" has given us a delightful, if thoroughly predictable, story line. Girl meets man, girl underestimates man, man undervalues girl, man and girl thrown together time and again until the scales fall from their eyes and they partake of the forbidden fruit (figuratively). But change requires more than just knowledge. Do they have what it takes?

The setting is a resort in the hills of Kentucky and although Crusie is parsimonious with her descriptions, they're enough to do the job. You really do feel you're enjoying the boat, the horses, the western bar just like the book's characters are.

For being a love story there is surprisingly little physical contact - just enough to remind you from time to time that this is a love story. And the story is so predictable you can relax and just enjoy the light banter between the leading lady and her nemesis. The end is somewhat anti-climactic, sort of like an editor said, "You can't end the book that way! Wrap it up for goodness sakes."

Thank God for Evolution - book review

Well, folks, the war is over. Those who are lined up one of the two sides: [(1) fundamental Christian "young earth" proponents and (2) atheist/agnostic scientists evolution proponents] should lay down their notebooks and put away their pulpits because the war is over.

According to Michael Dowd in his "Thank God for Evolution" 98% plus of reputable scientists in fields where it definitely matters agree that evolution is a fact, the earth is billions of years old, and there are several plausible mechanisms for driving evolution, the most popular of which are natural selection and sexual selection, neither of which requires the intervention of God. Dowd a man of god, an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ has, in tried and true fashion followed, the admonition "if you can't lick 'em, join 'em" - sort of. By clever redefinitions, Reverent Dowd elevates God from creator of the universe to "the universe" greater than which there is nothing. The Theory of Evolution, he conflates with The Good News or today's Gospel.

I like his definition of God's words to single persons such as Moses, Abraham, Peter, Paul (and dare I add Joseph Smith, Brigham Young) as "private revelation" as it cannot be duplicated no matter how you try to recreate the conditions which brought about the revelation. "Public revelations" on the other hand are facts (not speculations or assumptions) observed by many people over time and space which can be duplicated when the conditions are recreated. With such definitions Dowd points out that public revelation has grown apace and seems to be heading for greater information than we had ever dreamed possible. Private revelation, on the other hand, has all but ceased with only one major church still claiming it. And that which was given has become frozen into scripture where it can become all but useless unless reinterpreted in light of public revelation.

By clumping together both camps and changing definitions, Reverend Dowd will probably not make many friends except in the liberal Christian community who really do want to get along with those scientists who can still believe in the spirit if not the letter of scripture. And there are probably some of these scientists who really want to remain religious. But Dowd is not really worried about conversions or building up a great congregation which believes as he does. He's more interested in the insights that we can gain (and that he can explain in his seminars) as to why people act the way they do (evolution answers many of the questions) and what we can do to grow past these problems (again evolution suggests the answers).

The book is not a difficult read and even if you never get past the part which encourages reinterpretation of private revelation in light of modern public revelation, you will still have gained a great return for your efforts.

The Soul of Medicine - book review

Another Canterbury Tale

Having read Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland's outstanding book "How We Die" I was naturally interested when I heard that he had published another book related to his medical interests. I have spent the better part of my life in medical related careers where it is common practice to discuss the unusual events of the day precisely to keep them unusual. Now in "The Soul of Medicine," Dr. Nuland is simply including us in the "surgical grand rounds" and sharing with us some of what has made his life exciting.

For some unknown reason, Nuland has fashioned his book roughly on the model of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales so that the 20 plus tales that are told have 20 "different" tale tellers. You'll read the Surgeon's Tale, the Urologist's Tale, the Caridologist's Tale, etc. I was unable to discern any order based on the tellers specialty nor for that matter was every tale related to its teller. Hence the puzzlement over the Chaucer analogy. I was also somewhat confused as to whether he was telling each story in the actual words of the specialist from who he heard the story or whether he had put his story in the mouth of a specialist who might have had reason to hear or participate in the creation of the story.

The stories themselves are delightful. You'll find yourself turning pages way too quickly so that the 20 tales and the 207 pages are soon behind you. You find yourself wishing there were 5 or 10 more stories or wondering why the author stopped so soon.

There is nothing in the book that requires the reader to have a medical
education. Just the normal brush with medical and nursing care. Nuland's stories remind me a little of the gynocologist who worked in my hospital. He carried around with him a standard vaginal speculum somewhat like other doctors carry a stethescope. The shock is supposed to amuse you. So Nuland's stories have a little shock value to remind us that we're not dealing with normal people in normal jobs.

For example in the first tale a patient is discovered to have a chest cavity filled with feces. Normal people would find that only mildly alarming given that there's intestines & all in that general area so Nuland has to explain why that is not an expected condition.

Some stories are heart warming, some are inane, some are just quirky. It is the package of the whole that makes it "The Soul of Medicine."

Lastly, one minor complaint on the parchment-like jacket cover - it doesn't hold up well and it isn't transparent enough to show the illustration on the hard cover.

Grayson - book review

The book Grayson by author Lynne Cox is one of those books that I have to be tied down to read. It has enough woo-hoo magical thinking to make me start wondering if I shouldn't be doing something else. In my case I was listening to the book on a Playaway (that handy book-on-a-chip instrument) and was busy working in our library of all places. Had I been using a CD player I would have had dozens of alternate choices but with the Playaway I had about 8 choices, none of them sounding any better.

Back to the book: The plot is simple and the story short. The author Lynne is out swimming off the Seal Beach/Long Beach shoreline building up her strength and endurance when she finds that a baby gray whale has started following her. A friend tells her that she can't come out of the water because the whale would follow and die on the beach. So she swims back out alternately leading and losing contact with the baby whale. The woo-hoo and magical thinking comes when she starts communicating with the baby whale. She assumes that he has lost his mother and then transferring all sorts of human emotional and rational abilities onto the whale starts trying to comfort him and convince him they'll find his mother. His clicks, grunts, whistles, and poofs are a foreign language to her but she's still sure she understands Grayson, a name that suddenly appears in the text but makes perfect sense for a whale who is the son of a gray whale.

By "thinking as loud as she could" and with the help of a few friendly dolphins she is able to reunite mother with baby and all ends happily. By the end of the book I was glad that I stuck it out. The book is definitely one of those "feel good" books that leaves you with the impression that with just a little more work we really could talk to the animals and this interspecies dialog will lead to world peace and brotherhood. You're also impressed that Ms. Cox would stick with her self-assigned goal of reuniting the little familly. Impressed, that is, until you realize that it was probably her swimming that distracted the little one and got him lost in the first place.

Since the action took place in our old stomping grounds around the Long Beach harbor and the Seal Beach pier, it held my interest on another level. I felt like a fact checker for the publisher. I couldn't find anything wrong.

I'm not blown over by this book but I'd still say it was above average.

No Country for Old Men - book review

I listened to this book on one of those new Play Away "book on a chip" devices. I'm not sure I would have plowed through all the bloody gunfights otherwise. Cormack McCarthy has written a book No Country for Old Men that brings all the elements of the wild west, gang fights, drug wars, war veterans, and retribution morality. In fact the final quarter of the book seemed to me to be the ramblings of an aging sheriff who intends to hang up his badge and is sort of balancing the ledger in his mind as he does so. He admits that he couldn't possibly bring all the criminals in his jurisdiction to justice and the best he could hope for was to scare them enough that they'd go somewhere else.

The gunfight scenes seemed oddly unmatched with equal parts rifles, submachine guns, and sawed off shotguns. Oh, and the main baddy uses an air driven bolt that is normally used to put down cattle before they're butchered. It punches a 3/4 inch diameter hole about 2 inches into the cranium effectively killing the cow (and in this story, men) without the blood, gore, sound, and smoke of a bullet. It also works nicely in punching out door lock cylinders.

The relentless successes of Chigurh and his ability to come back from near death make the book more science fiction or fantasy than anything else. Otherwise I would have enjoyed it more.

Change of Heart - book review

I'm not sure it even makes sense to review a book that has 223 customer review on Amazon.com. After reading a few of them I began to think that I wouldn't have picked this book if I had read the reviews first. I hope my review doesn't have that affect on anyone.

Jodi Picoult, in her recent novel "Change of Heart", apparently wants to comment on the social dilemmas of the death penalty since she has the "murderer" protagonist being sentenced to death in New Hampshire which has not (according to the book) had an execution in 58 years. But then she adds into the plot the desire of the condemned man to donate his heart to the murder victim's younger sister who will die soon if she doesn't get a new heart. Thus, Picoult sets us up in a lose lose situation. We develop sympathy for both Shay Bourne, the convicted murderer, and Clair, the girl who needs a heart. We can't have both of the characters live.

Instead of a defense or condemnation of the death penalty or even a balance argurment for and against the death penalty, we end up having to deal with the ethics of organ donation. Picoult tells the story in the first person bouncing around between main characters that made me feel I was really "in their heads" and seeing the situation from their standpoint. Very effective.

Finally, there is the Christ imagery woven into the story. I could almost hear my freshman English professor saying, "What character is the Christ character and which situations parralel Christ's life and surroundings." This imagery certainly woulldn't have been necessary but it adds another dimension and doesn't take anything away.

I'm ready to read another Jodi Picoult book.

Intuition - book review

I think it's a rare novel that can take on the dual tasks of character and relationship development while at the same time describing and critiquing a societal institution. But in Intuition, Allegra Goodman has managed to pull it all off. The only thing I didn't like about the book is the title. It could certainly be made to fit the story but then almost any random word would work the same. I think a much better title would be Naked Rats or R7 Virus. But that's beside the point. It's named what it is, counter intuitive though it may be.

The scene will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a research lab, especially one that is funded by federal grants (and who isn't now?) There is a mixture of Directors, post-docs (students who have earned their PhD sstudies but want to complete one to 5 years of good research before taking a faculty or other position where research may not be full-time), graduate students, and technicians. There might even be an undergraduate or two if the grant is generous or the lab forward-thinking. There are also several projects being worked on, each with it's own funding source and the status of the project proportional to the current funding or the number of papers that it has produced because funding and papers are what it's all about.

Cliff, a post-doc who has strained the patience of the lab directors by not coming up with useful data suddenly starts getting results that are almost too good to be true. Rather than be suspicious or skeptical, the directors immediately divert resources to the now "golden boy" rehabilitated post-doc. No one seems to notice that many of his results are obtained when he works alone which is often. His results are praised but his methods not reviewed. Only an ex-girlfriend Robin finds what appears to be Cliff's picking and choosing his data so that his results look promising. This is a time-honored practice of scam artists who can prove anything by selectively discarding data. But it is not science.

Goodman has Robin and the lab directors each following protocol and chain of command in the whistle blowing process. Thus we are treated to an analysis of the structures which attempt to ensure that good science is practiced and rewarded while bad science is de-funded and scorned. But of course these are man-made structures which often have unintended consequences. Robin ends up the pariah rather than a heroine.

There are few cliff-hanging moments in the book but there are some surprises and humor. Again, those of us who have worked in a research environment will recognize the characters in Intuition that must have been modeled after people in our labs.

Definitely worth reading.

The Omnivore's Dilemma - book review

Somehow, the Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan reminds me of some essays I have written that cover lots of ground but have little or no unifying thread. The subtitle of this book is "A Natural History of Four Meals" but the book is divided into three sections. I can't even remember how he came up with 4 meals.

The three sections are Corn, Grass, and the Forest. In the first Pollan talks about the great prevalence of corn in the American's diet and the industrialization of this crop which has changed the face of the land from the Mississippi to the Rockies. The meal most representative of this section was the fast food meal. Pollan shows that virtually every item in a fast food menu will have some element of corn. He also goes to great length to explain how the industrialization has removed all the taste and goodness of this food staple.

The second section, Grass, seemed to be devoted to showing how much better it was to eat organically grown, free-range items. Or not. The author shows how the label "organically grown" has been compromised by the USDA and stripped of any meaningful value for labeling food. Pollan describes a farm that is almost completely self-contained so that no unnatural chemicals are needed for ferilization or elimination of bacterial and pests. As such, this farm is a leader in "organically growth" vegetables and meat but can't use that phrase because of possible USDA sanctions. The farm even has difficulty getting their food to market.

The last section bounced back and forth between the value of "hunter gathering" and dangers of purely natural foods. Woven into this essay is one about the conflict of hunting, killing, and then eating another animal, one likely to have as much concept of its existence as a young baby or a senile man. Do we have the right to shoot deer so that we can have meat during the winter?

The book makes some great points. However, the author writes like he's being paid per word. You could probably make a book of the first two sentences in each paragraph without losing a great deal of meaning of the book. Otherwise I enjoyed the book immensely.

...... in Death - book review

Nora Roberts, well known for her romance novels, also writes under the pen name of J. D. Robb. All the books written by J. D. Robb are titled "[something] in Death", such as Innocence in Death, or Stranger in Death.

Carolyn and I have been reading the "...... in Death" series by Nora Roberts after we chanced upon the series by checking out one of her novels pretty much at random then checking out a couple others in the series. At this point it was clear that Roberts was actually developing her characters from book to book which would make it advisable to read the series in order. Fortunately, there is a complete list of Robb's work (her 29th book in the series is expected Feb 2009) in series order at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Death In addition to the names of the novels there is a table indicating for each book the victim(s), cause(s) of death, weapon(s), and perpetrator(s). Don't look at the table until after you read the book. That's a lot of spoiler information there.

The gist of the series is centered on the main heroine, a "tough bitch cop" by the name of Lieutenant Eve Dallas, a detective in the homicide division of the New York Security and Police Department in mid-century 2000's. By having the setting a bit in the future, Robb can use technology such as stunners instead of guns and "links" instead of phones, and off-planet prisons.

For each book in the series Dallas has at least one and sometimes 2 or 3 murders to solve. She has to use all her mental and much of her physical abilities to track down the murderers. In the way, of course, are dirty politicians, lying spouses, cops on the take, meddlesome reporters - in short all the things that today hinder police investigations. To spice up the books with just a tiny bit of sex is Eve's relationship with Roarke, the richest man in the known universe - a man so rich he doesn't need a second name. This not only adds a love interest but also gives Dallas a powerful, if slightly illegal, access to information and physical property than she is tempted to use from time to time, though she always goes back and gets the information legally.

There are just enough characters to make the books exciting without having to write down a cheat sheet to keep track of the good guys and the bad. And, I mentioned earlier, the characters develop through the series so that a bright young uniformed cop named Peabody assists Dallas in one of the earlier book and advances to Detective before you get to the later books. The murders seem plausible enough and the solutions reasonable. Dallas has more of an "attitude" than I feel comfortable with but it is balanced with some others on the NYSPD.

I wouldn't recommend a diet consisting solely of J.D. Robb novels but they're good enough reads that one or two a month would be okay.

God, the Failed Hypothesis - book review

Does "God, the Failed Hypothesis" by Victor J. Stenger really illustrate "How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist"? I find the claim of this book rather intriguing because so many atheists stay far away from such a claim. Trying to prove that God does NOT exist, they say, is equivalent to proving a negative such as "there are no invisible pink unicorns living in this universe." Even if we were able to scan the whole universe with invisible pink unicorn detectors, unless we scanned the entire universe at the same time, a claim may be made that our unicorn had moved around to escape detection.

Stenger tries a more sophisticated approach by specifying a particular God, namely the God of the three monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He is not saying that science proves there is no god (generalized & unspecific) but that it can prove there is no GOD (specifically the god of Abraham). By specifying a specific God who says that he is involved with the human race, Stenger can test hypotheses about what the world scene would look like with and without a God.

To set up the testing, Stenger must first explain what science is and how science uses testable hypotheses to rule out things that are not true. For example, if prayer is truly effective then it must make a difference in people's lives. Such differences would be measurable with a properly set up experiment.

For the rest of the book Stenger refers to experiment after experiment, none of which confirm the hypothesis that God exists or interferes in the lives of humans. There may be a God who ONCE created everything and set things in motion but that is an untestable hypothesis so science can neither confirm nor rule out such a God.

This book is not for the faint of heart theist. Such a reader is liable to come away with a questioning belief in God or in science. On the other hand it might be excellent reading for preparing for debating an atheist.

What the Dead Know

If you like murder mysteries because they leave you guessing right up until the final chapter, you'll probably enjoy What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman. There are no action scenes, no gory gunfights, or gratuitous sex -- although there are references to some of these. A woman stopped for fleeing the scene of a traffic accident offers to clear up a 30 year old case of two missing teenagers. She claims to be one of the missing girls. However, she is anything but cooperative or straightforward. As the investigators (and we the readers) try to decide whether she is lying or telling the truth, the actual events are revealed little by little. Even when she confides in the reader that she is lying, you might think she's lying about lying.

But it all comes together in the end in a nice tight package that leaves almost everybody better off because the woman was stopped and did talk.

Good book as is but would be horrible if abridged.

Nineteen Minutes - book review

Jodi Picoult's 14th novel Nineteen Minutes describes the horror of a high school student's gun shooting rampage which leaves 9 students and 1 teacher dead. But, unlike newspapers or even news magazines, Picoult's novel goes into great depth about what might cause such tragedies. She describes in great detail the constant physical bullying, social humiliation, and obvious group exclusion which may be major causes for a student to "blow up".

In this novel there are no one-sided "bad" persons. Everyone, including the killer is multi-dimensional, the kind of parent, friend, teacher, and townsperson that we each feel we are. It's easy to point the finger at a person who has pointed a gun but how many little insults and humiliations does it take to equal a bullet? Picoult's Nineteen Minutes forces us to look at all the sides. Her flashbacks and flashforwards keeps you wondering what the end result is even as you are sure there is no question what it has to be.

Excellent read. Would make good required reading for highschool students.