Recent nonfiction: with titular colons
Aug. 28th, 2021 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn-The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity - rec from lightreads. As lightreads warned, contrary to the title, this is not a self-help book but rather more of a scientist's memoir by Nadine Burke Harris, Surgeon General of California. It's fairly breezily written, easily read, not a whole lot of delving into the nitty gritty of the science (I'm currently reading Robert Sapolsky on that, also on lightreads' rec, which I'm really enjoying) and what I loved about its style was that Harris does, I think, get across the feel of the excitement of doing both science and policy-related-to-science.
And then there's the content: lightreads was like "yeah, yeah, I already knew all that" but I guess I live under a rock because somehow I had never heard of an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score, much less knew about the correlation between one's ACE score and adverse medical outcomes, and this... kind of blew my mind. (One of the things I'm thinking about: There are six full cousins in my family on my dad's side (including my sister and me) and three of them have auto-immune problems. Of note is that both the families represented here were pretty high-pressure in general, and also that these three are the youngest in their families and so had a lot of pressure on them to follow the accomplishments of their siblings in a way the older ones didn't. IDK, it's an anecdotal sample size. But still... I wonder.)
-Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (Carreyrou) - The rise and fall of Theranos, the company that claimed to do everything, medical-testing-wise, and... really really didn't.ase read this a while back, and it's been on my radar since then -- and I finally got around to it. And WELL that was something.
Let's just say that the book starts with Theranos doing a demonstration in which they purport to show that their blood testing technology works, and it turns out they can't get it to work so at the demo they show a FAKE RESULT. (Also, the CFO is like "...maybe we shouldn't do that?" and then he gets fired.) This is not even the craziest thing that happens in the book. It's basically like a primer on How Not To Do Science Or Technology. Or maybe How To Do Technology Totally Unethically. I actually had trouble reading the first half because the sheer scale of the amorality turned out to ping my embarrassment squick. Like, it's embarrassing to do science ("science") so awfully! When Carreyrou himself showed up in the book and I knew stuff was about to go down, I can't tell you how relieved I was.
lightreads. As lightreads warned, contrary to the title, this is not a self-help book but rather more of a scientist's memoir by Nadine Burke Harris, Surgeon General of California. It's fairly breezily written, easily read, not a whole lot of delving into the nitty gritty of the science (I'm currently reading Robert Sapolsky on that, also on lightreads' rec, which I'm really enjoying) and what I loved about its style was that Harris does, I think, get across the feel of the excitement of doing both science and policy-related-to-science.And then there's the content: lightreads was like "yeah, yeah, I already knew all that" but I guess I live under a rock because somehow I had never heard of an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score, much less knew about the correlation between one's ACE score and adverse medical outcomes, and this... kind of blew my mind. (One of the things I'm thinking about: There are six full cousins in my family on my dad's side (including my sister and me) and three of them have auto-immune problems. Of note is that both the families represented here were pretty high-pressure in general, and also that these three are the youngest in their families and so had a lot of pressure on them to follow the accomplishments of their siblings in a way the older ones didn't. IDK, it's an anecdotal sample size. But still... I wonder.)
-Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (Carreyrou) - The rise and fall of Theranos, the company that claimed to do everything, medical-testing-wise, and... really really didn't.
ase read this a while back, and it's been on my radar since then -- and I finally got around to it. And WELL that was something. Let's just say that the book starts with Theranos doing a demonstration in which they purport to show that their blood testing technology works, and it turns out they can't get it to work so at the demo they show a FAKE RESULT. (Also, the CFO is like "...maybe we shouldn't do that?" and then he gets fired.) This is not even the craziest thing that happens in the book. It's basically like a primer on How Not To Do Science Or Technology. Or maybe How To Do Technology Totally Unethically. I actually had trouble reading the first half because the sheer scale of the amorality turned out to ping my embarrassment squick. Like, it's embarrassing to do science ("science") so awfully! When Carreyrou himself showed up in the book and I knew stuff was about to go down, I can't tell you how relieved I was.
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Date: 2021-08-29 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-08-29 02:21 pm (UTC)by something, in the last couple days, I've been taking a look at the Kindle sample of his Behave book, which seems to have high overlap with his course that's on YouTube and which I watched a couple years ago and keep saying I should rewatch. Since I strongly prefer text to lectures, the fact that there's a book is excellent and I'll probably end up buying the book as reference. (Sapolsky is one of the few lecturers I can stand to listen to, because he talks fast and is information-dense.)If you're not reading his memoir, highly highly recommended. Not as technical, but you learn a lot about baboon behavior, and SO funny. (I actually skimmed most of the human chapters; the baboon chapters are where it's at. YMMV.)
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Date: 2021-08-31 03:45 am (UTC)I'm reading Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers! (Which on cross-reference I see you have read too, but somehow I didn't remember this at all!) Which I had seen before, possibly even seen recced, but the title made it look to me like it was pop science written by a Malcolm Gladwell type. I was so pleasantly surprised to read it and find out he's legit :D It is definitely much heavier reading than The Deepest Well, which I think is awesome. (I mean, I liked Well a lot too, and it was a good first intro, but Sapolsky brings the goods.)
I actually have Behave checked out from the library -- it looks a lot like Overview Course of Human Behaviorism, which I think will be great. I want to finish Zebras first, though.
I can see his memoir being great! He definitely has an extremely snarky sense of humor.
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Date: 2021-08-31 02:27 pm (UTC)Same! I had seen it discussed in the comments to a post in Rachel's blog, and immediately dismissed it as probably frivolous junk. Then my partner told me she had watched an awesome documentary (the one that made her go, "...Wait a minute. My family is a dysfunctional baboon troop!") And watching that documentary, I went, "Wait, is this guy legit? I remember hearing about him and thinking that he didn't sound like it." So I went and reread the comment carefully, and realized that I had been conflating the original Sapolsky book with some junk *based* on his book, but the commenter was not actually saying Sapolsky was junk. So I gave him a try, and I was SOLD!
So what I see is that his publishers' marketing department picked a title that would appeal to a very broad audience, while accidentally weeding out some serious-minded people. :P
I actually have Behave checked out from the library -- it looks a lot like Overview Course of Human Behaviorism, which I think will be great.
Yep, it looks a lot like his course on the biology of human behavior, which pleases me, since actually looking things up in a 50-hour untranscripted video series is haaaard. :P
I can see his memoir being great! He definitely has an extremely snarky sense of humor.
His sense of humor is amazing! If he hadn't been an actual research scientist in his own right, he could totally have made a living as a science popularizer. I told my partner I wish people would stop writing their own books and let him do it. :P (Like Goodall, I realize her work was seminal in the field, but her books of her field observations of chimps are just so much less engaging than his field observations of baboons. His memoir read like a novel that just accidentally teaches you about the behavior of baboons so that you actually remember it, because it has characters and a narrative and everything.)
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Date: 2021-08-29 03:24 pm (UTC)Complicated, however. Very tidily, my mother's two older sisters learned the language of occupation in school; she was young enough to start school without it, due to the hiatus in schooling (she was toddler-sized when the war began and neatly school-aged upon its ceasefire); thus I have a convenient set of historic vantages in one small set. Anyway, the two older ones had to redo work (not only to give up their early family life in a totally different location before several hundred km of migration), and they never forgave the school thing, though it's quite small amidst all the other things. And it goes on from there. But also, all three were dusted directly with DDT, common at the time, which can definitely result in epigenetic change and worse health outcomes for descendants. Not everything is dire childhood situations and stress....
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Date: 2021-09-03 05:03 am (UTC)Bad Blood
Date: 2021-08-30 04:38 am (UTC)Re: Bad Blood
Date: 2021-08-31 03:53 am (UTC)Re: Bad Blood
Date: 2021-08-31 06:04 am (UTC)Re: Bad Blood
Date: 2021-09-01 05:04 am (UTC)