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 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: 2021-08-31 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-31 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-03 05:03 am (UTC)