Marlene Zuk's RIDDLED WITH LIFE reviewed on Bitter Grace Notes blog

Book Rec
Monday, August 11, 2008.

Seems like ages since I've posted here about a book I didn't review for money, but this one deserves all the readers it can get. Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are is the best kind of popular science writing. It's witty, Marlene Zuk's prose is graceful, and it's perfectly accessible without seeming a bit dumbed down.

Zuk's basic message is "Stop worrying and learn to love pathogens." Or at least accept that they are an inescapable fact of our existence. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're both--kinda like every lover you ever had, right? In fact, you could read this book as a sort of human-microbe relationship manual. Chapter headings include "When Sex Makes You Sick" and "Parasites and Picking the Perfect Partner." There's a danger here of excess drollery, but the science is substantial enough to keep the jokes from getting tiresome. When Zuk lets herself get a little poetic, the book really soars. Here's a great passage from the introduction:

Life is naturally tattered, infested, bitten off, bitten into. The stem with a broken leaf, like an animal with lesions on its internal organs or less-than-glossy feathers, is more normal than its unscarred counterpart. An unblemished animal--or person--is idealized and fictional, like the advertisements showing a solitary traveler at the Eiffel Tower. It doesn't really exist except in our imaginations. Disease is part and parcel of how we are supposed to look, of how we are supposed to live.

Beautiful stuff. The whole book is like that, only funnier, and occasionally creepier--especially when she writes about how pathogens may actually guide our behavior. The book came out last year, but it was just released in paperback this spring. It's well worth the $14 investment. Plus, it may save you a fortune in hand sanitizer.

For the full blog entry, click here.

A SLAVE NO MORE, David Blight, and Julian Houston in the Boston Globe

An ex-slave in Cohasset
Town largely unaware of late resident's memoir

A family photo taken between 1913 and 1918, in Cohasset. From left: Annie Washington, John Washington, their son James (standing), and his wife, Catherine. (Courtesy of The Alice Jackson Stuart Family Trust)

By Megan Woolhouse
Globe Staff / August 25, 2008

COHASSET - John Washington may be one of the most illustrious residents of this swank seaside town, albeit one few people have heard of.

At the Cohasset Farmers Market last week, Charlie Field had his own guess as to Washington's claim to fame.

"Is he George's brother?" he asked as he pushed his granddaughter in a stroller.

No. John Washington lived in Cohasset as a retired sign painter, a life far removed from his younger years as a Virginia slave. Washington fled Virginia in the chaos of the Civil War, helped the Union Army, and later migrated to Washington, D.C., and ultimately Cohasset, where he died and was buried 90 years ago this year. But what makes Washington's emancipation story unique is that - unlike the millions who endured slavery - he wrote it down.

The manuscript, one of only 120 that have surfaced since the Civil War, was the subject of the 2007 book "A Slave No More" by Yale University professor David Blight. The original manuscript, extremely rare and penned on loose-leaf paper, sits in a locked vault at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston alongside the papers of Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Yet in Cohasset, once a rich haven for the Yankee elite, where a replica water spigot in the town center gets special historic recognition, Washington's story is a historical footnote, if that. The Cohasset Historical Society does not keep a copy of Blight's book, which examines narratives by Washington and another former slave.

"I don't think the town knows anything about John Washington," said Cohasset Historical Society curator David H. Wadsworth, 78. "There isn't much when it comes to black history in Cohasset."

For decades, the craggy, majestic shoreline of Cohasset drew Boston's wealthy leather barons, who built mansions overlooking the water. And the Bancroft family, former owners of the Wall Street Journal and Barron's Weekly, has deep roots in the community.

Historically, the South Shore town has been so exclusive that it shunned the likes of Joseph P. Kennedy, who unsuccessfully sought membership at Cohasset Golf Club before his son became president. Today, the community remains nearly exclusively white. In the 2000 census, 13 of the town's 7,200 residents were African-American. All of which makes Washington's life there that much more remarkable.

For the full article, click here.

Marlene Zuk's RIDDLED WITH LIFE in Nature

Nature, the international weekly journal of science, recently included Riddled With Life in their Summer Books Opinion section.

Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are
by Marlene Zuk
(Harvest, $14, £8.99)

An evolutionary biologist enthusiastically argues
that parasites are a driving force behind evolution
and that their effects still mould us today. Parasites
have shaped us physically and culturally, and affect
our minds on a daily basis.

Anthony Kronman on C-Span

ANTHONY KRONMAN'S C-SPAN AFTER WORDS INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES MURRAY

Monday, August 18th, 2008.

In Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, Yale Law Professor Anthony Kronman writes that universities no longer emphasize educating students about what the great thinkers have written about the meaning of life, instead concentrating on a curriculum fueled by political correctness. Charles Murray was the guest interviewer.

Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is a former Dean of the Law School and currently teaches in the university's Directed Studies Program.

Charles Murray is the author of Read Education.

To watch the video, click here.

Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING reviewed in the New York Times

Mao’s Little Helper

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: August 15, 2008

Life in Mao Zedong’s China is so exciting for little Moying Li. The grown-ups talk of a Great Leap Forward that will allow China to overtake Britain. Her family even gives over their lovely courtyard to a belching, smoky furnace so that the neighborhood can supply steel for the Great Leap. Neighbors contribute their cooking pots and cutlery for the cause. When Li’s grandmother asks if anyone has seen her cleaver, the little girl proudly responds, “Yes, I helped our country with it.” The family retrieves the big kettle and some spoons from the pile, but the cleaver, as she recalls, “had joined its comrades in the burning fire, doing its share for China.” Everyone has a good laugh over that one.

Then there is the war on the sparrows, a crusade to eliminate the accused scourge of crops. Li and her brother, Di Di, cheer lustily as her father’s pellet gun fells one feathered threat after another.

But things do not go as hoped. Making good steel, it turns out, is more difficult than it looks, and the government rejects the lot, leaving the neighbors downhearted and decidedly less well equipped in their kitchens.

As for the sparrows, well, the government had not considered the fact that sparrows eat insects. Crops are ravaged. In coming years, as a result of natural and man-made disasters, millions die.

And then things really begin to get bad.

Small tragedies are the prelude to great ones in “Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution,” a memoir of the wrenching years of Mao. With the Olympics bringing renewed attention to China, it can be easy to forget the pain that went before, pain that occurred in living memory. But this memoir makes those times unforgettable. Simply and hauntingly told, the book is written for young readers, but adults can learn a great deal from it as well.

For the full article, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE in the Washington Post

Risky Business -
Two books map the economic perils facing American families.

Reviewed by Martha M. Hamilton
Sunday, August 17, 2008.

HIGH WIRE: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
By Peter Gosselin

THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND: Reports from a Divided Nation
By Barbara Ehrenreich

The recent economic downturn, with the collapse of the housing bubble and the tightening of credit, has revealed a world of financial risk that had been there all along, unnoticed by most of us. Two new books examine other financial perils and inequities that put us further at risk.

You might not expect a book on economic policy to be a page-turner, but Peter Gosselin's High Wire is just that. Gosselin, a national economics reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has written a systematic investigation of the many ways financial risk has been transferred from employers, the federal government and insurance companies to individuals and families. Gosselin shows, in frightening detail, how our lives as Americans have become riskier over the last few decades. Instead of believing that we are mutually responsible for each other, we now rely on markets that have repeatedly demonstrated that they are distorted by greed, corruption and irrationality.

Gosselin makes his case using statistics and stories of real people, such as Debra Potter. Potter was a stay-at-home mother until the late 1980s, when she became an insurance agent to supplement the modest income of her husband, a Presbyterian pastor. In 2001, she earned more than $250,000. But by the end of May 2002, she had become so disabled by symptoms of what was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis that she had to give up her job. Her insurer, whose policies she had previously sold, tried to reclassify her disability to reduce her benefits substantially.

Despite continued appeals, the insurance company stood by its decision, and Potter's condition worsened. As a result, the Potters spent almost all of their savings on Debra's treatment and living expenses and were forced to pull their son out of college. In August 2003, her diagnosis was definitive, and Social Security began disability payments. Nearly two years after the definite diagnosis, Potter's insurer finally began paying benefits. A check for the benefits previously denied arrived three years later, but the damage was done.

For the full article, click here.

Paul Goldstein's INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY reviewed in the Law Library Journal

Goldstein, Paul. Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business.
Reviewed by Ryan Saltz

Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business offers a thorough analysis of intellectual property issues for the nonlegal professional. Author Paul Goldstein, who is also responsible for giving us Goldstein on Copyright,2 has done a good job of presenting exceptionally dry material in an easy-to-read format. Each topic within the intellectual property (IP) realm has been broken down into its own chapter, which makes the book’s legal concepts easy to follow for even novice readers.

Intellectual Property is divided into seven chapters plus an introduction, and separate acknowledgments, sources, and index sections. In the first chapter, Goldstein presents the case of Polaroid Corp. v. Eastman Kodak Co.3 to illustrate the importance patents hold for companies. The case also illustrates what Goldstein frequently refers to as the “intellectual property paradox,” which is that “without property rights [intellectual] assets will be under produced, but with property rights they will be under used” (p. 36).

Chapters 2–5 are devoted individually and respectively to patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, and provide a concise, easy-to-understand overview of each topic. Chapter 6, “Intellectual Assets on the Internet,” examines IP law as it applies to Internet technologies. Comparisons are drawn between the freedom of access provided by the Internet and the dilemmas faced by the motion picture studios when the VCR was introduced, illustrating that “once habits of free use become entrenched, they cannot be reversed by legislation” (p.152). The Internet’s rapid evolution has created the need for IP law to evolve at a similarly rapid pace.

This discussion of Internet issues provides a perfect segue into the final chapter, “Intellectual Assets in International Markets.” The Internet opened the floodgates to globalization. The fact that different countries developed different laws governing IP rights necessitated treaty agreements to iron out these issues. This chapter follows the evolution of various treaties, including the Berne Convention4 and the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement.

This book would be a perfect addition to any legal or business academic collection. It provides for the enthusiastic novice a great introduction to the IP field, presenting legal case analysis in plain English and providing just enough information to assist business owners with protecting and managing their own intellectual assets. With a price of only $27.95, Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business is a must read.

Rachel Herz's SCENT OF DESIRE in the New York Times

The Nose, an Emotional Time Machine

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: August 5, 2008.

Here is a fun and easy experiment that Rachel Herz of Brown University suggests you try at home, but only if you promise to eat your vegetables first, floss afterward, and are not at risk of a diabetic coma. Buy a bag of assorted jelly beans of sufficiently high quality to qualify, however oxymoronically, as “gourmet.” Then, sample all the flavors in the bag systematically until you are sure you appreciate just how distinctive each one is, because expertise is important and you may never get another excuse this good.

Now for the meat of our matter: pinch your nostrils shut and do the sampling routine again. Notice the differences? That’s right — now there are none. Every bean still tastes sweet, but absent a sense of smell you might as well be eating sugared pencil erasers. And if in midchew you unbind your nose, what then? At once the candy’s candid charms return, and you can tell your orange sherbet from a buttered popcorn.

We’ve all heard about the mysterious powers of smell and its importance in love, friendship and food. Yet a simple game like What’s My Bean, and our consistent surprise at the impact of shutting down our smell circuits, shows that we don’t really grasp just how deep the nose goes. At the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in San Francisco late last month, Dr. Herz and other researchers discussed the many ways our sense of smell stands alone. Olfaction is an ancient sense, the key by which our earliest forebears learned to approach or slink off. Yet the right aroma can evoke such vivid, whole body sensations that we feel life’s permanent newness, the grounding of now.

On the one hand, said Jay A. Gottfried of Northwestern University, olfaction is our slow sense, for it depends on messages carried not at the speed of light or of sound, but at the far statelier pace of a bypassing breeze, a pocket of air enriched with the sort of small, volatile molecules that our nasal-based odor receptors can read. Yet olfaction is our quickest sense. Whereas new signals detected by our eyes and our ears must first be assimilated by a structural way station called the thalamus before reaching the brain’s interpretive regions, odiferous messages barrel along dedicated pathways straight from the nose and right into the brain’s olfactory cortex, for instant processing.

Importantly, the olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain’s limbic system and amygdala, where emotions are born and emotional memories stored. That’s why smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled, and why the simple act of washing dishes recently made Dr. Herz’s cousin break down and cry. “The smell of the dish soap reminded her of her grandmother,” said Dr. Herz, author of “The Scent of Desire.”

For the full article, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN and Steerforth Press in the Boston Globe

Sitting back from publisher's role, his eye for talent's still true
By Kathleen Burge / August 3, 2008

Early this summer, a little-known novel ("DeNiro's Game") published by a little-known publishing house (New Hampshire's Steerforth Press) won one of the world's largest literary awards.

Roland Pease, fiction editor for Steerforth Press in New Hampshire, has been instrumental in discovering new writing talent, such as Rawi Hage, author of 'DeNiro's Game.'

HE READS 'EM BEFORE WE DO
It was a coup for a Cambridge man, Roland Pease, who edited the US version of Rawi Hage's book, which was first published in Canada. But it was not his first.

Pease, who ran his independent literary publishing house Zoland Books for 15 years, has a knack for finding talented but undiscovered writers among the hundreds who slog through manuscripts that will never become the pages of a book.

At Zoland, Pease was the first publisher of Ha Jin, who later won a National Book Award for his novel "Waiting." Pease also published the first book of poems by Anne Porter; her work became a finalist for a National Book Award for poetry. Porter, the widow of artist Fairfield Porter, was 83 when Pease put out her first book.

At Steerforth, where Pease, 61, has been fiction editor for the past few years, he chooses only a few books each year for publication. But several have won acclaim. Four of his past five titles, including Castle Freeman's "Go With Me," were named to Barnes & Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" series, said Chip Fleischer, Steerforth's publisher.

"His track record has been unbelievable," he said.

For the full article, click here.

James Galbraith's PREDATOR STATE reviewed in the Austin American Statesman

James Galbraith's 'Predator State': damning, incisive
The UT professor and son of a famous economist denounces the 'free market' that has created a vulture-like capitalist culture

By Roger Gathman
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, August 03, 2008

Since John Stuart Mill wrote "The Principles of Political Economy" in 1848, economists have generally believed that free trade and free markets arise universally from the principle that supply and demand eventually meet in an equilibrium, which is why markets are self-correcting, and government action is self-defeating.

But there have been brilliant dissenters. For instance, Thorstein Veblen, in "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899), observed the robber barons of his time, who flaunted their art collections and stripped their workers and their companies of wealth, and was reminded of the warriors, kings and priests of the "barbaric" ages who spent their time competing for prestige and preying on the artisans and peasants who made up the productive classes.

Decades later, there was John Kenneth Galbraith, who, in his 1952 book "American Capitalism," coined the term "countervailing power," which he defined as a concentration of power that allows an agent to influence prices over and above the "market." Wal-Mart, for instance, has countervailing power over its suppliers.

Galbraith passed away in 2006. Before he died, he challenged his son James, himself a prominent economist and a professor at the University of Texas, to write a book on "predatory" capitalism. The word "predatory" is taken here from Veblen's classic book. It was long thought that Veblen's predatory capitalists and the system of laissez faire that made them possible disappeared after the New Deal was created in the 1930s. But the predatory capitalist culture emerged, again, at the end of the 1980s. The narrative Galbraith lays out in "The Predator State" is an explanation of why it resurfaced and how it has mutated.

Galbraith makes the most of his material in the first section of the book, which criticizes the many shibboleths of economics, including the slipperiness of the concept of the "market." The reader might, however, find it difficult to see these self-contained chapters in terms of the larger narrative, which comes into focus only in the second section. That narrative takes its bearing not just from Veblen, but from Galbraith's father's 1969 best-seller "The New Industrial State," which argued that the postwar era was defined by a three-way alliance between big business, the government and labor. During that era, the Fortune 500 corporations accepted and exploited government regulation and tax rates that supported a growing social net. The government passed back and forth between Democrats and Republicans, but both parties shared a modestly progressive agenda and a sense of good governance. Unions, the wild card, had settled down, demanding better wages and benefits, rather than the public takeover of major industries.

For the full article, click here!