Raleigh News & Observer & The Charlotte Observer, December 27, 2010
BY PHILLIP MANNING
This year, publishers rolled out over 200 new books about science. Most were solid contributions that inform the public about what’s new in science. Some were very good, and a few were outstanding. Here are my choices for the year’s best.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer Siddhartha Mukherjee. Scribner, $30, 592 pages.
Cancer is a tricky, complicated, and deadly disease. It is, in fact, as the book’s title states “the emperor of all maladies.” The author, Siddhartha Mukherjee is well positioned to tell the emperor’s story. As a working oncologist and an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, he is thoroughly familiar with the disease. He is also a very good writer.
He describes the often gruesome (and mostly ineffective) cancer treatments that have been tried over the years, such as horribly disfiguring women with radical mastectomies. But today he sees signs of hope. A few pills a day of the new drug Gleevec, for instance, has transformed a once deadly form of leukemia, into a treatable, chronic condition for most patients.
Science is clearly making progress toward deposing the emperor. But the gains come slowly and are hard-won
The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth Irving Kirsch. Basic Books, $23.95, 240 pages.
The first sentence in this book spells out author Irving Kirsch’s position on the $11 billion a year antidepressant business. “Like most people,” he writes, ”I used to think antidepressants worked.” The rest of the book explains why he changed his mind. In this important book, he contends that the standard antidepressants — Prozac, Paxil, and Celexa, among others — used by millions of Americans are no more effective in treating depression than sugar pills.
His clear, no-nonsense arguments revolve around the placebo effect, the improvement in symptoms many people experience after sham medical treatments. The positive results obtained with antidepressants, he argues, are due to that effect.
After panning antidepressant pills, Kirsch offers advice on how one should treat depression. “Antidepressant medication should not be discontinued without first discussing it with your doctor.” However, if you have been recently diagnosed or are dissatisfied with your current medication, Kirsch recommends that you consider psychotherapy.
How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond
John Powell. Little, Brown; $24.99; 272 pages.
Starting with the definition of a musical note, author John Powell, who is both physicist and musician, uses easy-to-follow, conversational language to lead the reader into the science of music. He explains every common musical term, from “key” to “bar” to “scale.” He differentiates a concerto from a sonata and shows how composers use chords to create harmonies. He brings his explanations to life with a wide range of examples. For instance, a certain type of chord called an arpeggio is found in “Hotel California” by the Eagles, but he uses a Bach concerto as an example of a complex harmony called counterpoint.
After explaining the meaning of musical terms, Powell then interprets those strange-looking symbols found in a piece of sheet music. It is a tribute to this fascinating and well written book that after a few hours of Powell’s explanations, a musical novice (like me) could begin to read music.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot. Crown Publishing, $26, 384 pages.
Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951 at the age of 31. Before her death, some of her cancerous cells were removed for biopsy and cultured. In the lab, a very strange thing happened. The cells began to reproduce. More importantly, they continued to do so, something no other human cells had ever done. This long line of cells is called HeLa, for Henrietta Lacks, and descendants of those cells are alive today. In fact, over the years, scientists have cultured and used about 50 million tons of them.
HeLa cells have been have been an essential part of many important scientific projects, ranging from cancer research to the development of the Salk polio vaccine. Their value to science has been enormous. But author Rebecca Skloot goes beyond the science to tell with great sensitivity and passion the human side of the story, which involves race, poverty, politics and the Lacks family’s emotional struggle to understand and deal with the immortal cells of their relative.
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
Sean Carroll. Dutton, $26.95, 438 pages.
Scientists sometime ask questions that most of us find silly. “What is time,” for instance. When Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech — asked strangers that question, he got some good, straightforward answers. “Time,” one person said, “is how we know when things happen.”
That definition would satisfy most of us, but physicists want to know more. Why, for instance, does time flow only in one direction? Why can you scramble an egg but not unscramble one? To answer those questions, Carroll leads the reader into some fascinating, but speculative, physics. The hypothesis that he thinks best explains the nature of time is the multiverse theory, which suggests that our entire universe is just one of many.
Carroll writes and thinks clearly. He tells us what is known and testable about the direction of time and what isn’t. This evenhanded approach should satisfy both hard-nosed skeptics and blue-sky thinkers.
5 more notable science books
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Bloomsbury, $27, 368 pages.
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. W.W. Norton, $26.95, 276 pages.
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Bantam, $28, 208 pages.
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Seife. Viking, $25.95, 304 pages.
Here’s Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion through the Astonishing World of Math by Alex Bellos. Free Press, $25, 336 pages.