My thoughts:
I loved this book, the story of the two men who drove the formation of a scientific medical examiner’s office in Prohibition-era New York City. A great mix of chemistry, interesting anecdotes of purposeful and accidental poisonings, political wrangling between several mayors and civil servants who just want to do the job they’re mandated to perform, the effects of Prohibition, the Depression, and the burgeoning machine age upon the populace. There could have been a bit more chemistry and biology, a little less detail about various animal experiments, but overall I think Blum struck the perfect balance to keep readers interested. A fascinating look at what things were like prior to regulated industry (proof to all those crazy libertarians that industry can’t be trusted to look after the best interests of people). A testament to two great men who worked tirelessly not just for knowledge for its own sake but in order to help people. There’s just so much material for thought here, but the presentation makes it a quick and easy read. Great book for a book club to read.

My rating: 8.5/10

Can something as complex and wondrous as the natural world be explained by a simple theory? The answer is yes, and now Evolution explains how in a way that makes it easy to understand.”

My thoughts:
A pretty decent explanation of evolution–surely better than what many students in the US public education system get in their whole time in primary and secondary school. I just finished reading The Blind Watchmaker, and I recognised many of the points and examples from there in the first part of Loxton’s book (he even drops Dawkins’ name a couple of times for some reason–like instead of saying “biologists” or “scientists” think he says “biologist Richard Dawkins thinks”). One significant omission was the discussion of ring species as evidence of evolution that we can see in real time.

The second part was a take down of common creationist talking points, presented in a question-answer format. Most of these were rather good, explaining things well in a short space without being either condescending or too abstruse for the target audience. I did however, think the answers to the final two questions were a bit weak and a little too much on the side of accommodation.

The first dealt with abiogenesis, and instead of being quite firm that though the details are sketchy, scientists have arrived at several plausible methods whereby living cells could have evolved from self-replicating chemicals. Instead, he stresses the fact that we don’t yet know how it happened, making it sound like we have no real clue at all. At least that’s how it came across. Okay, but not strong enough for my taste.

The second question was the one about religion. I mean, if he’s going to bring up religion at all he shouldn’t take the “non-overlapping magisteria” tack. It’s rather a cop out. It’s wrong to tell kids that “science as a whole has nothing to say about religion”. It’s an easy thing to say, and might prevent your book being banned by anti-intellectual parents, but it’s just not true. Science has plenty to say about religious claims: in the form of evidence-based history and archaeology, in the form of controlled studies of the efficacy of prayer, miracle claims, in the form of the study of neurology and the human brain to determine whether there’s any evidence for body/spirit dualism, in the study of anthropology and sociology to figure out how religion develops and operates in society and in diverse human cultures…you get my point. Sorry Daniel, “your family, friends and community” are not the “best people to ask about religious questions”. You want a kid to develop critical thinking skills? Don’t tell them to ask questions of people who may have a biased interest in selling their own religion, and say they’re the best option. Tell them to be critical and ask some experts or read some books by experts on those subjects.

—
Also, very important to consider when evaluating children’s books:

Presence of Sexism – A
Men and women, girls and boys are presented fairly equally. Loxton seemed to make an effort to include a female scientist by talking about paleontologist Mary Anning. So overall, a good job.
There is a page talking about hominids and the misleading “March of Progress” image which would have been better had it included both a man and woman in each place.

Presence of Heterosexism – mostly N/A
As sex was hardly mentioned at all aside from a couple of places where we would have to infer it (e.g. he uses a compromise in tail lengths as an example of balance between selection for speed and selection for sexual attractiveness, but doesn’t actually ever explain sexual selection).

Presence of Racism – B+
There’s quite a bit of diversity among questioners, but when humans were the subject that was being discussed, the illustrations were of white people only, and the March of Progress page still made it look a little bit like modern humans in the form of white people (actually men) were the “most evolved” or what have you. Definitely not the impression he was trying to make, but it could come across that way subliminally.

My rating: 7.5/10

My thoughts:
I really enjoyed this book when I read it last year as a library copy. So much so that I decided to send it toStephen Harper for the What Is Stephen Harper Reading: BookCrossing Edition Release Challenge.

Rather than try to recover my initial thoughts, I went back to some posts I made on the BookCrossing Book Talk forum and will quote them here.

I [...] am now reading Your Inner Fish which seems okay so far, but the author seems like he’s aiming at someone far younger or with far less general knowledge than me. It’s like he’s talking to a 15 year old. It’s also annoying, especially in a book about science, to have measurements in US imperial instead of metric measures.

Finished Your Inner Fish, which was pretty good on the information side, though I was less than impressed by the style (just a bit too condescending, like he was talking to a child). Anyway, the book was well worth reading. I was aching for some science and got it. Very fascinating discussion of various anatomical features humans have (e.g. limbs, eyes, ears, bodies) and from what ancestors we got them (fish, microbes, worms). Interesting stuff like how the bones in mammalian ears evolved from jawbones of fish, and how our genes show evidence of messy evolution over time rather than any kind of rational design.

There are similarities even with fish and chicken embryos. It’s all very fascinating.

From the book:
Watching the process of development brought about a huge intellectual transformation in me. From such simple embryonic beginnings–small blobs of cells–came wonderfully complex birds, frogs, and trout comprising trillions of cells arranged in just the right way. But there was more. The fish, amphibian, and chicken embryos were like nothing I had ever seen before in biology. They all looked generally alike. All of them had a head with gill arches. All of them had a little brain that began its development from three swellings. All of them had little limb buds. In fact, the limbs were to become my thesis, the focus of my next three years’ work. Here, in comparing how the skeleton develops in birds, salamanders, frogs, and turtles, I was finding that limbs as different as bird wings and frog legs looked very similar during their development. In seeing these embryos, I was seeing a common architecture. The species ended up looking different, but they started from a generally similar place. Looking at embryos, it almost seems that the differences among mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish simply pale in comparison with their fundamental similarities.

Flies have genes that are associated with development of sections of their bodies and those same genes in us are associated with the same regions of our bodies. Shark heads and human heads have the same gill arches and nerve structures. Very cool.

It’s also amazing to think of how life went from being a bunch of single celled organisms into all the myriads of species we see today, all from miniscule changes over time.

He also has some very interesting facts about weaknesses we have due to our evolutionary history. For example, hiccups are a holdover from our amphibian days when as tadpoles we needed to close our airway.

QueenBoadicea wrote:
> Thanks for the critique. The condescending
> tone you mention is off-putting but
> perhaps the author was simply trying to
> make the book accessible to the average
> reader and didn’t want to discourage them
> by making it too esoteric.

Yeah, it kind of sounds like he’s used to talking to students who may not be the brightest on the block. But then, I’m sure many people would like the style because he sounds like a ‘regular guy’ explainin’ stuff & not some ivory tower academic or esoteric scientist who’s forgotten how to speak English.

LOL. I guess my problem was that it was *too* readable. But that was only a mild annoyance. Overall, I thought it was good and thought-provoking.

My thoughts:
This is Agatha Christie’s second novel featuring Hercule Poirot and his sidekick Captain Hastings. From the title, I was a little concerned that golf would be heavily featured (as apparently have most book cover designers for the novel), but in fact it isn’t really mentioned at all. One of the bodies in the case is found on property which happens to be a golf course under construction, but that’s the only connection to the game.

In this one, Poirot using his knowledge of human psychology, observation of the people involved, and his memory of a prior murder case is pitted against a French detective using “modern” methods of evidence collection and analysis. Hastings, blinded by the attractive and/or interesting women he encounters, is particularly foolish (for example, leaving one of them alone with the body for several minutes).

Some of the twists in the plot I figured out, but still I was surprised at learning the identity of the killer, so overall it was a good mystery. I didn’t care for the object of Hastings’ affection and had to agree with his initial dislike of her but it will be interesting to see how their relationship plays out in future books. Next comes a collection of Poirot short stories.

My thoughts:
At first glance, this looked like exactly the type of book I love. It has all the right elements: a complex plot (actually multiple plots), partly in the past (Victorian England), partly in the more recent past (1986), somewhat interesting characters, academia and erudition, a collage of styles (including “quoted” Victorian poetry, journals, and letters), discussions of symbolism, and a mystery at the heart.

It’s not often that a book like that wins a Booker and gets glowing reviews, so I was prepared for a masterpiece. I was prepared for this one to make my all-time favourites list. Objectively speaking, it is undoubtedly the former, but sadly it didn’t achieve the latter. I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps when it comes down to it, I didn’t really care for any of the characters. They all seemed so unlikeable and self-absorbed. I also found much of the poetry tedious and rather uninteresting. I did enjoy the narrative variety and the setup and revelation of the mystery (though I was left at the end still wondering about one specific part of the Victorian timeline story). So, in the end, I have to say I liked it but didn’t love it.

My thoughts:
When I first heard about all the hype surrounding this book (when it first came out), I was kind of turned off. It (along with Hitchens’ book) sounded, well, it sounded mean. I’ve never had belief in the Christian god, though in the past I’ve flirted with both a kind of philosophical/spiritual Platonism (you know, the one that says “God is real (and perfect and good) but religions aren’t factually true”) and spiritual pantheism/panentheism (“Nature/the Universe is divine and religions are just ways of communicating with that divinity, and some of those ways are morally & intellectually better* than others”). So I didn’t have a vested interest in protecting Christianity from condemnation. However, I still retained that very liberal attitude that Culture (including Religion) should be respected to the degree that it does no harm: if you want to believe that the execution of some Iron Age carpenter-cum-preacher somehow makes you a better person, well, okay, who am I to judge you? And why should I dismiss the possibility that supernatural things could happen (albeit perceptually filtered through different cultures’ mythologies)? It just seemed like Dawkins was going out of his way to rain on the parade, and to do so without having proof that there wasn’t something real lying behind all those trappings. I didn’t really care to read this book at that time.

But I did read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Which sparked in me a renewed interest in science. From there, I searched for other sources of scientific writing (both in print and online). One day, Carl Zimmer posted about Carl Sagan’s tv series Cosmos and I promptly watched the whole series from beginning to end. But I wanted more so I looked on YouTube for more vids about science and when The Greatest Show on Earth came out, I was quite keen to read it. It’s very difficult to learn what’s going on in scientific circles today without bumping up against the attack campaign of the Creationists.

All of which eventually led to my becoming quite acquainted with Dawkins, both as a biologist and as an advocate for Rationalism. So by the time I picked up this audiobook, I was pretty much so familiar with the contents from recorded lectures and interviews, nothing came as a surprise. Not only have I ventured to read The God Delusion, but I have to say that I agree with it for the most part. Under the banner “harm” I no longer include just physical harm, systemic discrimination (e.g. racism, misogyny, bigotry against homosexuals), an unhealthy attitude to the planet & its other inhabitants, and cultural genocide. Now I include violence to truth, obstruction of education, personal indoctrination of children, and the waste of (financial and human) resources sucked up by religion.

The problem with doing this review is that I don’t really recall much of the book! I finished listening to it back in February and because I was listening, the content has kind of blended into all the lectures and interviews I’ve watched and listened to over the past year or two. A few things do stand out though: discussions of agnosticism and Spinoza’s/Einstein’s pantheism; a discussion about morality without gods; and Dawkins’ appeal to quit saddling children with the religions (and corresponding labels) of their parents.

Oh, and one more thing: I didn’t find it mean at all. Though often caricatured as “strident” and “shrill” Dawkins is actually rather kind and rational (fancy that). He’s just passionate about scientific truth, and like all lovers wants everyone to share in his joy. Hmm. Yes, that and he can’t abide those people who knowingly and deliberately hide it, lie about it, and brainwash others about it. It’s well worth reading—even if you’re religious I doubt you’ll actually be offended by most of what Dawkins says and all of it is well worth considering.

I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land is the fascinating and absorbing story of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, two fugitive slaves from Kentucky who made a daring daylight escape from slavery in 1831. Smardz Frost has written an epic account of this couple’s extraordinary life and their struggle for freedom – the choices they made, the dangers they faced, and the courage they had to forge ahead and create new lives for themselves. It is both a devastating portrait of the conditions – and the politics – of slavery and an inspiring account of two intrepid fugitive slaves whose flight to freedom changed US and Canadian history.”

Other useful links:
site for I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land

My thoughts:

I was walking away from the computer here at the library the other day when I happened to see this Challenge book on the New Books shelf. I thought it would be a good choice as a palette cleanser after Not Wanted on the Voyage and The Subtle Knife. I thought it would be putdownable and so I’d be able to read just bits and pieces while I get my move completed. Yes on the first, no on the second. It was gripping and I read it all in about a day and a half.

This is a fantastic book! I recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in American or Canadian history.

In 1985, there was an archaeological dig under a school playground in the heart of Toronto. This had been the home of two fugitive slaves, a married couple, who had escaped from Kentucky, were the catalysts for the first “race riot” in Detroit, had settled in Toronto protected by the government of Upper Canada from several attempts at extradition, who had started the first cab company in Toronto (his colours, red & yellow, are still the colours of the TTC — the municipal transit commission), and became involved in Abolition efforts and helped other refugees from slavery to settle in western Ontario.

This book is a geneology and biography of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, a description of Kentucky, Detroit, western Ontario, and Toronto of the nineteenth century, a history of slavery and the abolitionist movement in the U.S. and Canada, a spotlight on U.S./Canada relations of the time, and a history of York/Toronto and the Black community there.

The author did almost 20 years of research to piece together all of the details scattered among newspapers, censuses, court documents, geneological and property records.

Great book (and well deserving of the GG award)!

1. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
2. Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
3. The Faerie Queene, Books I-III by Edmund Spenser
4. The World of Odysseus by M. I. Finley
5. Ulysses by James Joyce
6. The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds
7. Timaeus by Plato (re-read)
8. Critias by Plato (re-read)
9. The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler (re-read)
10. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (re-read)
11. The Seville Communion by Arturo Perez-Reverte
12. Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie
13. Parmenides by Plato
14. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
15. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
16. The Tale of the Unknown Island by José Saramago
17. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
18. Theaetetus by Plato
19. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
20. The Sophist by Plato
21. The Geographer’s Library by Jon Fasman
22. What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin
23. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
24. The Statesman by Plato
25. Mount Appetite by Bill Gaston
26. Notable Historical Trials, Volume III edited by Justin Lovill
27. Philebus by Plato
28. Rescue Ferrets at Sea by Richard Bach
29. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
30. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
31. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
32. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
33. Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
34. Déjà Dead by Kathy Reichs
35. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
36. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
37. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
38. Laws by Plato
39. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
40. Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan
41. The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde
42. Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
43. Death Du Jour by Kathy Reichs
44. Categoriae (Categories) by Aristotle
45. Such is My Beloved by Morley Callaghan
46. Complete Short Stories, Volume 1 by Ernest Hemingway (on audio)
47. “A” is for Alibi by Sue Grafton (on audio/re-read)
48. De Interpretatione (On Interpretation) by Aristotle
49. Children of My Heart by Gabrielle Roy
50. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
51. The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
52. The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (re-read)
53. Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood
54. The Hours by Michael Cunningham