Off to parts Mid-west...

Off for a brief tour of the American heartland, including the places pictured below. I won't post as often as usual in that time, but will try to check in. Expect me back around the beginning of June.

Restless, Altmanesque montage of disconnected lives (Books - A Week in December by Sebastian Faluks)

This is my first encounter with best-selling British writer Sebastian Faulks. So far his latest, A Week in December, reads like a restless montage of contemporary ephemera - a literary equivalent of, say, the film Crash - reflecting the breadth of contemporary London life and its preoccupations - credit default swaps, multiculturalism, gaming with on-line avatars, and terrorism. He quick-cuts between segments (of substantial length) from the lives of a young woman who is a train-driver on the London underground, a hedge-fund manager, a young man in an islamist terrorist cell, a teenager who does nothing but smoke pot, eat pizza, and watch so-called reality television, and a few others, following their lives over a single week as their existences slowly converge in what feels likely to be disaster. This Robert Altmanesque technique does not shortchange the reader on detail within the individual segments. In fact, Faulks has accumulated scads of them which, as I read, I can't help thinking of how mind-numbingly specific to our own time they will become in about five minutes. Yet, the meta-story is told the through the confluence of these stories, which make for their own evocative rhythm that feels as though the segments are being viewed on simultaneous screens - hence the allusion to Crash - and whose appreciation is not particularly harmed by missing any particular detail of an individual segment.

Living post market crash and post the recent Times Square bomb attempt, I feel as though I've paid for a ride on a roller coaster, knowing the tracks will end abruptly and that it will fling me into the abyss, and yet I read on with a strange curiosity for how he will fling me there. The most pervasive theme I'm struck by in these individual narratives is one of the interpersonal distance inherent in our crowded lives, how much substantive human contact has reduced as we claim to be better connected and better informed - watching television that claims to be about "real" lives.

Jenni, the train driver, lives most of her life beneath the streets of London in the driver's cabin of the Circle Line. When released after her shift she is eager to get home to her gaming, where she assumes a false name and meets other substitute identities:

She had not gone far before she encountered a man. He had cargo pants to the knee, bare torso and multiple piercings. His skin was light brown, though most of it was covered in tattoos; he carried a Uranium credit card (the highest rating) and a submachine gun in his right hand.

Jenni sighed. This was not the kind of man she would have chosen, but she had learned that it was pretty much standard dress for men in Parallax. Most of the maquettes were scary and you just had to remind yourself that they might in reality be women or children - you absolutely could not rely in appearances; you had to disbelieve your eyes.

Finn, the teenage TV addict watches a television interview with a schizophrenic:

For the last fifteen years, Alan had been without a permanent home. He said he hadn't liked the hospital, it was loud and dirty, but at least he'd felt safe there.

"So," said Terry O'Malley, "as far as your accommodation's concerned, it seems you're in two minds about it."

The audience laughed. "Schizophrenia...in two minds..." O'Malley underlined his joke for the slower ones.

"That's not what schizophrenia means," said Alan. "That's a misunderstanding. It's nothing to do with a 'split personality' or -"

"Sorry," said Barry Levine. "Which one of you said that?"

The characters in these parallel stories watch television to get the stories of real people, but they don't actually listen to them. They connect to tattooed gangsters and don't really know who they are. This is a world about being disconnected from each other and from our senses - the equipment that we have to collect information about the world and make predictions about behavior given what we can know about what exists outside of us. The only people alert to the details of their surrounds in this novel are those who want to place bombs in public places or who wish to make personal fortunes at the cost of billions in others' pension investments. This is our world, in case you didn't recognize it.

Moral ambiguities in post-war Berlin (Books - The Good German by Joseph Kanon)

Joseph Kanon has been compared to Graham Greene, and having just read The Good German I can see why. He explores moral questions in a context where the political meets the personal but does so in a format that is recognizable as entertaining - the thriller. Kanon's plot doesn't baby the reader. It is intricate and he does not over-explain the action in a step-wise fashion - a quality I appreciate. Instead, events unfold fluidly through behavior and dialogue, their ambiguities intact. The setting of The Good German is just post-World War II Berlin. The concentration camps have been emptied. Berlin is rubble and the British, the Americans, and the Russians have carved it up into zones and are struggling over how justice can be wrought on the Germans. That's the political part of the story. Into this setting falls the body of an American soldier. No one knows who murdered him or why but a great deal of money is found on his corpse and American reporter Jake Geismar is not content to leave the story alone. That's the mystery/thriller aspect of the story. The book asks one question, the Germans were clearly responsible for the war but who do you hold accountable? The military sent to Berlin to clean up the mess seem to find that, beyond the Nazi party leadership and the camp guards, everyone else seemed to have been following orders or trying to stay alive. No ordinary individual German seems to think they had any culpability. Is a greifer (a spy who turned Jews and other criminalized groups in to the Nazi's) guilty? Even if they are Jewish themselves? How about a scientist who collected statistics for the experiments conducted on unwilling human subjects in the camps? That is the moral part of the story. In addition, Geismar left behind in Berlin a married woman with whom he had an affair and wants to know if she is still alive. That's the love part of the story and in Kanon's hands these four threads of this book blend unselfconsciously. His prose is entertaining but not too brisk at the outset. He takes his time developing the stories and their actors. His dialogue is clipped, sparse, and believable, the moral and political ambiguities are neatly plotted and make good drama, the history is accurate and detailed, and he is good at suspense too. In the last 100 pages there is a terrific escape and chase scene - a real white-knuckler. This is a book that just screams movie - and evidently it was made into one, although I haven't seen it. Have any of you?

Things are looking up!

Good news! John Tierney has an article in today's Science Times on Matt Ridley's new book The Rational Optimist. Its thesis is that homo sapiens are unique not because of bigger brains, nor because of our ability to cooperate, but rather because we created ways to exchange goods and information.

"The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz," Dr. Ridley writes. People traded good, services, and most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence..."

This lead to circulating the knowledge of domesticating crops, the development of alphabets, and number systems and, Ridley argues, the creation of measured time, because the worth of a good or service was measured in how long a person would have to work to pay for it. One might also argue that it circulated small pox and MacDonald's but that isn't mentioned.

"The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating and the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before."

His prediction is the spread of prosperity and happiness and the decrease of disease and violence. I will have to read the book to find out how he goes from point A to point B, and Tierney's piece certainly makes me want to, but I am not sure how mixing inevitably leads only to the progress of good things and the decrease of bad. One might argue that innovation is more likely to diffuse information, that is, that it will spread randomly until it becomes equally distributed. Is knowing more always better? The myth of Prometheus, pictured above, argued otherwise. What happens when bad things spread? The spread of what knowledge we have is inevitable, but is the eternal increase of knowledge inevitably positive? What happens the day that that knowledge includes the certainty of the destruction of our planet or the extinction of our species? But Ridley is a wonderful thinker and writer and amidst crashing markets, bombings, and the growth of the Tea Party, some unbridled optimism is welcome.

Dolphins are shallow

You may have heard that dolphins are the most intelligent species in the animal kingdom (aside from us brilliant creatures). They may be cute when balancing balls on their noses, but that theory has been seriously debunked. I am so disillusioned!

Via The Loom, thanks Carl.

Reading with recycled neurons (Books - Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene)

Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene is a readable account of how the reading brain works, as well as how it doesn't.  Given the fact that printed text is a relatively recent human invention and, given the time scale of evolution, the brain could not have evolved specialized structures for reading per se but rather has adapted structures that evolved for more general visual purposes and applied them to this specialized task which combines seeing and recognizing objects and the reception of the abstract thoughts of another person. The form of letters have little to do with the meaning they ultimately communicate. As a result it has become the work of seven to ten of our earlier years to learn rote the relationship between our culture's symbols representing the units of sound (phonemes).  These are combined into (words) from which we generate continuous phrases and sentences which accomplish the transfer of information and point of view. This is done at a minimum with some coherence, if not also some beauty, and the composer of those same units of meaning doesn't even have to be around to explain himself. It might seem roundabout that printed text has to take a two step journey from sound to meaning rather than going straight to meaning, but this is what allows language to communicate abstract thought:

I suspect that any radical reform whose aim would be to ensure a clear, one-to-one transcription of English speech would be bound to fail, because the role of spelling is not just to provide a faithful transcription of speech sounds. Voltaire was mistaken when he stated, elegantly but erroneously, that "writing is the painting of the voice: the more it bears a resemblance, the better." A written text is not a high-fidelity recording. Its goal is not to reproduce speech as we pronounce it, but rather to code it at a level abstract enough to allow the reader to quickly retrieve its meaning.

The brain accomplishes this remarkable feat, Dehaene tells us (without even being there), via two pathways that operate simultaneously when reading is fluent. One path transfers the letter-string to it sound content (and the motor requirements of our making that sound with our vocal apparatus) prior to its meaning, and the other that goes for the identity of the word first and then the sound. A great number of pages in the book is spent on discussing the fruits of Dehaene and his colleague Laurent Cohen's labors identifying the left hemisphere's visual word-form area, a region of the brain whose purpose seems to be to be the visual analysis of the symbols that make up letters and words irrespective of their superficial differences. That is to say we can read word, WORD, or even WoRd equally easily and can tell the difference between ANGER and RANGE. You can see the visual word-form area in the picture representing the relative activity of regions of Dehaene's reading brain below, its the area right above his ear. There are other areas that accomplish the conversion of printed text into units of sound, still others that agree on the meaning of the assembly given not only its form but its context.
The typical right-handed person's brain has developed most of its key language processing areas in the left hemisphere (left handers are less reliable in this regard). This is true whether the personn reads from left to right or right to left and whether they read an alphabet whose symbols map to units of sound (as in these roman letters you are reading right now) or comprise pictures of whole words (as in logographic alphabets like Chinese). Dehaene, in fact, explores the evolution of different writing systems from pictoral markers in depth as he builds his case for how the human brain evolved the skill of reading, a section of the book I very much enjoyed.

Much of this case centers on the brain's ability to adapt cortex to multiple functions, something he calls neuronal recycling.

We would not be able to read if our visual system did not spontaneously implement operations close to those indispensable for word recognition, and if it were not endowed with a small dose of plasticity that allows it to learn new shapes. During schooling, a part of this system rewires itself into a reasonably good device for invariant letter and word recognition.

According to this view, our cortex is not a blank slate or a wax tablet that faithfully records any cultural invention, however arbitrary. Neither is it an inflexible organ that has somehow, over the course of evolution, dedicated a "module" to reading. A better metaphor would be to liken our visual cortex to a Lego construction set, with which a child can build the standard model shown on the box, but also tinker with a variety of other inventions.

My hypothesis disagrees with the "no constraints" approach so common in the social sciences, according to which the human brain is capable of absorbing any form of culture. The truth is that nature and culture entertain much more intricate relations. Our genome, which is the product of millions of years of evolutionary history, specifies a constrained, if partially modifiable cerebral architecture that imposes severe limits on what we can learn. New cultural inventions can only be acquired insofar as they fit the constraints of our brain architecture.

In the book's final chapter, Dehaene discusses cortical plasticity - a neuroscientific idea that is relatively recent and much in vogue.  It is the ability of brain's neuron's to adapt their function from one purpose to another - for example, when a blind person's visual cortex cells become able to decode sensation of the fingertips to braille letters.  Dehaene makes a case for the necessity of cortical plasticity in inventing cultural forms like number systems and the arts. It's one of those fun bits of reaching for the stars that a researcher has to save for when they write a book rather than a journal article. His voice comes off a little stuffy at times, but his theory is intricate - composed of many interleaving units - so his writing must be systematic in driving home each concept and then attaching is to its predecessor. His model for how the brain accomplishes reading, I must emphasize, is one of several, but he does acknowledge alternate viewpoints along the way. The lay reader may not find this book as accessible as Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, but it goes into more depth and synthesizes a lot of information into a coherent narrative arc. His diction is clear and the reading experience fluid and even entertaining. Dehaene's work is at the cutting edge of our understanding about the relationship between language and the brain so I found it a pleasure to get the story from one of its sources.

If you in or around NYC on Thursday March 13 at 6pm, join me for a film about dyslexia called THE BIG PICTURE: RETHINKING DYSLEXIA.  Click here for information.

Triple-threat

So … you’re halfway through a book and you’re hating it. It’s boring. It’s trite. It’s badly written. But … you’ve invested all this time to reading the first half. What do you do? Read the second half? Just to finish out the story? Find out what happens? Or, cut your losses and dump the second half.

If the book is trite, boring, and badly written I doubt I would have gotten half way (unless it's only 100 pages long - I'm willing to give most bad reading experiences 50 pages). There is no question for me on this point - dump it. What am I reading for? Fun, enlightenment, information - whatever the case - it's all for me. I have no obligation to anyone connected with my reading. Even if I have received the book for free to review I won't finish it (in fact, especially then, as I am trying to give an honest reaction to what I have read and it is usually something I would never have read in the first place). Who am I kidding? The author is not hanging around waiting for my opinion, ARCs are publicity, kids. I don't read for my many adoring fans, much as I love them both. Two exceptions - reading for school, I almost always complete assigned reading unless I am simply tortured by it, and reading something written by a friend, although my friends don't usually write things that are trite, boring, and badly written. They don't tend to sin in threes. Where I might sit on the fence is if a book has a dull subject but is brilliantly written (I almost never find this to be the case), or has a killer story but is written in illiterate fragments or a string of endless cliches. Even in these cases, I don't agonize over not finishing a book. Closing doors is healthy. There are enough choices to make in this information-saturated world and ruling one out lightens the burden. Lastly, although I sometimes talk about investing time, an economic metaphor in this case isn't entirely appropriate. If I have invested $1000 in a stock and it disappoints me by going down, to not sit it out means I have lost my money. Having spent a few hours in reading the first half of a book - if it was a good investment, then my time was not a wasted regardless of whether I continue or I stop. If it was obviously not a good investment from the get-go I shouldn't have read so far (and generally I don't). I may invest time to read, but it is only by continuing to invest it when I am getting nothing in return that I experience a loss. That is the reason I don't agonize about pulling out, there is only a cost for continuing. If a book is good enough to make me wonder whether, if I read on, it would improve then there is something compelling in it and I should consider the pleasure of that anticipation its own reward. Any way I look at it, reading is sheer indulgence and I'm going to trust my taste and follow my pleasure since I can't do that as relentlessly in most other areas of life.

Brutal power in a quiet package (Books - The Debut by Anita Brookner)

Anita Brookner's The Debut was her's in the fiction world (she had written art history prior to writing fiction); it was as well my first encounter with her writing, and I was pleasantly surprised. I had been led to expect the repressed work of a bookish spinster, but my experience of this novel about a young woman who has escaped into books to avoid the tyranny of her indulgent actress mother and clueless father, was of a literate mind which energetically subjugates words to its bidding to produce a wry, bittersweet story with acutely etched characters. Her's is a piquant voice, with a clearly defined moral stance, one whose observations are without mercy but also full of humor.

Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

In her thoughtful and academic way, she put it down to her faulty moral education, which dictated through the conflicting but in this one instance united agencies of her mother and father, that she ponder the careers of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, but that she emulate those of David Copperfield and Little Dorrit.

[...]

And yet she had known great terror, great emotion. She had been loved, principally b a leading philologist at the Sorbonne, but that was not her story. Her adventure, the one that was to change her life into literature, was not the stuff of gossip. It was, in fact, the stuff of literature itself. And the curious thing was the Dr. Weiss had never met anyone, man or woman, friend or colleague, who could stand literature when not on the page.

Her writer's eye seems hungry to land to alight on the unsuspecting scene and have at it, producing some delicious set pieces, like this one of George and Helen's (the parents) arrival in Brighton for their first holiday in years:

... The taxi had unloaded George and Helen into a maelstrom of returning holiday makers, a world they did not know existed: Elderly men with veins standing out on their foreheads trying to cope with five suitcases, elderly women with swollen feet and glistening white cardigans bought especially for the holiday, enduing the fright of a lifetime in order to enjoy the pleasure they had promised themselves all through the winter, too many children, shrill with tiredness, their long hair sticking to their damp faces, their mouths smeared and stained with sweets and ice lollies, none of them aspiring even to the relative comfort of a taxi, but queuing patiently for buses, shifting their burdens from hand to hand, trying to quiet the children, longing for that cup of tea at home, safe at last for another year.

Doesn't that paragraph makes you feel sticky with the grime of a long journey? Brookner's writing can appreciated for its precision, its delicious topography, its consistency of outlook, and its ability to call up visceral experience. There is another similarly potent paragraph on caring for an elderly invalid that is a gem.

The writer Brookner most calls to mind for me is Cynthia Ozick, also a consummate crafter of memorable characters, her experience deeply steeped in the close reading of literature, and a writer of darkly funny novels. Apparently this novel is somewhat autobiographic and since Brookner decided to make the switch from art history to fiction, she has turned out something like 25 of these 200-page works at the rate of one per year, according to this Paris Review interview with her. The Debut had a brutal power in a quiet casing - like someone wielding a sledgehammer encased in soft batting. I am admiring both of Brookner's skill of observation and the delicious prose with which she delivers them up. Do any of my readers have a Brookner favorite they recommend I read next?

Anita Brookner on writing...

In anticipation of writing about Anita Brookner's precisely observed, and sardonic The Debut in the coming days, here is a Paris Review interview with her from 1987. Very exacting in her moral outlook and somewhat rigid in her thinking, she started writing novels in her 50s and has produced one per year. This is the first of her's I have read. Great writing - a potent voice that envelops one in the world of her characters. It is fascinating, as always, to read of her process and her influences.

Lost chances (Books - Love and Summer by William Trevor)

William Trevor's new book Love and Summer is a wistful tale, redolent of lost chances. Its first third, as its characters are introduced, feels more like a set of short stories than a novel. The narrative ambles from neatly sketched character to neatly sketched character in desultory prose that eventually settles down to tell a predictable yet still involving story.

Love and Summer opens with a funeral, of which the embittered Miss Connulty is the benefactress:

Miss Connulty didn't care any more. They could do what they liked: delicious death had been a richer compensation than she had ever dreamed of. She was in charge, and today she wore the pearls.

Ellie Dillahan, an orphan in the care of the nuns, receives her good fortune in becoming the the servant of Mr. Dillahan, a farmer, who eventually marries her. Both women's routines are disturbed by the appearance of Florian Kilderry, a young dreamer on a bicycle.

She wondered if she would be the same herself; if she was no longer - and would not be again - the person she was when she had gone to Mrs. Connulty's funeral and for all the time before that. When he had asked whose funeral it was it had been the beginning but she hadn't known. When Miss Connulty had drawn her attention to him in the Square she had realized. When he'd smiled in the Cash and Carry she'd known it too. She had been different already when she stood with him in the sunshine, when he offered her the cigarette and she shook her head. Anyone could have seen them and she hadn't cared.

Each woman has been rescued from misfortune, Ellie from loneliness and poverty and Miss Connulty from an early pregnancy out-of-wedlock. Each accepts her salvation into a passionless world of routine without question, realizing only later what they have given up, and in the heat of a summer, Florian Kilderry, almost a ghost haunting the ruins of his family's estate, ignites their fantasy.

In fact, there are two ruined estates in this story, and their presence creates a landscape of desolate romance that seems doomed from the start. I found this an imperfect novel. It was easy to see what was going to happen. Although I cared what would happen to Ellie and Florian, I found them rendered with a lack of specificity. They remained stand-ins for romantic characters who I could never really see as people. Ultimately I found Miss Connulty drawn with greater detail and her secrets and paradoxes far more intriguing. Her subplot lies abandoned for a chunk of the novel, only to be picked up again at its end. I am left having enjoyed the beauty and assurance of Trevor's prose and the atmosphere he created in Love and Summer without ever completely falling in love with the story.

Plain vanilla fiction

From this day forward, you may only read ONE type of book–one genre–period, but you get to choose what it is. Classics, Science-Fiction, Mystery, Romance, Cookbooks, History, Business … you can choose, but you only get ONE.

I don't know if this is cheating, but I would go for contemporary fiction - not historical novels, not romance, not mystery, not sci-fi - just plain vanilla new fiction in English. The advantage of that is a variety of subject matter and prose styles that would change over time, as styles and themes reflect the time and place of which they are a part and the writing going on around it. Just looking at a few examples of the contemporary fiction that I have read so far this year - The Magicians, Authenticity, In the Beginning, and The Unnamed - there is such richness of subject matter, setting, and prose style. In fact, I might even be willing to restrict myself to reading fiction that came out in the year in which I was reading it, allowing that I could carry over the book I'm in the middle of reading on December 31 but that I hadn't finished yet. But I'd rather not, reading for me is an exercise in indulging my intellectual and experiential fancy, not restricting myself.

Curing cancer with beer and speculative genetics

Carl Zimmer has an excellent piece in today's Science Times focusing on the notion of deep homology in genes. Deep what, you ask? Zimmer begins by writing about research to find genes that play a role in the growth of blood vessels. The hope is that if these genes can be identified, they can be turned off and slow the growth of tumors. The genes are part of the yeast genome which doesn't even have blood, let alone blood vessels, and Zimmer's article reveals why cancer researchers would bother to look at genes that repair cell walls in yeast.

Deep homology is the concept that body structures do not arise anew, but evolve from existing structures. Drs. Shubin, Tabin, and Carroll explain it well in the abstract to their 2009 article in Nature:

Advances in developmental genetics, palaeontology and evolutionary developmental biology have recently shed light on the origins of some of the structures that most intrigued Charles Darwin, including animal eyes, tetrapod limbs and giant beetle horns. In each case, structures arose by the modification of pre-existing genetic regulatory circuits established in early metazoans. The deep homology of generative processes and cell-type specification mechanisms in animal development has provided the foundation for the independent evolution of a great variety of structures.

In other words, new structures share common genetic ancestry with older structures. The human eye and the contemporary jellyfish eye, for example, evolved not from anything that looks remotely like an eye, but from cells in aquatic species that also had light-sensitivity. What these structures have in common is a genetic sequence that provides the template for the assembly of c-opsin - a light-sensitive protein. And that is the most important point that Zimmer's article and the articles by Shubin and Carroll make to me. Genes rarely directly make disease, they don't directly encode complex behavior, and they aren't even "designed" for the purpose of building a given anatomic structure per se. Genes sequence proteins and in the context of different organic substrates those proteins can be adapted for specific functions. It is fun to get lost in the speculative connections that books like Richard Powers's latest make about "happiness genes," and the like. But it is worth being cautious about allowing such dreams to drive scientific terminology. This is well illustrated by the following excerpt from Zimmer's article:

Scientists are also discovering that our nervous system shares an even deeper homology with single-celled organisms. Neurons communicate with each other by forming connections called synapses. The neurons use a network of genes to build a complete scaffolding to support the synapse. In February, Alexandre Alié and Michael Manuel of the National Center for Scientific Research in France reported finding 13 of these scaffold-building genes in single-celled relatives of animals known as choanoflagellates.

No one is sure what choanoflagellates use these neuron-building genes for. The one thing that is certain is that they don’t build neurons with them.

Then maybe we shouldn't call them neuron-building genes? It's easy, if one is driven by a passion for a narrow sliver of knowledge, to see everything as related to that expertise. It makes sense to drive hypothesis-making with our knowledge of genes, since their action precedes any biological function or structure we can observe, but this article reads like a cautionary tale regarding attaching structural significance to a gene if knowldge of its function is not secure. Genes sequence proteins. Genes sequence proteins. Read Zimmer's article - it combines clear writing about contemporary basic science with a good story about current newsy science. A really good piece.

Killing giants, myth busting and other valiant deeds (Books - The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing & Reading in the Brain)

I just came across two excerpts in Richard Dawkins's collection of science writing that reminded me what gives me pleasure about reading science. One is geneticist J. B. S. Haldane's "On Being the Right Size" and the other, Zoologist Mark Ridley's "On Being the Right Sized Mates" from his 1983 book The Explanation of Organic Diversity. Haldane's essay muses on how the physical structure of animals evolved to the "right" size for their makeup. As an example he uses the giants from the books of his childhood,

These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross-sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bones had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every times they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one's respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

I love the fact that Haldane uses his childhood memory of Pilgrim's Progress to communicate to his reader what he is thinking about the physiological evolution of animal life. The best teaching occurs, I think, when the teacher themselves can get back to what initially ignited their own interest about their subject and communicate from that vantage point. Haldane then goes on a musing spree which covers the structure of members of the animal kingdom ranging from insects to giraffes. How an insect's structure allows it to fall without danger, but if it gets wet it is likely to drown. Tall animals require a certain strength pump and vessels for the circulatory system that convey blood to their extremities, however, this puts them at risk for high blood pressure or problems associated with vascular weakness. How do wings permit flight? How do different respiratory structures - those that have evolved with gills and those with lungs - accomplish the oxygenation of blood? And given these diverse means, what are the upper limits of the size of the animal that possesses them? Haldane not only informs us of the vagaries of the natural world we are a part of, he communicates the verve with which he observes that world, and with witty prose drives the reader forward. It is little wonder that he inspired Mark Ridley's observation that species have evolved to favor homogamy, that is, like mates with like. What I enjoyed about this brief essay is Ridley's debunking of the well-entrenched myth that in human affairs of the heart, opposites attract.

'it is a trite proverb that tall men marry little women...a man of genius marries a fool,' a habit which Murray explained as 'the effort of nature to preserve the typical medium of the race.' The same thought was expressed by the vast intellect of Jeeves, to explain the otherwise mysterious attractions of Bertie for all those female enthusiasts of Kant and Schopenhauer. The source of this proverbial belief is not certainly known; but one possibility can be ruled out. It did not originate in observation: humans mate homogamously (or perhaps randomly) for both stature and intelligence.

Myth-busting is not just a darn good time - especially when indulged in with such gusto - but doubting our assumptions is vital to the continued development of our knowledge. This is also another of many instances in Dawkins's juicy compendium in which learning something new is married to lucid, entertaining writing. The danger of this volume, however, is its tendency to bloat the TBR list. I've made it a rule to only jot down my desired titles at this point, and not engage in any impulse buying. We'll see how long that holds! Here are my other posts related to The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 1, 2.

I have also begun Stanislas Dehaene's recent book Reading in the Brain and, speaking of gills, it is packed to them with information about how the brain accomplishes the act you are performing right now - reading. An accessible and engagingly written volume. I tore through the first 60 pages. More on that soon.

Chick-lit meets Holocaust novel (Books - Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay)

Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key alternates two narratives, one set in 1942 as Paris's Jews are rounded up by their own police and sent to Auschwitz to impress the Nazis and their Gestapo, with whom they had recently allied themselves. The other set in 2002 Paris, as Julia, an American journalist married to a Frenchman, researches the story of Vel' d'Hiv' (the French name for the roundup). She discovers that the apartment that has belonged to her husband's family and into which they are planning to move after a renovation, was originally occupied by a Jewish family and suspects it may have been acquired through less than above-board methods. It becomes her obsession to find out who occupied that apartment and what happened to them and the knowledge changes her life as the book cover's blurbs assures me Sarah's Key will change mine. What amazed me rather was how predictable and lacking in personality this book club favorite is. It's pop-chick-lit meets pop-Holocaust novel. Think Sleepless in Seattle meets Life is Beautiful. Never complex, never subtle, Sarah's Key held not a single surprise for me either in how its historical plot unfolded nor its contemporary one. The writing was clunky - constantly explaining the obvious - usually with a cliche.

Her mother. Her father. Her brother. She missed them so much she felt physically ill. She felt as if she had fallen into a bottomless hole.

or

"I can still hear her scream," he whispered. "I cannot forget it. Ever."

What Sarah's Key does have going for it is plot. Vel' d'Hiv' is heart wrenching history and the reader uncovers the details on a factual basis and on an imagined personal one, learning what happened as Julia learns it. It's a good device but the contemporary plot aligns with the historical one too neatly, the children in the story parallels Julia's pregnancy, the apartment she is renovating happens to have been inhabited by a Jewish family, I feel like the novel is constantly hitting me over the head to make sure I got it. I got it.

What this book did accomplish is to make me even more curious about the history of occupied France and its aftermath. In fact, I started Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper's Paris After the Liberation yesterday (it had been sitting on the TBR pile for a few months). So you could say that in the end, de Rosnay's book accomplished something, so does it matter that it wasn't well written? It does to me. The kind of book I value enriches me with the complexity of human beings. It shows people as living paradoxes, it doesn't merely explain to me that they are paradoxical. I really hated that de Rosnay split up the family into those who sided with Julia and those who didn't and then had the dying matriarch decide the outcome with a little narrated moralizing speech at the novel's end that delivered the book's lesson like a family drama for the Disney Channel or ABC-Family. I also value a novel that asks me to sustain my attention to a chapter that takes longer than 5 minutes to read. Reading a rich novel is an enveloping experience in which events unfold with the improvisatory twists that seem to mimic those we experience in our lives, it is not just a way to absorb information. I have been more surprised by the events in re-reading a novel (for example, Chiam Potok's In The Beginning earlier this year) than I was in reading Sarah's Key for the first time. I was interested in seeing what all the fuss was about, but ultimately although informed and even moved (once), I was disappointed to discover such thin gruel made of such rich stock.

Forthright and penetrating (Books - Something is Out There by Richard Bausch)

Richard Bausch's new collection of stories, Something is out there. observes the strong passions of everyday life. I think his greatest skill is making what is internal - what is going on in the heart or the mind of his characters - external without our being precisely aware at the moment of the arrogance of the invasion. In the title story, the action is a kind of surreal malaise experienced by two sisters resulting from the shooting, earlier that day, of one of their husbands. As a blizzard envelops them, the two sons tend to the practical business of shoveling snow as they await the arrival of their cousin, the son of the other sister. One sister is forward-focused and a doer, the other ruminative and hysterical.

Dora wandered back into the kitchen and then on, to her room. The boys talked about shovbeling the walk again. Paula said to go ahead; it was something for them to do. She couldn't quite voice the thought - it was too ordinary, really, almost childlike - but it seemed impossible that the trauma of the afternoon's trouble and anxiety could be added to by anything serious where Christopher was concerned. The world she knew did not act that way. She wanted to say something to the boys - to tell them that the day's misfortune was sufficient, plenty enough for anyone, and surely the world would not add to all that. But then she understood the irrational nature of this line of thinking; there was not going to be anything sensible or logical about this day. She felt a little freezing current of air under her heart, and tried to concentrate on watching the boys shovel the walk again. They barely made any headway.

How subtly and exactly he captures that wandery, threatening, other-wordly atmosphere of a confrontation with mortality - the aftermath of the storm of adrenalin, the sense-making exercises the mind engages in. Bausch doesn't write what Paula thought but rather what she doesn't think, but what sits at the edge of her mind behind her actions. Nor does he litter his prose with the predictable 'she thought to herself.' Instead he observes what people do, what they say, the idiosyncratic content of a sensory detail that comes to their awareness, and the understandings they then possess out of these experiences. That "freezing current of air under her heart," how perfect and precise a physical detail. A winter storm inside to match the winter storm outside.

Bausch catches the odd moment, the kind that we become aware of in the moment that we will never forget all our lives.

I found "One Hour in The History of Love" the most unusualof the stories. Written in the present tense, it observes the commerce of relationships of 3 groups of people - 1 newly wed (and newly pregnant) couple sitting at a cafe table with their friends, also a couple, but at a more jaded stage in their relationship. At an adjacent table sits another couple, a writer, his fiancee, and a self-absorbed photographer she used to assist. An elderly couple sits in a coffee shop on the corner of the same block as the cafe. Beginnings, middles, and ends of the life cycle eddy around this block, interacting with the chief creative acts of life - art-making (in the writer and photographer), life making (in the grown children of the elderly couple and the nascent child in the newly wed's womb), and loving. These three forces exist in three adjoining dramas which affect each other but never intentionally interact.

"Give me a call before you leave town," Benjamin says to them both. "We could sit out on my balcony and share a bottle of wine." He realizes, as he speaks, how lonely this makes him sound, and as he tries to find something else to say, some words indicating with the proper amount of casualness that others would also be there, Jesse cuts him off. "We'll do that, you bet," he says in the tone of someone already forgetting the invitation, and walking away with his lovely woman on his arm, and his obvious pride in being happy, in love. Benjamin walks down the sidewalk, past an old man - the same old man, he realizes, that he had seen earlier - who comes storming by him with that rickety walk, hands shoved down in his pockets. The whole world is bright sun, and the man's eyes are narrow, furious, the mouth deeply frowning.

What a masterful conflagration of detail, like an episodic stage play in which the summing of unrelated scenes creates a complex drama that the participants aren't event aware of.

I think my favorite of the stories was "Overcast," in which Elaine, a waitress at a diner, lives in the aftermath of her divorce. The business of the story is her taking refuge in writing and listening to opera, her brewing and serving of coffee, her visiting her mother, but its action is her dawning realization of her own loneliness. The story has a quiet arc, a penetrating insight, and forthright diction. Those are the qualities I have come most to admire in this, the first Bausch volume I have read. I am tempted to try a novel by him next - any suggestions?
Here are my other posts on Something is out there 1, 2.

Big Thinking

I was introduced today to the website Big Think. On it I discovered, among many treasures, this interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett discussing the Mechanics of Studying Consciousness. The excerpt is not interesting because of any earth shattering content Dennett reveals about the nature of consciousness but rather for what he reveals about his thought process. You know how obsessed I am with creative process. Here Dennett discusses how to put one's mind to solving a problem and stay focused on the work of that problem, rather than on the many things that can waylay us: its scope, the wonder of our subject, or that this part I am working on isn't really the subject I mean to address.

The website offers video interviews with all sorts of influential thinkers and doers - chefs, economists, politicians, writers, choreographers, neuroscientists, musicians... you name it. I enjoyed Oliver Sacks and historian David McCullough is particularly good on the value of history and our founding fathers.

Information storage and replication - adaptive and maladaptive (Books - The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing & Something is Out There)

I wrote in my last post on Richard Dawkin's fine collection of science writing of hypothesis testing - a part of the scientific method which helps us to build our body of knowledge about the world through disciplined comparison. This is how it works. Scientists pit a hypothesis that says that what they think is not true (the null hypothesis) against an alternate hypothesis (their own). For example, if the scientist is testing the effect of a drug to cure the common cold, he might take two groups of people with nasty colds, give one the drug and the other a sugar pill. His claim might be that those who took his drug will sneeze fewer times a day than those who took the sugar pill. His 'null hypothesis' would state that there will be no difference between the two groups - that both will sneeze the same number of times after taking the pill. This is the result he does not want. If his experiment is successful, he cannot prove his hypothesis per se, because no one can test every instance of something, but what the scientist can do is reject the null hypothesis to some degree of certainty. It is up to not just this probability,but also to the experimental design to say that the reason the sneezing decreased was the drug and not something else.  Our experimental design would have to account for other explanations, such as the fact that the cold ended naturally on its own - something science calls controlling the experiment.

Why would scientists work so hard to try to address an explanation other that the one we want? There are two reasons: one protects against our influencing the outcome in subtle ways in our experiment because we want success so badly (scientists fall prey to the same psychological pitfalls as any other human). The second is is one of logic and safety. Say you wanted to reach some books on a very high shelf and you had no ladder, but there was some wood, a hammer, and a few nails. You build a 4-step step-stool but you have no aluminum braces and only a single nail for each join. Would you a) proudly throw your finished stool down in front of the right spot on the shelf and jump on up to the top step, standing on your toes to reach that book as soon as it was finished or would you b) put some weight on it with your hands first, testing the stool before climbing on it? If you are like a scientist, you will opt for the second choice, preferring to break the stool you made with your hands than to impulsively leap to the top step and risk breaking your neck .  It is more logical to attempt to break the stool safely than it is to assume that it is functional because you would like that book on the top shelf so badly. It is not that we want the stool to break, it is that we want to know with a great deal of certainty that it will not. So we try to break it by putting at least as much pressure on it as it would likely withstand under typical us.

That long explanation of hypothesis testing was a preamble to a point I wanted to make inspired by another couple of excerpts Dawkins chose in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, these by biologist Francis Crick and zoologist Matt Ridley. That is: scientists are good at doing other things too. One strength of a great creative-scientific mind is the way it can use its body of accumulated knowledge together with its unique perspective to see patterns in the world that others have not seen. This begins with a sentence from Watson and Crick's 1953 paper on DNA:

'It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.'

The quality of mind that enabled Watson and Crick to race ahead of their laboratory-based rival Rosalind Franklin is well demonstrated by that sentence, and it is shown again in the extract I have chosen from Crick's book Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981). Watson and Crick were not only concerned with finding out how things actually are - although that was of course their ultimate goal. They also kept in mind the way DNA ought to be if it was to do its job as the genetic molecule, and this gave them a short cut, which was ignored by the painstaking Rosalind Franklin...it is in general true that deep cogitation on the way nature ought to be constitutes a good prelude to the eventual investigation of the way it actually is. Only a prelude, however: the ultimate test of an idea is not its elegance but how will it explains reality.

So creative scientists are also good at something that might be called informed musing. In fact most creative people of all kind are. I might add to Dawkins cautionary concluding sentence that a responsible reporter of science will always let you know which they are doing - testing a hypothesis or musing.

I have not read Matt Ridley's 1999 book Genome, but Dawkins describes its creative structure - 23 chapters, one for each of our chromosomes, each chapter extrapolating upon a theme inspired by what is known about the functions of that chromosome. If the excerpt is any indication, this makes for some rich cross-fertilization among genres. In the case of this chapter it is biology, physics, and information processing. The short chapter careens from Erasmus Darwin's 1794 prediction that living filaments may be shared precursor to all organic lifeforms - an amazing notion for its day! To the idea that lifeforms, unlike closed systems which proceed from states of order (requiring more energy) to states of chaos (requiring less),

...build packets of order and complexity called bodies but at the cost of expending large amounts of energy. In Erwin Schrodinger's phrase, living creature 'drink orderliness' from the environment.

Isn't that fantastic? He goes on to connect the building of a body with the need for information. That information must be storable (the DNA of our genome) and must be both readable and replicable. Less than two pages later, Ridley speaks of the year 1943 as the time when diverse ingredients began to coalesce in a way that would eventually transform how we know our world. Here is what I mean by a unique mind being able, through its own peculiar fund of knowledge and its uniquely creative disposition, to see what no one else can. Ridley writes of what Watson and Crick were up to, the tortures Josef Mengele was enacting at Auschwitz, the work of Oswald Avery that prefigured the connection of DNA to heredity, and the brilliant Alan Turing, who was creating a computation machine that also could store information, modify it, read it to enact functions, and replicate it. What Ridley sees and writes of with panache is the excitement in disparate disciplines that prefigured the connecting of biological code to heredity. It's a visionary discourse that exemplifies what I wrote of in the last post inspired by Dawkins's collection, that strong feeling precedes scientific inquiry.

I have also continued my travels with another unique mind - that of Richard Bausch - in his latest story collection, Something is Out There. "Son and Heir" is a devastating portrait of dissolution of the aimless son of a college president. Lyndhurst, the son, is a pitiable character whose combination of pride and inherent mistrust leads him to make a series poor judgments. This mistrust is predicated on his having witnessed his respected father's infidelity toward his mother alongside the public continuance of their marriage - a hypocritical facade - to which Lyndhurst has developed over time his own facade of not caring. Here too we see information stored and replicated, this time in a maladaptive pattern, no doubt initially developed to protect Lyndhurst from hurt but, in the long run he is never able to modify his mistrustful picture of the world so that he might experience it as a place where effect can predictably follow cause. Bausch's portrait of Lyndhurst's anxiety and hurt are set in the context of the great power failure during the intense heatwave the Eastern half of the U.S. experienced several summers ago. He cooks them to the boil.

Particulars in ordinary worlds versus ordinariness in extremis - (Books: Something is out There by Richard Bausch & Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay)

I dipped into two fiction books this weekend, one Richard Bausch's new collection of short stories Something is out there. and the former bestseller by Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key. They couldn't be more different.

Bausch's narrative voice is patient, gentle, clearly of the South. His subject matter quotidian heartbreak - the strain in a marriage between an older and a younger artist, the selfless gesture of a son towards his dying mother, the adulterous adventure of a reverends wife.

Keeping strictly to the early-morning ritual, Diana prepared coffee, boiled one egg and lightly buttered two slices of toast for him, then put cereal on for the girls, and went and dressed for the day, while they ate. When they were finished, she rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. In the usual rush, she saw the twins off to school, brushing Lauren's hair for her, nagging Kelly about brushing her teeth thoroughly to get the food particles that had lodged in her braces. All as usual. So much the exact pattern of her mornings. The ordinariness of it made her happy, and it surprised her. It also increased her sense of unreality.

The economy of this opening paragraph is a pleasure. We know Diana's day is structured, regular, but not a burden. That Diana's husband is a creature of habit, a reserved man - one egg, the toast lightly buttered - I call up the picture of an English parson. We also know that this will not be a typical day, but we don't know why, and so Bausch has created suspense in a scene of the most familiar ordinariness. Bausch fashions a world that is familiar almost to the point of cliche, but rescued from that fate by its being particular to individual lives. He accomplishes this through the use of detail. Each of the three worlds of his I have entered so far envelops me in its totality. We get to know its key citizens, usually just two or three people, very intimately. We go deep, not broad. The kind of encounter I leave feeling it has been of value.

Contrast this with the bestseller, Sarah's Key. Two alternating narratives, one set in 1942 as Paris's Jews are rounded up by their own police, one of many episodes in France's embarrassing Vichy past that had been swept under the carpet for many years. The other set in 2002 Paris, as an American journalist, who is married to a Parisian, takes ownership of an apartment originally inhabited by one of those Parisians who were shipped off to Auschwitz in 1942. De Rosnay tries for distinct voices - there is a third-person narrator in 1942, but one focused on the character of a young girl. This makes for a combination of omniscience and innocence that sounds awkward to the ear in a way that has yet to resolve itself sixty pages in. In 2002, we read the first-person voice of the American journalist, Julia. This tries for a relaxed, contemporary tone peppered with confessional detail about her marriage to Bertrand and her friendship with two cool gay fellows that I care nothing about, having not the slightest idea who she is, as well as awkward dialogue from her 11-year-old daughter.

Bertrand waved to us, then pointed to the phone, lowering his eyebrows and scowling.

"Like he can't get that person off the phone," scoffed Zoe. "Sure."

Zoe was only eleven, but it sometimes felt like she was already a teenager. First, her height, which dwarfed all her girlfriends - as well as her feet, she would add grimly...

Was this written for the Disney channel? "Like he can't get that person off the phone?" Like I can believe this sentence is being spoken by a Parisian 11-year-old who is continually 'scoffing' and 'adding grimly' - can she never simply 'say' anything? "First, her height, which dwarfed all her girlfriends - as well as her feet" Second, which comes after first, this is not a sentence. And, if I read this correctly, did her feet dwarf all her girlfriends?

Ms. de Rosnay also makes the unfortunate choice to use Zoe to give less cultured readers the basics in French everyday life:

"I have to go," I said. "Meeting with Joshua."

"What do we do with Zoe?" asked Bertrand.

Zoe rolled her eyes.

"I can, like, take a bus back to Montparnasse."

"What about school?" said Bertrand.

Roll of eyes again.

"Papa! It's Wednesday. No school on Wednesday afternoons, remember?

Bertrand scratched his head.

"In my days it - "

"It was on Thursday, no school on Thursdays," Chanted Zoe.

"Ridiculous french education system," I sighed. "And school on Saturday mornings to boot!"

School on Wednesday not on Thursday. Got it. Glad we got that exposition out of the way. I keep waiting for Mickey Rooney to run on from behind a curtain and sing a number.

The chapters are of Disneyfied length, I guess that is so that the Americans can trot off to the kitchen between them to get popcorn and sugared soft drinks and maintain their status as the leader of stupidity and obesity in the Western world, while not forgetting who anyone is. So far the structure is predictable and the prose is the most ungainly I have read in a good long while. I am interested by the Vichy occupation and I have heard that the plot is a killer, so I will try to stay with this book a bit longer. I can only guess that its popularity has to do with the fact that no one could tell a well written book from a poorly written one when the subject was the holocaust. Or maybe it was Oprahed?

Novelties VII

Eating: Lately, my favorite Japanese restaurant has offered a warm mushroom salad atop greens that is to-die-for, as they say. Here are two slightly different variations on the theme - Martha's and Food and Wine's - take your pick.

Drinking:
The Ragazzo brough home a Belgian wheat beer flavored with coriander, orangeskin, and liquorice - Blanche de Namur. Great on a hot weekend afternoon, we found, with some hearty rye and a strong cheese.


Watching: To be honest, I haven't been watching much of anything.

Listening: I've been listening to Brad Mehldau's new album Highway Rider. That's dated - can one still say album? It uses many of the solo voices of traditional jazz, like piano and sax, but some pieces have a Pat Metheny like drive (but not his very pop sound) and also has some pieces reminiscent of Samuel Barber.




Surfing & Learning:

Ed Young of Not Exactly Rocket Science (an excellent science blog) has a great piece in New Scientist; think of it as a consumer's guide to critically reading genetics claims in the press. The habit of pitting nature and nurture against each other as mutually exclusive categories is as ubiquitous as the mind/body duality, and it is just as misguided. He also warns us that genes with catchy names are usually misleading. Check out his other concise, clearly written advisements via the link.


So, what's new with you?

A smorgassboard of writing by 20th and 21st century scientists and why we should care (Books - The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing)

I find that there is too little appreciation among the commonly educated person of what science does (as opposed to, say, the average understanding of the value of the medical practitioner whose practice is served by science but is not, generally speaking a scientist). I feel I should do more frequent science posts along with my book posts to address this imbalance! This post will give you some of each.

Science's functional value is its way of understanding the phenomena we experience in our world. Science is reserved in many minds as the realm of fact - the way we achieve certainties - which distinguishes it from the realm of belief, and neither the twain shall meet. However, science is, actually, the realm of probability. It is belief that travels in the realm of certainty. One can only achieve certainty through faith - a ceaseless practice that is most obviously valuable when it ignores the experience of our senses. For example, the Jewish practice of saying Kaddish when one has lost a loved one. Kaddish is a mourning ritual, but it is not a prayer of mourning, it is a ritual of praising the source of life in the face of loss. One can see the value of such a practice for the mourner. 

In good science, observations of the world are collected and measured against some standard that is set beforehand. Scientists then express to the world just what we did and how likely it is that what was observed can be said to be true about the world (or some part of it).  Everyone, even the strictest of scientists, live with beliefs about the world. That is how they produce hypotheses, which are the genesis of scientific inquiry.  So belief generally precedes scientific inquiry. But because everyone possesses belief and because, time and again, our beliefs about our world have had to change, it is useful to have a system of inquiry, a method to discipline some of that certainty, so that we don't become too righteous. What is true about the world is not always obvious and, indeed, not always immediately visible. The work of transformational scientists is often to make the invisible visible. The earth, low and behold, is not flat. It really does revolve around the sun and not the sun around it. Germs really do exist, even though they cannot be seen with our eyes. Washing hands really does reduce transmission of germs and, therefore, infection. Cholera really is transmitted via drinking water. And gaining that new understanding is valuable. People derided those now commonly held truths when they were first introduced but we are better for each of those influential changes and somehow Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and a host of other practices are alive and well.

In that spirit, the much revered Richard Dawkins has collected excerpts of influential science writing in English from the 20th and 21st centuries in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. I received it the other day from a colleague and have begun to happily making my way through its excerpts by physicists and chemists, mathematicians and biologists, cosmologists and paleontologists. They are as various as their creators and those I have read so far are illuminating, amusing, and provocative.

I'll give you just one bit of Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of England's, Just Six Numbers (2000). In it, he describes the interrelationship of the microscopic scale of atoms, molecules, and cells and the macroscopic scale of planets, stars, and galaxies that are our cosmos. He uses the serpent devouring its own tail - an ancient symbol of endless recreation called the ouraborus - to depict the interdependence of these two aspects of our universe and how we humans exist smack in the middle, superimposing each point on that scale in scientific notation onto the ouraborus, to create a sort of quasi-mythic quasi-scientific clock.

Living organisms are configured into layer upon layer of complex structure. Atoms are assembled into complex molecules; these react, via complex pathways in every cell, and indirectly lead to the entire interconnected structure that makes up a tree, an insect or a human. We straddle the cosmos and the microworld - intermediate in size between the Sun, a a billion metres in diameter, and a molecule at a billionth of a metre.

What follows is a ode to the interrelatedness of what Rees calls inner and outer space that makes me want to immediately read his book. (Which I may do after I graduate). I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those books that leads to reading many other books. How very in the spirit of scientific inquiry. If you are interested in a volume that could whet your appetite for original writing by scientists, this is an enticing smorgassboard of excerpts as brief as they are various.