Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is our favorite self-published books, which is problematic for me given how few I’ve read. Disrupting the Rabblement is a much-mention, since it was the first Kindle title I ever read (using Kindle for PC), and is the author’s manifesto for leading a simple and authentic life, continually evaluating one’s self, challenging one’s beliefs, pushing oneself to grow in ways that are frightening. I know I’ve read a few more, but some of them were terrible and the others I’ve just forgotten about. I suppose I should create a self-published label for them.

What, after all, counts as hereditary, and what environmental? People conventionally think of “environmental influences” as the ways your parents treat you as an infant, or the sorts of television shows you watch as an impressionable preschooler. But at this point, scientists believe the environment encompasses things that happen to you even before you’re born, in the environment of your mother’s uterus. Thus, if a pregnant woman is under stress severe enough to change her hormonal balance, and if the change is demonstrated to have an impact on her baby, the effect would be called environmental. Similarly, should prenatal viral infection be shown to cause schizophrenia—a possibility now under investigation—that too would rank as an environmental rather than an inherited cause of the disease.

The Beauty of the Beastly, Natalie Angier

The Germans did have one potential trump card which might have brought some relief to the infantry struggling to establish a bridgehead in the conditions described above – some 250 tanks, organized in four battalions. Some were light tanks, which were genuinely amphibious and intended to launch from barges and ‘swim’ ashore, but others were Panzer III and Panzer IV medium and heavy tanks, which had been waterproofed and fitted with long flexible tubes intended to float on the surface as the tank itself drove along the sea bed. These could operate in 25 feet of water, although driving off the end of a barge and sinking to the sea bed must have called for crews with strong nerves.

Hitler’s Armada: The Royal Navy and the Defense of Britain