Rebel

Posted on June 12, 2012 by smellincoffee

Rebel
© 1993 Bernard Cornwell
402 pages

Nathaniel Starbuck shouldn’t be in South, but this son of a preacher man is positively hopeless when it comes to the ladies. Love tore him from the seminary, and it led him into Virginia just as the United States was about to be rent in war, as southern aristocrats — having finally lost their domineering influence over the path of the nation — seceded from the union rather than face the prospect of inevitable change. The appearance of a Bostonian in their midst on the eve of war doesn’t sit right with the townfolk, and Starbuck makes his first appearance running from an angry mob set on tarring and feathering him. Fortunately, young Nathaniel is friends with the richest man in Falcouner County — Washington Falcouner, who owns a mansion with its own name. Such influence is handy, for it saves Nate’s life…but in return for his assistance, Falcouner would like Nate to join his fancy new regiment. While some fear war, to Falcouner it’s a marvelous opportunity to dress in uniforms, salute the flag, woo the ladies, and win some glory. So Nate, son of an abolitionist preacher, is thrown by chance where no one would possibly expect to find him: in the ranks of the Confederate Army, where he will find what fate has in store for him.

I never expected to read the Starbuck Chronicles, for despite having been born and raised in the South, I’ve always been a stalwart Union man. The idea of a northern fellow fighting for the rebels did not sit well with me at all. Oh, I grudgingly figured I would try the first book one day, because it was after all a Bernard Cornwell novel, and I am rather enamored of his work — but I didn’t plan on liking it. As it happens, Nathaniel Starbuck is not an idealist.  Frankly, I was off my rocker to suspect that a Cornwell protagonist would be fighting for ‘principles’. No, like Richard Sharpe or Thomas Hookton, Nate is just someone who found himself in the middle of a war, realized he had a talent for soldiering, and decided to play the cards he’d been dealt. Starbuck is no more a states-rights enthusiast than Sharpe is a fan of British foreign policy, but defend it he shall, because he happened to be on that side of the Potomac when the war broke out, and — well, it’d enrage his father, and wouldn’t that be fun?

Rebel is the story of a man finding himself in battle — at the Battle of Bull Run — but he really starts off a boy, and this sets him apart from every other Cornwell hero I’ve yet read. Even when Uhtred of Bebbanburg was a boy, he brimmed over with confidence — his charging the Norse to avenge his fallen father so impressed them that they adopted him. But Nate Starbuck is a fuzzy-faced teenager by comparison. He’s utterly unsure of himself:  only that profound weakness for women kept him from being utterly dominated by his father. I’ve haven’t seen a character this easily or drastically derailed by women since The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.  Nathan was raised Puritan, but he can’t help being a lover…and love will turn him into a fighter and see him change the fate of a nation.

Nate Starbuck amuses me. Of course the novel is superb, filled with little details that make Cornwell’s world seem real, and the characters are as ever fantastic, constantly defying expectations. But Cornwell’s series are known for their larger-than-life heroes, and this one has just gotten his boots on. I’m looking forward to seeing what he makes of himself. As I seem to be sliding into an American Civil War mood (for the first time since 2003…), I may be reading the series this summer.   I’m  interested in seeing what an English author like Cornwell makes of a conflict that involves only Americans.

Related:
The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
Rifles for Watie, Harold Keith. Meant for teenagers,  set in the west, about a young boy who joins the Union army and has various wartime adventures, including a stint pretending to be a rebel after he’s caught behind enemy lines scouting.

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Teaser Tuesday (12 June)

Posted on June 12, 2012 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday once again!

How wide the gates of hell gaped, how searing the flames would be, how agonizing the lake of fire, and how long would all eternity stretch if he did not stand now, fetch his sword, and walk out from this den of iniquity into the cleansing rain. Dear God, he prayed, but this is a terrible thing, and if you will just save me now then I will never sin again, not ever.  He looked into Sally’s eyes, her lovely eyes.
“Of course I’ll kill him for you,” he heard himself saying.

p. 227, Rebel. Bernard Cornwell. 

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Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Posted on June 10, 2012 by smellincoffee

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
© 2012 Peggy Orenstein
260 pages

When did every little girl become a princess to be bedecked in pink and fawned over? Such is the question posed by Peggy Orenstein, author of numerous books on issues of motherhood and raising women. The answer is at least twofold. First, advertising toward girls in general has emphasized coy, yet overt sexuality, even to the very young: and secondly, in the early 1990s, the Disney Corporation realized there was a lot of money to be had in developing a line of princess goods.  But this isn’t really a book on advertising: Orenstein is more concerned about what the princess culture is doing to the minds of girls. The substance of the book is an examination of  how girls view themselves and each other in society.

 What makes a princess special? There’s no answer. A princess is special just because. She exists solely to be an object of attention: her specialness is not the result of her accomplishments, her skills, her talents, her character, or anything substantial.Therein lies the problem with the princess culture, for it influences girls to aspire to be objects of appreciation. Their sense of self-worth is an external fair, subject not to what girls feel themselves capable of, but how girls feel others respond to them. If they are not regarded as Special, they feel worthless. Distracted by the quest for attention, they don’t bother with the kind of self-growth that would merit attention, or  be fulfilling on its own. Substance is placed by superficiality. This is particularly troublesome in the case of sexuality: in Orenstein’s words, girls learn to aspire to be desired before they have desire (of that kind) on their own. Orenstein sees this as a problem for girlhood in general, because the princess culture has utterly hijacked what it means to be a girl. If a helmet isn’t pink, it isn’t a girl’s helmet. If a mother scorns all the fluff, her inadvertent lesson to her daughter is that it’s not okay to be a girl.  This being the problem, her solution — in addition to reversing Reagan’s deregulation of children’s advertising — is for parents to focus on teaching girls how to live for themselves, and not for the approval of others; to define themselves and not try to fit Disney’s definition of a girl.

Orenstein is a fun author, especially as she covers beauty pageants for four-year-olds and facebook, using phrases like “Sesame street walker”.She’s also one who has to practice what she preaches, for her own daughter Daisy is one of the afflicted: the account conveys her desperate frustration in trying to raise Daisy to be a strong person in an environment swamped by odious messages in the advertising. It shares themes with Consuming Kids and So Sexy, So Soon and covers similar ground. What So Sexy, So Soon referred to as “age compression”, Orenstein calls “KGOY”, Kids Getting Older Younger. This refers to the way kids are attracted to objects advertised to older children, hence kiddie thongs and Barbie in the toddler aisle.  Of obvious interest to the parents and guardians of young women, and quite readable. 
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Why We Get Fat

Posted on June 9, 2012 by smellincoffee

Why We Get Fat: and What To Do About It
© 2011, 2012 Gary Taubes
267 pages

The secret of weight, we are told, is as simple as physics, as the laws of thermodynamics. If we take in more energy in eating than we expend in exercise, we gain weight. If we use more energy than we eat, we lose weight. Hence the constant advice to those concerned about their bellies is to eat less and exercise more. Simple, right? …then why doesn’t it work?  Why do millions of people go on diets every January and struggle so mightily to do make any progress? And how can there be so many societies in history and at present where obesity is linked not to abundance, but to poverty? How can obesity and malnutrition exist in the same family at the same time?  Gary Taubes has an answer, one which explains in full the link between obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiac problems while turning everything you thinkyou know about diet on its head.

            Insulin is the key. Taubes writes like a volleyball player, delivering his argument with a bump, a set, and finally the spike. He begins by dismantling conventional explanations about weight control, pointing out that even studies done by institutions which dearly wanted to demonstrate an incontrovertible link between exercise and diet and weight loss have failed to do so. He then prepares the reader by pointing out that we already know that fat is managed substantially by hormones, pointing out the role estrogen plays in shifting body fat around at the onset of puberty. He also points out the way we observe fat utilized in other animals: is a Jersey cow lean because it eats lighter and runs laps around its field? Hardly. Jersey cows are bred as milk cows because their hormones prioritize turning food into milk, and Angus cows are bred as beef because their hormones emphasis turning food into fat and muscle. Calories and exercise have nothing to do with it – not in cows, not in rats, and not in humans.

            In humans, insulin is the chief hormone that manages fat. We’ve known this for decades, but somehow in the WW2 period the United States lost sight of the consequences. Essentially, when insulin is present in the bloodstream, we accumulate fat, and can’t get rid of it. When insulin is absent, our bodies are free to convert fat into fuel. To avoid gaining weight, then, we must avoid foods which stimulate the secretion of insulin, particularly carbohydrates and sugar. No carbs means no grain, no corn, and no rice. The idea of going “carbless” may strike modern readers as positively abnormal, but in truth the diet we’re “used” to is the strange one from the perspective of natural history. Humans evolved eating meat, fruit, and the occasional greens –  our dependence on grains is relatively recent, historically speaking. That dependence is one promoted by the idea which currently holds sway over dietary belief in America, that carbs are good and fat is bad: in most supermarkets, low-fat brands are the only option available. Not only is our love affair with carbohydrates fattening us up, says Taubes, but we’ve declared anathema a vital part of our diet.  We’re supposed to be eating fat, he says. The more fat in our diet, the more efficiently our bodies run — and there’s nothing to the idea that fatty diets lead to exercise, studies indicate.Here he and Michael Pollan concur.

The effective way to losing weight, then, is to avoid carbohydrates and eat heartily the diet of our ancestors – meat and greens. Fruit is more problematic because modern stocks have been bred to be far more sugary than their antecedents. This approach has been advocated by others; the famous Atkins Diet is based on it, for instance, and it’s very similar to the “Paleo” diet which is now gaining in popularity.  Why is there a link between obesity and poverty? Because poor societies rely on cheap foodstuffs – carbohydrate-rich foodstuff like bread and rice. Why is the Fast Food nation an obese nation?  Because carbohydrates are the appetizer, main course, dessert, and drink under the golden arches.
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Why We Get Fat is a book of tremendous importance. In the United States today, diets low in fat are emphasized even as sugary sodas are sold in the public schools. Little wonder that despite the prolonged ad campaigns of the past decades,  obesity and its related diseases continue to become worse. Not only are we missing the point, but our attempts to address the problem only exacerbate it. Consider diabetes, a disease defined by our bodies’ inability to manage its blood sugar. The dominant form (Type 2) of diabetes is caused by our bodies becoming resistant to insulin: that is, it is less effective at moving sugar out of the bloodstream and into cells. Thus, our bodies have to produce more of it to do the job, and naturally the body becomes even more resistant to insulin, rather like we build a tolerance for alcohol. When the body’s demand for insulin product exceeds its ability to do so, we recognize diabetes…but our solution is to inject more insulin into the bloodstream.  This is a ‘solution’ that guarantees the problem will never be addressed at its root.  The lesson of Why We Get Fat is that we become insulin-resistant because our diet demands we produce an abnormal amount of the hormone. Change the diet to minimize insulin demand, and our bodies won’t develop that resistance.If that weren’t enough, Taubes also pins the blame for high blood pressure and heart disease on it, though the latter is only a correlation.


Taubes has written two books in this vein; Good Calories, Bad Calories and this, Why We Get Fat. As I understand it, Good Calories, Bad Calories is the more substantial of the two, while Why We Get Fat is intended for a larger audience (har har) and emphasizes more application of the research. While Taubes doesn’t promote a specific diet, the appendix does list various others (like Atkins) and provides general guidelines to eating. I’ve been doing my homework on Taubes’ work for the last few months, since I first heard him in an extended interview on EconTalk, and I believe Why We Get Fat may be one of the most significant books I have ever read. Definitely recommended. 

Related:

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Cheap

Posted on June 8, 2012 by smellincoffee
Cheap: the High Cost of Discount Culture
© 2009 Ellen Ruppel Shell 
296 pages 
A few weeks ago I read Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, which is a critical history of  the 20th-century trend in business toward cheaper goods. The history begins in the 19thcentury, with the rise of bulk retailing department stores. The existence of a business atmosphere that didn’t prioritize the lowest prices possible seems surreal to someone like myself, who came of age in the era of Wal-Mart triumphant.  But according to Shell, traditional businessmen were positively scandalized by the ambitions of new retailers, who opted to make their profits by selling an enormous amount of cheap merchandise rather than a respectable amount of more moderately priced items. The new business model transformed the world, but there are consequences to every action.  
Shell covers some of the same ground as was covered in The Wal-Mart Effect: the new model shifts the balance of power in business relationships from suppliers to retailers, which is bad news given that the retailers tend to be more monolithic, concentrating power in the hands of a few. Consumer expectations for cheap goods has disastrous environmental consequences: cheap is an adjective that once meant not just inexpensive, but inferior, and that meaning remains valid. The goods manufactured and sold by Wal-Mart and IKEA are produced as cheaply as possible, using the cheapest – most inferior – materials as possible. Not only do these cheaply-made goods wear out quickly, but they can’t be made into anything else. Although they cost the consumer little, they are a grave waste of resources in an age that can’t afford such waste. The costs that the consumers are spared are paid by cheap, abused labor, and the global environment.  Shell also writes on price mechanisms and the psychology of selling, opining that the retailers’ success in convincing consumers that items can be sold this cheaply has distorted our concept of what things should truly cost, and ends by extolling the virtues of craftsmanship – a value I’m given to share. I despise purchasing items that won’t last, or visiting stores where service is nonexistent because there the only reason people are hired is to restock merchandise and check goods out.
            How convincing this is, I can’t say: The Wal-Mart Effect familiarized me with most of the key concepts. I was struck most here by the notion that we are creating garbage goods from garbage materials. Unfortunately, I can’t see that most people will decide to start buying more expensive goods, even if the discount culture depresses wages and wastes resources. However,  as the 21stcentury progresses, the scarcity of resources will force people to use them more intelligently regardless of their wishes. 
Related:
The Wal-Mart Effect, Charles Fishman
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why America Needs a Green Revolution, Tom Friedman  
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A Blaze of Glory

Posted on June 7, 2012 by smellincoffee

A Blaze of Glory
© 2012 Jeff Shaara
464 pages

Come all you gallant soldiers, a story I will tell
About the bloody battle on top of Shiloh’s hill
It was an awful struggle; it’ll cause your heart to chill
All from the bloody battle on top of Shiloh’s hill.

  In 1974, Michael Shaara wrote an unparalleled novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, eschewing a traditional narrative and telling the story directly from the point of view of various generals and infantrymen who contended against one another amid Pennsylvania’s rocky hills and woodlands. The novel met enormous critical and popular success, and when it became a movie,  Shaara’s son Jeff was prompted to consider picking up where his late father left off and writing similar novels in the same time. He responded with Gods and Generals, concerning the war’s beginning, and later with The Last Full Measure, making his father’s original part of an American Civil War trilogy. Keeping his father’s style, Shaara followed up on his success with novels set in all of the United States’ major wars – the Invasion of Mexico, the War of Independence, and the two world wars.  The WW2 novels saw Shaara attempting to create his own narrative approach, one focused on fewer characters, but in A Blaze of Glory he returns to both his original style and setting:  1862, the American Civil War. But this time Shaara writes not of Lee and Grant, of the armies of the Potomac and of Virgina. Here, the action begins in the west, and the main event is the staggeringly bloody battle of Shiloh.

            Shaara turning his attention to the little-regarded western theater is most welcome:  although the battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg may have some name recognition,  the eastern characters and battles (Lee and Grant;  Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg) dominate the national imagination.  I also welcome Shaara’s return to his and his father’s former style: the WW2 novels were overly dominated by one or two characters and didn’t deliver the varied substance of The Killer Angels and other works. Here, Shaara’s panel includes Albert Sidney Johnston, Nathan Bedford Forrest,  Grant, Sherman, and a few infantrymen from both sides. This allows Shaara to tell the story from both sides, without demonizing either. Consistently, the generals chide their men for dehumanizing the enemy, pointing out that the “rebs” or the “bluebellies” are just as clever, just as tough, and just as resolute in believing the righteousness of their cause as their respective side is.

            Shaara’s writing in A Blaze of Glory is as compelling as ever: he captures splendidly the utter confusion in the opening day of battle, as the southern troops hammer through a bewildered Union line, and the grisly impact of the bloodshed on the second day. It’s an experience that leaves one stunned, especially when main characters become part of the carnage. At novel’s end, one can’t help but reflect on how much was lost in one battle for relatively nothing, and the epilogue doesn’t improve judgments of the battle’s worth.  Unlike battles covered in other novels, there’s no triumph to celebrate, nothing to redeem the carnage and make it seem worthwhile. And yet even knowing this, I’d read it again, because Johnston is a particularly inviting character, and the suspense and action make it an exciting read even given the subdued ending.

            If Blaze of Glory is any indication of what we have to look forward to, Shaara’s new ACW trilogy will prove quite a treat, for it begins with a battle that is both a thriller and gives opportunity for sober reflection on the costs of the war.

Although we won the battle, my heart is filled with pain
The one that brought me to this life I’ll never see again
I pray to the lord  if consistent with his will
Lord save the souls of them poor boys that died on Shiloh’s hill.

Related:
  • The Killer Angels; Gods and Generals; The Last Full Measure; Gone for Soldiers; Michael and Jeff Shaara
  • Shiloh, 1862, Winston Groom
  • “The Battle of Shiloh Hill”, various artists. The most haunting version I’ve yet heard is Bobby Horton’s. YouTube has a cover by Wayne Erbsen.
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Teaser Tuesday (5 June)

Posted on June 5, 2012 by smellincoffee

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “When the wind changes direction, there are those who build walls and those who build windmills.” What will we do? 

p. 24, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why America Needs a Green Revolution. Thomas Friedman.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly book event in which participants share excerpts from their current reads. Play along at Should Be Reading.

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Books in the News

Posted on June 4, 2012 by smellincoffee
Every so often I see news articles which touch on subjects I’ve been reading about; I used to link to them in weekly review posts from time to time, but I may start doing it in this format.

Financially struggling schools nationwide are increasing the volume of advertising that children see in the halls, at football games and even on their report cards.
School administrators say that with a public unwilling to adequately fund K-12 education, they’re obligated to find new ways to keep teachers in classrooms.
“We know that we can’t continue to only look at ways to cut, we also need to be innovative about the assets we have and learn how to bring in more revenue,” says Trinette Marquis, a spokeswoman for the 28,000-student Twin Rivers Unified School District in McClellan, Calif.


For Asphalt Nation  and Suburban Nation:
States eye new motorist taxes: miles you drive could cost you (USA Today)

States are looking for new ways of taxing motorists as they seek to pay for highway and bridge repair and improvements without relying on the per-gallon gasoline tax widely viewed as all but obsolete.
Among the leading ideas: Taxing drivers for how many miles they travel rather than how much gasoline they buy. Minnesota and Oregon already are testing technology to keep track of mileage. Other states, including Washington and Nevada, are preparing similar projects.
The efforts are being prompted by the fact that gasoline taxes no longer provide enough money to pay for roads and bridges — especially when Congress and many state legislatures are reluctant to increase taxes imposed on each gallon. The federal tax of 18.4 cents a gallon hasn’t been raised in nearly two decades.

For The Shallows
Some caution texting is ruining art of conversation, Martha Irvine

Statistics from the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that, these days, many people with cell phones prefer texting over a phone call. It’s not always young people, though the data indicate that the younger you are, the more likely you are to prefer texting.And that’s creating a communication divide, of sorts – the talkers vs. the texters.Some would argue that it’s no big deal. What difference should it make how we communicate, as long as we do so?But many experts say the most successful communicators will, of course, have the ability to do both, talk or text, and know the most appropriate times to use those skills. And they fear that more of us are losing our ability to have – or at least are avoiding – the traditional face-to-face conversations that are vital in the workplace and personal relationships.“It is an art that’s becoming as valuable as good writing,” says Janet Sternberg, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York who is also a linguist.

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The Witch of Hebron

Posted on June 3, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Witch of Hebron
© 2010 James Howard Kunstler
334 pages

The future isn’t what it used to be. When the oil wells ran dry, the global economy and every nation built on petroleum collapsed. This is the dawn of a new age, one centered on self-sustaining towns with a close relationship to the soil — a world made by hand, where most of the population works in agriculture and the few which don’t are busy turning the resources that remain into usable goods; they are carpenters, cobblers,  James Howard Kunstler’s original novel in this world established the conditions and allowed us to visit the town of Union Grove as it slowly began rebuilding itself again in a most eventful summer. The Witch of Hebron begins in the early fall and culminates in Halloween, a fitting setting given the eerie tone of the book. The central character of The Witch of Hebron is Jasper Copeland, son of the town doctor, who flees after an act of  revenge that ends in death. Outside the confines of Union Grove, darkness awaits, hiding desperate poverty and grotesque individuals. Jasper starts off as a boy on the cusp of adolescence, and what little innocence he could call his own is ripped away when he is coerced into becoming the protege of a highwayman who refers to himself as an Honorable Bandit and insists on singing a ballad about himself to all his victims. The citizens of Union Grove are still trying to find themselves, adjusting slowly to their new environment. The adults have seen everything they took for granted destroyed; the rules seem to be broken. Anything might be possible — they cannot tell what beauties or horrors the future might hold.  Although Kunstler is not a man given toward the supernatural, it permeates this new world. Even the skeptical have been so shaken by all they have witnessed that they wonder if maybe there aren’t such things as devils and witches:  the industrialized world is dead, and with it the scientific thinking it encouraged. Kunstler develops their uncertainties and plays them to full advantage: the reader is left to sort through the ambiguities. Is this is a fantasy, or are Brother Jobe and the witch playing within the same rules as today’s mentalists, phone psychics, and witch doctors?

Even without the supernatural element, The Witch of Hebron‘s setting is unsettling, a mix of the old and new — the 18th century seems to have been reborn against the decaying background of the 20th. Characters’ dangerous journeys through the woods take place not on old dirt pig-trails, but heavily damaged country highways. One flaw in Kunstler’s world-building is that he resurrects too much of the old too quickly, particularly the language of occupations which have only recently been reborn: characters who are our contemporaries, living in the same world we live in now, are suddenly talking about sutleries and haberdasheries.  While these artisans would revive, would they refer to themselves in antiquidated ways? Would the new shoemaker not call himself a shoemaker, and not a cobbler? At least the town doctor does his own surgeries and isn’t recommending people to the barber in Old West style.  Perhaps it’s Kunstler’s way of emphasizing the divide between the world we’re expecting the future to become, and the world it might turn out to be.  Peak oil and the collapse of modern civilization are matters which Kunstler almost seems to anticipate with relish: they are the destruction of everything he despises, and that destruction will allow a better world to be created. But this isn’t wish-fulfillment: while his imagined world has its pleasures, the entire book is smeared with blood. It is a violent and disturbing world.

While the plot is a little thin (it’s more a season in the town’s life with a little journeys giving a thread of consistency), the setting continues to fascinate me.  Kunstler’s next work is nonfiction (Too Much Magic), but his third World Made by Hand novel should take place in the winter.

Related:
World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler
The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler
Lucifer’s Hammer, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

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Why We Get Sick

Posted on June 2, 2012 by smellincoffee

Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine
© 1994 Randolph M. Nesse, M.D; George C. Wiliams, Ph.D.
290 pages

Years ago I read an exceptional book on evolution by David Sloan Wilson. I say exceptional because it advocated for freeing evolution from being mere natural history: instead, Wilson argued that we should use it to understand all matters biological, including medicine. He used as his example the case of morning sickness in pregnancies, revealing research that illustrated that far from being a problem to be solved, morning sickness is an adaptive behavior which protects fetuses from foods that might be toxic to them in their highly vulnerable state. This application of evolution floored me, and so you can imagine my delight to discover an entire book on the subject, Why We Get Sick.

For the most part, Why We Get Sick fulfills my anticipation, though its authors are writing mostly to introduce the concept of evolution-informed medicine to the public. Though they share the insights that research with this focus have revealed already,  in any more instances they can only offer speculation, as Darwinian medicine is still quite new. The book covers general health, and explains the science of injuries, nutrition, and sickness. They establish early on that the Darwinian model can help us understand a given disease’s ultimate root, and avoid prolonging it in our clumsy efforts to dispels the symptoms. Often symptoms of a disease are actually the products of our own immune system, and if we disrupt those defenses the disease itself is given free reign. Fevers, for instance, are one of our body’s ways of disrupting an infection. It doesn’t matter to our genes if it makes us uncomfortable: they’re more concerned with killing the invaders. But the invaders have their own defenses, and they adapt a lot more quickly than we do — another reason some diseases to be here to stay, like the flu. The existence of multiple flu strains and our constant attempts to find new ways to kill them are evolution in action, the ongoing biological arms race.  Other physical ailments are hangovers of evolution, like our back problems and heel spurs;  walking upright on two feet is something our bodies are still getting used to. We haven’t even started adapting to novel environments, another element of disease: we have bodies accustomed to hardship now living in a world of abundant, cheap food and easy living. Little wonder we struggle with obesity and problems of physical inactivity. And then there are the genetic diseases and strangely adaptive byproducts of mental illnesses…

Why We Get Sick is compact, dense, and brimming with information: the authors are writing to introduce people to the viewpoint,  so there’s lot of enticing speculation. If one section doesn’t catch your interest, rest assured another will. I for one am quite excited about this novel approach to medicine, and if health or evolution are of any interest to you, this intersection of the two should prove fascinating.

Related:

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