Reviews and Comments

I’m not sure what this book is about. It has been written in a haphazard way, both structurally and at the sentence level. The author seems to have a cabinet full of axes to grind. No arguments are made, there is just reportage with the author’s opinion made either explicitly by simple statement, or much more often implicitly by the images created from what is sometimes unrelated material. The core of the book is the story of the Reality Winner espionage case. Introductory portions of the book are sporadically about Julian Assange, John Lindh, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and the dark activities of our intelligence services. I suppose that these serve to set the stage for Reality Winner, or to show us the environment that she was living in. The author thinks (or perhaps feels is better) that torture is bad, that prison is bad, apparently that people come as good or bad, that medical personnel are often condescending, that our privacy has been destroyed by the internet and the NSA, and that if you are arrested and people don’t like you, then you will be abused one way or another. I wouldn’t argue that any of these are untrue, but if you worked for the government for years and have access to classified material, I find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t know that giving classified material to the internet media is a felony. The author seems to be defending Reality Winner based on statements that the Espionage Act was usually not enforced for the crime that Winner committed, that the FBI interrogated her inappropriately, that she was naive, that she was arrested at a bad time politically, that she was arrested while a fascist was the president, and that she was not a spy of any sort but a kind of whistle-blower. I guess I don’t disagree with anything in particular; I just found the whole construction to be mildly irritating and it disturbed my chi. Also, if you examine what our intelligence services did after President Bush and Congress pandered to their own fears after 9/11, you will be opening a very black box indeed.

Quammen interviewed many researchers involved in the Covid-19 pandemic during and just after the lockdown using Zoom. He has digested and presented this information for us in his usual straightforward and evenhanded way. The nature of RNA viruses, the known history of the progression of the pandemic, and various opinions on the origin of the virus are discussed. DQ occasionally goes off on a tangent, e.g. the details of Pangolin smuggling, but I found it all interesting. My edition from last year has an addendum that brings things up to date, although there hasn't been a lot of new data on the origin of the virus - the author explains why.

There is a summary of the whole book at the end of the text that was largely made by abstracting what you've just finished reading. I found it unnecessary unless you aren't going to read the book.

Chapter 37, page 145: In addition, the CDC kept advising that, when local health departments could test they should focus only on people with a travel history, or people with severe symptoms... The author should explain why the CDC made this recommendation.

Chapter 69, page 279. a potluck banquet involving roughly forty thousand families [!]

Quammen interviewed many researchers involved in the Covid-19 pandemic during and just after the lockdown using Zoom. He has digested and presented this information for us in his usual straightforward and evenhanded way. The nature of RNA viruses, the known history of the progression of the pandemic, and various opinions on the origin of the virus are discussed. DQ occasionally goes off on a tangent, e.g. the details of Pangolin smuggling, but I found it all interesting. My edition from last year has an addendum that brings things up to date, although there hasn't been a lot of new data on the origin of the virus - the author explains why.

There is a summary of the whole book at the end of the text that was largely made by abstracting what you've just finished reading. I found it unnecessary unless you aren't going to read the book.

Chapter 37, page 145: In addition, the CDC kept advising that, when local health departments could test they should focus only on people with a travel history, or people with severe symptoms... The author should explain why the CDC made this recommendation.

Chapter 69, page 279. a potluck banquet involving roughly forty thousand families [!]

An epic novel about a family in southern India by a well-known physician-author. The author is of Indian ancestry, went to medical school in Madras, has another degree in fine arts, and has written other best-selling books – so he has both the ability and access to the stories that make this novel so attractive. I liked the water imagery, the analogy of the river as fate, and the theme of family secrets. I appreciated all of the Medicine in it and I was reminded of several Indian physicians I have known who were more knowledgeable about classical physical examination than my American colleagues.
I have no especially important criticisms, but …
•The ending of this story is a nice example of bathos (in the sense of too much pathos).
•Although Dapsone is mentioned briefly near the end of the book, the pharmacological treatment of leprosy is otherwise ignored in this story. I understand this is necessary for the plot, but it is misleading.
•I feel obligated to say that the so-called acoustic neuroma is really a schwannoma, derived from the cell named for its discoverer, Theodor Schwann (1810 - 1882).

One might think that the story of the great fire of Ft. McMurray, Alberta in 2016 would be similar to other accounts of disaster. The reader would be both horrified and somewhat reassured by the distance of the disaster from his own home in time and space. He or she might tell themself that they wouldn’t have bought tickets on the Titanic or been unlucky enough to be in Galveston in 1900. But this account is different since the author shows us how the Ft. McMurray fire was an example of things to come and that it was secondary to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is not just a Canadian problem. I have had trouble sleeping since reading this.

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The author is fond of his similes. The book is peppered with them. Fire is like a person, a general, a flower, a lemur, a hurricane, like an oven filled with shoeboxes, etc., and fighting one is like playing lacrosse, but only as it was originally conceived. These were distracting.

The author uses some big words, which I sometimes appreciated as with anagnorisis and ignescent, but which sometimes were a distraction as with infandous. I don’t think I've ever heard or read the word infandous before [My spellchecker recommends I use infamous.]. It is not in the Random House or Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionaries. I found it in the 1928 Oxford unabridged dictionary where it is listed as obsolete with references from the 17th century. It is also listed in Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words.

I appreciated the quote from Albert Bartlett, The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. I don't know if it is our greatest shortcoming, and it was Bartlett's thing, but I think it is clear that it is an especially unfortunate feature of innumeracy. I also liked the quote from Aubrey Clayton, The problem with exponential growth is that it means most of the change is always in the recent past. I have asked critics if they remember Al Gore in a cherry-picker in front of a graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide over time. They laugh and say yes, and I inform them that since that movie was made we have produced more carbon dioxide than since we discovered fire. Not all graphed functions are linear.