Book Review: Time Travel

Time Travel: A History
James Gleick
Literature, science

As far as anyone can tell, there isn't any history of actual time travel. This book is, accordingly, a history of the idea of time travel. It's fairly light on physics, discursive, playfully written, and enjoyably meandering. What it lacks in mass, it makes up in range. There can't be all that many books out there, for example, that quote T. S. Eliot and Commander Spock within a few pages of one another. (Admittedly the comparison is a bit unfair; Eliot's cultural influence is comparatively minor.) There are some mind-bending asides, some witty aphorisms, some unexpected cultural crossovers. All in all, a fun read.

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Much of Time Travel is about the fictions of time travel. In the process, the fictions themselves are described in some detail, which would rather spoil them for anyone who hadn't read them already. Read Asimov's The End of Eternity, Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and "--All You Zombies--", before you read Time Travel.

Book Review: Atomic Adventures

Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder--a Journey into the Wild World of Nuclear Science
James Mahaffey
Science

This could more accurately be titled Atomic Anecdotes. It's like a Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not compendium of nuclear physics. The stories are a semi-random mix of

• Outright scientific quackery (Ronald Richter)
• Scientists who were honestly deluded (the titular N-rays, cold fusion)
• Stuff that was scientifically fine but not practical engineering (atomic-powered aircraft)
• Stuff that was scientifically and practically fine, but killed by politics (nuclear-thermal rockets)
• Tales of the true but obscure (the Japanese atomic bomb program)

To put it another way, Chapter 1 is 36 pages long and contains 39 footnotes, all of which are anecdotes or sidelights that Mahaffey couldn't squeeze into the text but couldn't bear to leave out. 

Also, the writing assumes a quite substantial understanding of physics--not at the degree level, perhaps, but certainly above the interested-amateur grade.

Personally, I enjoyed the book. It's funny, and the individual components are all well-written. More importantly, I have a bottomless appetite for this kind of useless information, and I also have the requisite scientific knowledge. The story of how the author got caught up in the cold-fusion debacle is particularly good--amusing, personal, and lively. I'd be cautious about picking this up if you don't fit my profile, though.

Book Review: Miracle Cure

Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine
William Rosen
Medicine

Miracle Cure is the last book by the late author of the superb Justinian's Flea. There's a sad irony in the title: Rosen died of cancer after finishing the manuscript. For him, there was no miracle.

But less than eighty years ago, curing pneumonia or typhoid or plague or any of dozens of other bacterial infections would equally have required a miracle. Before then, it's quite likely true that no healer of any stripe had ever cured anyone of any disease whatsoever--except, perhaps, accidentally. If you got sick, you got better on their own. Or you died.

Miracle Cure isn't quite the achievement that Justinian's Flea is. Its scope is narrower. It requires somewhat more in the way of background knowledge. I spotted a few places where the copy editor should have caught a problem. There's a rather large cast of characters, although Rosen is pretty good at giving the major ones a few vivid identifying characteristics.

It's still a darned good read, though. The pacing is excellent--almost novel-like--and the substance fully justifies the title. Rosen puts together a clear, connected narrative that starts with Louis Pasteur and winds its way almost seamlessly to the 21st-century drug-resistant-bacteria crisis. Along the way he makes it breathtakingly clear how massively, how thoroughly, and how phenomenally fast everything about disease changed. In 1942, half the nation's supply of penicillin was used to treat one patient. By 1956,  Aureomycin (a tetracycline version) was making a roughly $40-million-dollar annual profit for its maker . . . and that's just one of dozens of drugs that were on the market.

I'm sorry that William Rosen won't be writing any more books. As valedictions go, though, Miracle Cure is nothing to be ashamed of.

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The classic older work in this area is Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters. On cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies is unbeatable.

Book Review: Grocery

Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America
Michael Ruhlman
Sociology, Food

The blurb describes Grocery as a "mix of personal history, social commentary, food rant, and immersive journalism." That's a pretty good capsule description. It leaves out the fact that some of those components are better than others.

The food rant is the worst. It's nothing but a combination of conventional foodie wisdom and personal prejudices. It talks a lot about trends in food, in a way that's very convincing if you ignore that fraction of the American public that doesn't happen to live in Brooklyn. You will not find, for example, any acknowledgment that organic accounts for all of 4% of U.S. food sales. What you will find is Mr. Crankypants-style assertions like "Canola stands for Canadian oil association--that's not food," which blithely disregards the fact that "canola" is in fact nothing more than a conventionally-bred form of the ancient crop traditionally known as rapeseed.

By contrast, the glimpse inside the day-to-day working of a modest-sized regional grocery chain (Heinen's, in the Cleveland area) is fascinating. Ruhlman got a tremendous level of access and cooperation from the Heinen family, and he does a great job of walking us through the things that they deal with. How do you set up the store? How do you compete with bigger chains when everyone has the same corn flakes? How is food buying and food selling changing? To give you an idea of how enticing this is, I now kind of want to go to Cleveland in order to go to a grocery store--specifically, this grocery store.

Finally, Ruhlman also does a wonderful job mixing in his own personal narrative. Chapter 1, entitled "My Father's Grocery-Store Jones," opens like this:

Rip Ruhlman loved to eat, almost more than anything else. We'd be tucking in to the evening's meal when he'd ask, with excitement in his eyes, "What should we have for dinner tomorrow?" Used to drive Mom crazy. And because he loved to eat, my father loved grocery stores.

This touching family story is threaded neatly through the book. It makes up for the boring food rant segments. It makes Grocery more than the sum of its parts. It's about the grocery business, yes, but it's also about what food means to us.

Book Review: Beyond Infinity

Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics
Eugenia Cheng
Mathematics

This reads like My Big Little Book of Advanced Mathematics. It would be a good introduction for someone who's seriously intimidated by math; it's engagingly written, sprinkled with personal anecdotes and useful analogies. If you're mathematically literate, however, this is at best a quick diversion.

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Everything And More covers very much the same territory. It's by David Foster Wallace, so it decidedly does not read like a book for middle schoolers.

Book Review: Scale

Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies
Geoffrey West
Science

With a subtitle like that, you expect that "modest" is not going to be what you get. And you don't.

In most of these reviews, I try to avoid too much recapping of what the book's contents actually are. That's what the back-cover blurb is for. For Scale, however, my reaction only makes sense in the context of Geoffrey West's argument. So, briefly:

1. It's long been known that larger animals have slower metabolic rates--lower heartbeats, longer lives, and so forth.
2. Empirically, the relationship between animal size and metabolic rate is a three-quarters power law. 
3. Many other biological features also show three-quarter-power scaling, or one-quarter-power scaling, or occasionally one-half-power scaling.
4. Geoffrey West has come up with a theoretical explanation for this surprising profusion of multiples of 4.
5. This theory allows him to make testable, quantitative predictions for various biological features, which agree closely with observations.
6. Cities have some animal-like features, but they also have some differences. For example, the number of patents per capita more than doubles when a city doubles in size.
7. With some alterations, West's theory can be used to make somewhat looser predictions about cities. 
8. Companies also can be compared to organisms.
9. With some further alterations, Wests theory can be used to make somewhat looser yet predictions about companies.

My reaction is: intriguing, but unproven. For one thing, West isn't necessarily the first to have made the connections he makes, although he may well be the first to do so in a formal, testable fashion. For another, his ideas seem quite strongly supported in the biological realm, but increasingly speculative outside it. For a third, some of the non-biological examples smell a bit like fishing. By that I mean that any two quantities that both grow exponentially--say, the adoption of telephones after 1880 and the salaries of baseball free agents after 1980--will have some power-law relationship, and some of these relationships will fit with whatever theory you propose.

That doesn't mean I didn't like the book; I did. It reminds me of Edward O. Wilson's Consilience. (Wilson is a better writer, but West makes his case more convincingly.) There's also a close connection to Edward Glaeser's very good book Triumph of the City, and a more distant one to the outstanding The Ghost Map by Stephen Johnson. 

The connection here, if it wasn't obvious, is that these are all big-picture-thinking books: books that try to perform synthesis on a heroic scale, making sense of many disparate facts under one intellectual umbrella. Scale isn't the best such book I've ever read--I wouldn't recommend it to a reader who doesn't have some tolerance for scientific writing, for example--but it's pretty good. In particular, it's a paean to the value of interdisciplinary thinking, and that's a subject dear to my heart.