I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Ed Yong
2016
I must say I expected to enjoy this book much more than I did. The premise is powerful: the effects that bacteria have at a macro scale in terms of human health and even behaviour. There are some wonderful musings on the far-reaching effects of bacterial evolution, for example in the observation that all eukaryotic cells (those with mitochondria and a nucleus) come from a single common ancestor, strongly suggesting that this is an evolutionary event that happened only once – and so might not occur in other contexts, making life more scarce in the universe than we might otherwise think.
Despite these tours de force, there's something unsatisfactory about the presentation. It's too breathless, too focussed, too willing to ascribe almost any phenomenon to bacterial causes and influences. A more balanced, shorter, presentation might have served better for me.
2/5. Finished 11 November 2017.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency, #1)
The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency, #1)
John Scalzi
2017
A fabulous opening to a space opera that looks to combine political dynastic in-fighting with a complex physical universe. There are very visible shades of Florentine politics, as well as nods to other science fiction universes – neither of which in any way interfere with the novelty and pace of the narrative.
5/5. Finished 11 November 2017.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
Kate Brown
2013
The all-but-unknown history of the US and Soviet nuclear weapons programmes contains some amazing parallels illuminated in this book. To get workers to agree to the claustrophobic and restrictive conditions in the plutonium plants, both sets of authorities created model cities that (in the US case) became models for a lot of later "gated" communities, but also gave residents a taste of an almost European social model they were reluctant to give up. The Soviet example is even more dramatic, almost creating (as Brown calls it) "Socialism in one city", a deft re-statement of Stalin's controversial claim to be creating Socialism in one country: perhaps the system works best at small scales. The environmental costs of both programmes have been devastating, in financial and human terms, and have left a legacy that will be felt for centuries to come, but perhaps they serve best as political statements of how weapons created unexpected mini-societies.
5/5. Finished 11 November 2017.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America
We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
2017
An interesting review of surveillance, especially good on the history of private investigators as strikebreakers and blacklisters, both in the US (the Pinkertons) but also in the UK, which is a far less well-known story.
3/5. Finished 11 November 2017.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)