Omnivore’s Dilemma
/ March 05, 2010Michael Pollan.
Many nonfiction books are written by journalists. They tend to be better writers than average, and they tend to get their books well publicized. Unfortunately, because of this, the media tends to elevate them to the status of “expert” on subjects that they know very little about. The real experts tend to do other jobs in relative obscurity. The most important thing I learned from Omnivore’s Dilemma is to determine if an author is a journalist or a legitimate expert before reading any piece of nonfiction. Journalists are generally good at sharing ideas, and some of them even come up with their own. They tend to be terrible, however, at conveying facts. Yet most of their readers have researched a particular subject far less than the journalist, so they are unable to recognize the shortcoming and tend to give too much credibility to what they read.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma is well written and the author obviously put his heart, soul, and lots of research into it.
Wicked Plants: The Plant That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities
/ March 05, 2010Amy Stewart, 2009.
This is a light read for disinterested people who are afraid of Nature. The very title "Wicked Plants" implies the impossible: That plants have a desire to do harm to people. One may as well write a book about wicked shovels (which can inflict serious, even lethal injury), wicked pencils (which injure thousands of schoolchildren every year). These examples may sound ridiculous, but they are no more ridiculous than the bulk of this book.
Yes, many plants are poisonous. Surprise!!!! Some are armed with stingers or thorns, and a few are even hallucinogenic. If you are interested in these fascinating topics, there are many much better places to get information than this tiny, poorly-researched volume that seeks to exaggerate, sensationalize, and anthropomorphize the plants it discusses.
I read this book in about an hour and learned very little. It is full of misinformation. For example, the pictures of Eupatorium are actually of water hemlock.
Catching Fire
/ March 05, 2010Richard Wrangham, 2009.
Anthropology is supposed to be the scientific study of humankind. Unfortunately, since its inception, it has been inundated by carefully disguised pseudoscience - attempts to use scientific data to support the preconceived biases of the investigators. Typically these biases (aka hypotheses) have been ethnocentric and agrocentric, and the arguments used to support them are often composed of flawed logic in the service of false implications. How relieving to read Wrangham's book, which actually appears to draw hypotheses from observations rather than a self-aggrandizing belief system. The author then analyzes realistic and sensible implications of these hypotheses, testing them in a simple but logical way that makes his conclusions seem obvious.
This is the kind of book that makes one wonder, "Why hasn't this been argued before?" While his book is rather small and the ideas are not deeply explored, this is largely because the hypotheses that Wrangham presents are quite new.
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