Visions - Michio Kaku

   1997; 355 pages.  Full Title: Visions – How Science Will Revolutionize the 21^st Century.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Physics; Futurology; Science; Speculative Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    There’s a curious phenomenon that happens as the world approaches a “turn of the century”.  People like to speculate on what their world will be like after another hundred years.  At the end of the 1800s, some fascinating predictions were made for how life in the following century would unfold, almost all of which were far afield, particularly from a technological point of view.  One of them is pictured at the end of this review.

 

    As the year 2000 approached, Michio Kaku decided to share his views of where science and technology are headed in the coming century.  Who the heck is he, what does he know about such complicated stuff, and why should we care what he thinks is going to take place over the next 100 years?

 

    Well, Michio Kaku is not your average layman.  He’s a Professor of Theoretical Physics, the cofounder of something called String Field Theory, and the host of a nationally-syndicated radio science program.

 

    It might be enlightening to read his Visions of the future.

 

What’s To Like...

    The sixteen chapters of Visions are divided into four sections:

Part 1: Visions (Chapter 1)

    An overview and predictions for 1997-2000.

Part 2: The Computer Revolution  (Chapters 2-6)

    Smart Cars, Robots, Holograms, Computers that Think, et al.

Part 3: The Biomolecular Revolution  (Chapters 7-12)

    Killing Tumors via Gene Therapy, Living Forever, Clones, Making Angels, et al.

Part 4: The Quantum Revolution  (Chapters 13-16)

    Nanotechnology, Antimatter, Warp Drives, Wormholes, et al.

 

    The chapters are fairly long, averaging just over 22 pages apiece.  But Michio Kaku breaks them down into bite-sized subsections, mostly only 1 or 2 pages in length, which made it much easier for me to focus on the physics-y concepts being presented.  It also helped that he gave a lot of those subsections catchy titles such as:

    Roadkill on the Information Highway  (pg. 121)

    Of Microbes, Mice, and Men  (pg. 151)

    How Long Can We Live?  (pg. 212)

    What Happened Before the Big Bang?  (pg. 350)

 

    Michio Kaku generally divvies up his next-century predictions into the time slots of 2000-2020, 2020-2050, and 2050-2100.  Once in a while he ventures even further into the future, but those predictions are understandably very iffy.  The fact that the book was published 26 years ago means that his first time slot is now “history”, and it was fun to look at how many of his “visions” have, and have not, come to pass.  The first excerpt below is an example of just how accurate most of his predictions are.  On the whole, he’s spot on, but we’ll list a couple of his “misses” a bit later.

 

    There’s a nice blend between “hard science” topics and popular ones.  At one point, five “Star Trek” gizmos are examined:

Force Fields, 

Starships, 

Portable 

Ray Guns, 

Transporters/Replicators, and Invisibility (Cloaking Devices).

    Michio Kaku concludes that four of those are scientifically impossible to achieve.  Guess which one might eventually be developed?  We’ll leave the answer in the comments section.

 

    In addition to all the cutting-edge technology that is discussed, Visions is also a trivia lover’s delight.  A few examples are: the origin of the word “turnpike”, how to grow a new hand (surprise!: it’s already been done!) why cats are more detached and reserved than dogs, and what percentage of all humans who have walked this earth are alive today.  Who says a science book has to be dull?!

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 266 ratings and 105 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.02/5 based on 2,366 ratings and 99 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Eventually, accessing the Internet may resemble talking to the Magic Mirror of children’s fairy tales.  Instead of typing arcane codes and symbols into a Web navigator and being flooded with fifty thousand incorrect answers, in the future we may simply talk to our wall screen or tie clasp and access the entire planet’s formidable body of knowledge.  This Magic Mirror, endowed with an intelligent system complete with a human face and a distinct personality, may act as an adviser, confidant, aide, secretary, and gofer all at the same time.  (pg. 44.  Shades of Siri and Alexa!)

 

    NASA has wisely decided not to repeat the same mistake made in the 1960s, when the space program was largely driven by the Cold War and collapsed after the politicians lost interest in the moon.  It is difficult to chart the future of space travel because the driving force behind the space program has often been politics, rather than science, with politicians demanding that astronauts perform glamorous but largely ceremonial stunts in space which could be done by robots for a fraction of the cost.  As one politician put it: “No Buck Rogers, no bucks.”  (pg. 299)

 

“Bioengineered crops can’t be recalled.”  (pg. 245)

    There is zero cussing in Visions, but that's the norm for science-y books.  Also, the usual geek caveat applies: if things like quantum physics, DNA, and nanotechnology don’t interest you, you probably should give this book a pass.

 

Here are a couple of “misses” in Visions:

    a. Cancer will be cured by 2020.  So will most infectious diseases.

    b. Newspapers will flourish during the Computer Age.

     c. CDs will be our primary way of storing and transporting information.

    d. Enron will contribute to solar energy development.

    e. The middle class will continue to grow in size.

 

    To be fair, a lot of these visions came with caveats.  Kaku notes that if a pandemic hits, then the timing of the disease cures gets set back significantly.  Newspapers will prosper only if they change their ways, doing things such as customizing their content for each customer.  And Enron had not been exposed as a scam.  

 

  But these misses pale in comparison to Michio Kaku’s “hits”.  For me, Visions was both an enlightening and captivating read.  This was my third book by this author, and I’ve loved every one of them.  Full disclosure: I am a chemist by career, so of course I’m fascinated by science-geeky books like this.

 

    9½ Stars.  As promised, here is a postcard depicting one of the many visions made just prior to 1900 predicting daily life one hundred years hence.  For more of these Google-Image the word “FutureDays”.

The God Particle - Leon Lederman

   1993; 410 pages.  Full Title: The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Particle Physics, Science, Molecular Physics, Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    The Higgs boson.

 

    Thirty years ago, its theoretical existence was the hottest topic among (subatomic) particle physicists.  It was of great importance to discover the basic building block(s) for all of Creation, and every physicist who was searching for it hoped to win a Nobel Prize if/when they were successful.  But alas, thus far, no one had yet seen the Higgs boson.

 

    There were reasons for the Higgs boson’s elusiveness.  It’s incredibly small, has no electric charge, no spin, emits no color, and only exists for about 1 x 10^-22 seconds.  How can you “see” a particle with those properties?

 

    Leon Lederman was a top-of-the-line particle physicist nerd.  He'd won the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics (along with two other scientists) for his work in examining another subatomic particle called a neutrino.  In 1993 he wrote a book detailing the history of mankind’s search for the universe’s fundamental building block, an endeavor which has been going on far longer than you’d think.  Lederman had his own witty name for that oh-so-elusive speck.

 

    He called it The God Particle.

 

What’s To Like...

    The God Particle is divided into a preface, nine chapters, and three (shorter) interludes.  The first five chapters discuss the history of the hunt for the basic building block, which goes all the way back to ancient Greece, most notably a guy named Democritus (460-370 BCE) and even Thales, a century-and-a-half earlier.  Democritus labeled the object of his quest the “a-tom”, but he mostly relied of philosophical reasoning to formulate his conclusions.  Amazingly, his suppositions have held up remarkably well down through the centuries.

 

    Chapters 6-9 focus on the modern-day "atom" (different from the a-tom) and its component parts: initially just the electrons, protons, and neutrons, then a plethora of even tinier particles such as leptons, positrons, gluons, muons, and last but not least, the bosons.  These latter chapters also chronicle Leon Lederman’s direct contributions to particle physics, mostly while he was employed at, and director of, Fermilab, located just outside Chicago.

 

    There were times, especially in the last half of the book, when my comprehension of what I was reading approached zero.  Yet it was still enlightening, as I gained insight to how things like the measuring instruments and the particle colliders were designed, and how you measure something that you can never directly see, that might appear anywhere, headed in any direction, and only around for billionths of seconds.  Happily, Lederman doesn't let the text get bogged down by doing complex calculations.  He presents them and references them, but doesn’t bore you with how they were developed.

 

    Lederman’s writing style is witty, folksy, and anecdotal, which kept the book from becoming boring.  At times, it’s even gets a bit snarky, such as when he  dubs the looked-for item the titular “God Particle”, a moniker which he says somehow managed to thoroughly ruffle the feathers of both theists and atheists alike.

 

    Be assured that you will learn about all sorts of things by reading The God Particle.  Examples include: Galileo’s stopwatch, the derivation of the word “boson”, how to make anti-matter, and why that famous CERN particle accelerator over in Switzerland, known as the “Large Hadron Collider”, has to be  circular in shape, and huge, in this case more than 16 miles in circumference.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 452 ratings and 157 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.15/5 based on 3,898 ratings and 186 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    The difference between chemists and physicists is not really insurmountable.  I started out as a chemist but switched to physics partly because it was easier.  Since then I have frequently noted that some of my best friends talk to chemists.

    The chemists did something that the physicists before them hadn’t done.  They did experiments relevant to atoms.  Galileo, Newton, et al., despite their considerable experimental accomplishments, dealt with atoms on a purely theoretical basis.  They weren’t lazy; they just didn’t have the equipment.   (loc. 2114)

 

    Like many physicists, Fermi loved making up math games.  Alan Wattenberg tells of the time he was eating lunch with a group of physicists when Fermi noted dirt on the windows and challenged everyone to figure out how thick the dirt could get before it would fall off the window from its own weight.  Fermi helped them all get through the exercise, which required starting from fundamental constants of nature, applying the electromagnetic interaction, and proceeding to calculate the dielectric attractions that keep insulators stuck to each other.  At Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, a physicist ran over a coyote one day in his car.  Fermi said it was possible to calculate the total number of coyotes in the desert by keeping track of the vehicle-coyote interactions.  These were just like particle collisions, he said.  A few rare events yielded clues about the entire population of such particles.  (loc. 5334)

 

Kindle Details…

    The God Particle costs $12.99 at Amazon right now.  Leon Lederman has two more physics-related e-books for you at Amazon: Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe for $14.49, and Quantum Physics for Poets for $12.99.

 

I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband, I know what to do, but how do you make it interesting?  (loc. 1448)

    The quibbles are minor.  There were only 14 cusswords in the whole book (and no f-bombs), which admittedly is pretty clean.  But somehow that seems like a lot for a non-fiction, scientific tome.

 

    And I'm not going to sugarcoat it, despite the author’s frequent quips, The God Particle is a slow, difficult read.  On a complexity scale of 1-to-10, or should we say “Neil deGrasse Tyson-to-Stephen Hawking”, the book is a lot close to the latter than the former.

 

    Finally, there are way too many typos, among which include linker/Tinker, sim/sun, rime/time, subde/subtle, and gaundet/gauntlet.  I suspect most of these arose during the conversion-to-digital phase.  It looks like that happened in 2012, so I'll not blame Leon Lederman for the errors.  But jeez, didn’t the publishing company have its proofreaders check for these things?

 

    But I pick at nits.  I greatly enjoyed The God Particle.  It was both enlightening and entertaining, no small accomplishment when the topic is Physics.  Keep in mind though, that my degree is in chemistry, and I am therefore inherently a science geek.  If, unlike Democritus, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, et al., you don’t care at all whether there’s a universal building block out there somewhere, you should probably give this book a pass.

 

    8½ Stars.  Full disclosure: Leon Lederman’s primary reason for writing The God Particle was to drum up public support for the continued funding of Fermilab’s Superconducting Super Collider which in 1993 was being built in Waxahachie, Texas and plagued by financial issues and lots of structural snags.

 

    This book was his last-ditch effort, and it failed.  Construction had started in 1988, Lederman’s book was published in 1993, and the project was scrubbed by the US Congress later that year.

What If? 2 - Randall Munroe

   2022; 334 pages.  Book 2 (out of 2) in the “What If?” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Humorous Science; Physics; XKCD; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    A few questions that might cross your mind some night when it’s 3 AM in the morning and you can’t sleep:

 

    01. What would happen if the Solar System was filled with soup out to Jupiter?

 

    06. How many pigeons would it require in order to lift the average person and a launch chair to the height of Australia’s Q1 skyscraper?

 

    38.  Could a person eat a whole cloud?

 

    56. What if you decided to walk from Austin, Texas, to New York City, but every step you take takes you back 30 days?

 

    64. What if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops?

 

    What?  You say you’d love to know the answers to these, but don’t want to suffer from insomnia while trying to figure them out?  Then pick up Randall Munroe’s new book, What If? 2.

 

What’s To Like...

    What If? 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Randall Munroe’s fantastic 2014 best-seller What If?.  I’ve read it, loved it, and it is reviewed here.  Randall Munroe is also the creator of the comic strip XKCD, which caters to the geek audience, of which I am a part.

 

    What If? 2 contains discussions of 64 mind-boggling questions like those shown above, plus five sections of “Short Answers” and three sections labeled “Weird and Worrying”.  There’s also a list, aptly titled “Things You Should Not Do”, that gets periodically updated throughout the book based on some of the questions, which advises you not to do things such as: pump ammonia into your abdomen, eat meat from rabid animals, and perform your own laser eye surgery.  There are numerous as well [citation needed] inserts; they are hilarious.

 

    ANAICT, the questions come from letters written by fans to the author, and he even lists the inquirers at the start of each discussion.  His answers to the 64 main questions average about 5 pages each, but each one contains several witty drawings in “XKCD style”, so the five pages are actually quick reads.

 

    I loved the innovative ways the author used to give valid answers to the absurdly-conceived questions.  For instance, how would you approach a problem such as “If house dust comprises up to 80 percent dead skin, how many people worth of skin does a person consume in a lifetime?” (Question 45).  Randall Munroe doesn’t pretend that he already knows the answers to such queries, and frequently mentions the experts he consulted.

 

    As anticipated, What If? 2 is also a trivia buff’s delight.  It was fun to see our summers here in Phoenix get duly cited for their incredible heat.  I smiled because I’d already read about the importance of Lagrange Points, but I admit I’d never heard of the “glass beaches of Vladisvostok”.  Google-image them, the photos are amazing.

 

    FWIW, I read What If? 2 in segments of 15-30 minutes, which is also how I read books of poetry.  I’m sure it’s possible to read all 334 pages in one sitting, but if I did that, the questions-&-answers would all start to blur together after a while. 

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.8*/5, based on 2,189 ratings and 146 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.40*/5, based on 6,714 ratings and 816 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    The 39,000 McDonald’s restaurants worldwide sell something like 18 billion hamburger patties per year, for an average of 1,250 burgers per restaurant per day.  Those 1,250 burgers contain about 600,000 calories, which means that each T.rex only needs about 80 hamburgers per day to survive, and one McDonald’s could support more than a dozen tyrannosaurs on hamburgers alone.

    If you live in New York and you see a T.rex, don’t worry.  You don’t have to choose a friend to sacrifice; just order 80 burgers instead.

    And then if the T.rex goes for your friend, anyway, hey, you have 80 burgers.  (pg. 39)

 

    The average kid produces about half a liter of saliva per day, according to the paper “Estimation of the Total Saliva Produced Per Day in Five-Year-Old Children,” which I like to imagine was mailed to the Archives of Oral Biology in a slightly sticky, dripping envelope.

    A 5-year-old probably produces proportionally less saliva than a larger adult.  On the other hand, I’m not comfortable betting that anyone produces more drool than a little kid, so let’s be conservative and use the paper’s figure.  (…)

    At the rate of 500 ml per day from the paper, it would take you about a year to fill a typical bathtub.  (pg. 263)

 

In other words, your aquarium could be destroyed by whale farts.  (pg. 148)

    I didn’t find many nits to pick with What If? 2.  As expected, there's no cussing in it, let alone any “adult situations” either implied or explicit.

 

    About the worst I can think of is that, if you aren’t science-oriented, some of the calculations used to determine the answers in the book may seem a bit “physics-y”.  I’m a chemist by trade, but if you saw my GPAs for the high school and college physics classes I took (especially the ones that incorporated calculus into the lessons), you’d understand why I am a bit thin-skinned when it comes to reading bunches of discussions involving physics.

 

    To be fair, Randall Munroe usually warns the reader when a calculation he uses is complicated and asks us to just trust the answer.  That may sound like a dose of risky blind faith, but rest assured, there will be readers of this book who are physics majors, who will double-check the calculations used, and will be ecstatically vociferous if they catch a flaw.

 

    What If? 2 was an enlightening and entertaining read for me, from the beginning through the end.  You’ll learn a lot, and have a fun time while doing so.  This may motivate me to read Randall Munroe’s companion book How To, in the not-too-distant future.

 

    9½ Stars.  For the record, Question 64 listed above comes from the first line of a nursery song that can be found multiple times on YouTube, including one version by Barney the Dinosaur.  I’d never heard of it.  I must be getting old.

Death by Black Hole - Neil deGrasse Tyson

   2007; 362 pages.  Full Title: Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Science; Essays; Non-Fiction; Astrophysics.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Consider the following declarations.  The North Star is the brightest star in the nighttime sky.  The Sun is a yellow star.  What goes up must come down.  On a dark night you can see millions of stars with the unaided eye.  In space there is no gravity.  A compass points north.  Days get shorter in the winter and longer in the summer.  Total solar eclipses are rare.

    Every statement in the above paragraph is false.

    (from “Death by Black Hole”, pg. 293)

 

    Are you curious as to why the above statements are untrue?  Do you ask questions like: What would happen if you (or a star) fell into a black hole?  How can 100+ different elements get created from a single "Big Bang"?  What the heck is a supernova?  A quasar?  What’s the likelihood of a killer asteroid wiping us out like one did to the dinosaurs?  Can God and Science coexist?

 

    The answers to the above questions, why those first statements are all inaccurate, plus many more, can be found in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book Death by Black Hole.

 

    And you don’t have to be an astrophysicist to understand what he’s saying.

 

What’s To Like...

    Death by Black Hole is a series of 42 essays, plus a Prologue, by the eminent author/astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.  He divides them up into seven sections, and 362 pages, meaning the essays are relatively short: just 8+ pages on average, which my brain appreciated.

 

    The essays cover a wide variety of science-related topics.  Some of my favorites were:

    05 : Stick-in-the-Mud Science

        The amazing experiments you can do with just a stick, a string, and an hourglass.

    12 : Speed Limits

        Measuring the speed of light.

    25 : Living Space

        How likely is life to develop elsewhere in the Cosmos.

    26 : Life in the Universe

        How likely is intelligent life to develop elsewhere in the Cosmos.

    30 : Ends of the World

        Three possible ways it might happen.

    32 : Knock ‘em Dead

        Mass extinctions: what caused them?

 

    This is my second Neil deGrasse Tyson book (the other one is reviewed here), and once again I was in awe of his ability to simplify complex scientific concepts to where even readers with non-technical backgrounds can comprehend and enjoy them.  Tyson has a knack for blending science with modern-day culture.  Deep subjects such as Lagrange points and quasars are mentioned alongside things like Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, naturally), Star Trek “redshirts”, and astrophysical bloopers Tyson noticed while watching several blockbuster science fiction movies.

 

    The book is a trivia nerd’s delight.  I was surprised to learn that an unopened can of Pepsi will float in water, while an unopened can of Diet Pepsi will sink.  I learned the etymology of the words algorithm, solstice, and quasar; laughed at the use of the terms spaghettification and astro-illiteracy; and smiled when the author revealed he’s had an asteroid named after him (”13123 Tyson”).  The world’s record low temperature (-129°F, in Antarctica) gave me shivers, while the world’s record high temperature (+136°F, in Libya) made me break out in a sweat.

 

    The science-oriented trivia was equally enlightening.  I enjoyed learning about Foucault’s pendulum, why the astronomer Percival Lowell honestly believed he observed canals on Venus, and how a Greek mathematician named Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference (to within 15% of the precise value) in the third century BCE.  The odds of life developing somewhere else in the Universe were much higher than I would have guessed, and I was fascinated that the element Technetium doesn’t occur naturally on Earth but has been found in the atmosphere of a couple of red giant stars in our galaxy.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.8*/5, based on 2,047 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.07*/5, based on 29,573 ratings and 1,367 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Syzygy (n.) : a conjunction or opposition, especially of the moon with the sun.

Others: Noctilucent (adj.).

 

Excerpts...

    One night a couple decades ago, while I was on winter break from graduate school and was staying at my parents’ house north of New York City, I turned on the radio to listen to classical music.  A frigid Canadian air mass was advancing on the Northeast, and the announcer, between movements of George Frideric Handel’s Water Music, continually tracked the descending outdoor temperature: “Five degrees Fahrenheit.”  “Four degrees.”  “Three degrees.”  Finally, sounding distressed, he announced, “If this keeps up, pretty soon there’ll be no temperature left!”  (pg. 180)

 

    When people believe a tale that conflicts with self-checkable evidence it tells me that people undervalue the role of evidence in formulating an internal belief system.  Why this is so is not so clear, but it enables many people to hold fast to ideas and notions based purely on supposition.  But all hope is not lost.  Occasionally, people say things that are simply true no matter what.  One of my favorites is, “Wherever you go, there you are” and its Zen corollary, “If we are all here, then we must not be all there.”  (pg. 297)

 

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort ‘em as much as you please.” (Mark Twain)  (pg. 329)

    I can’t think of anything to quibble about in Death by Black Hole, other than a single typo on page 132 referring the reader to “Section 9” for more information about the possibility of God stepping in “every now and then to set things right”.  There is no section 9.  That’s probably a printing error, since correct would be “Section 7”.

 

    A number of Amazon and Goodreads reviewers felt otherwise.  Some of their complaints:

 

    Neil deGrasse Tyson’s writing is too cute.  The book had no pictures of black holes.  The book’s cover was torn and the pages wrinkled.  Fake print.  Too hard.  Too simple (“cute beginner astronomy book”).  Too pessimistic.  Too anti-creation.  Too scary.  Not enough about black holes.

 

    Sigh.  For me, this was a great read that thoroughly met my expectations.  The essays are deep, yet not incomprehensible, unlike some other astrophysics books I’ve struggled through.  I highly recommend it to anyone seeking a greater understanding about how the Cosmos got here, where it’s going, what we know about the objects and forces that make up the Universe, and how we obtained that knowledge.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last teaser for the book.  Chapter 12 presents the history of scientists trying to determine the speed of light, starting with Galileo in the 1600s and continuing to the present day.  It thoroughly fascinated me.  The teaser is: if you wanted to do your own testing, how would you go about trying to measure the speed of light?

Grunt - Mary Roach

   2016; 272 pages.  Full Title: Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Military History; Scientific Research; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    There are all sorts of ways to get killed or horribly disabled while serving in the US Armed Forces.  The most obvious are the direct ones: the enemy can shoot you,  stab you, or blow you up with bombs which he can either drop on you, detonate under your vehicle, or launch at you from the side.

 

    The indirect ways are often the more lethal ones.  Horrible wounds such as loss of limbs leave the victim prone to infection and a long-term struggle to live a normal life.  And this assumes the medic who’s treating you on the battlefield remains level-headed and professional while giving you emergency first aid.

 

    Mother Nature can also be a killer.  Fighting in the desert heat affects a soldier’s performance, the loud noises of the machines of war can cause subtle hearing loss leading to lethal mistakes, and flies and diarrhea due to unclean conditions historically claim just as many lives as bombs and bullets.  Even birds, both alone and in groups, crash into Air Force jets thousands of times each year, usually at the most critical times: landing and taking-off.

 

    Serving in the navy has its own risks.  Ships can sink, making survivors floating shark bait.  Any mistake by a sleep-deprived sailor on a submarine can instantly create a death trap for all his shipmates.

 

    What sort of research is the military doing to deal with all this?  That’s what Mary Roach wanted to know, and Grunt details what she found out.

 

What’s To Like...

    Mary Roach divides her research efforts for Grunt into 14 chapters, plus an Introduction, each with a catchy title and subtitle.  A couple of examples:

    Chapter 1 : Second Skin: What to Wear to War

    Chapter 5 : It Could Get Weird: A Salute to Genital Transplants

    Chapter 8 : Leaky Seals: Diarrhea as a Threat to National Security

    Chapter 12 : That Sinking Feeling: When Things Go Wrong Under the Sea

 

    There’s a nice balance in the text between humor and seriousness.  Kevlar underwear made me chuckle, so did blue camouflage uniforms used by the US Navy (“so no one can see you if you fall overboard”).   But hearing from men who have lost limbs or are facing genital reconstruction (or a transplant?) was sobering, such as when a survivor describes what it’s like to step on an IED.

 

    Acronyms abound in the military.  Mary Roach had fun getting used to them, some of which are: BASH, BAM, FRACU, JUON, MRAP, WIAMan, TCAPs, WBGT, HULC, SALSA, JETT, and many more.  FYI, “BASH” stands for “Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard”.  You can learn what the rest mean either by reading the book or enlisting. 

 

    I particularly liked how the Scientific Method was applied in the studies.  How do you accurately evaluate the impact a turkey vulture has on a jet taking off?  How do you determine what attracts sharks to the water around a ship that’s just sunk?  How do you measure which type of clothing will keep you the coolest in the Iraqi desert?  The answer to that last one, BTW, is by using something called a Thermes rectal probe, which the author got to try out firsthand.

 

    Grunt is incredibly informative.  I enjoyed reading about the biochemistry of sweating.  The use of maggots as an anti-infection measure amazed me.  I rolled my eyes when I read the official “US Army Appearance and Grooming Policies”.  And both Mary Roach and I learned that the phrase “going kinetic” is Army-speak for “people are firing guns at you”.

 

     Each chapter begins with an intriguing and usually historical photograph or drawing.  There are lots of footnotes, which are both informative, and at a Terry Pratchett-level of witty.  Do not skip them!

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Sisyphean (adj.) : of a task such that it can never be completed.

Others: Wicks (as a verb).

 

Excerpts...

    The chicken gun has a sixty-foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery plane.  While a four-pound chicken hurtling in excess of 400 miles per hour is a lethal projectile, the intent is not to kill.  On the contrary, the chicken gun was designed to keep people alive.  The carcasses are fired at jets, standing empty or occupied by “simulated crew” to test their ability to withstand what the Air Force and the aviation industry, with signature clipped machismo, call birdstrike.  The chickens are stunt doubles for geese, gulls, ducks, and the rest of the collective bird mass that three thousand or so times a year collide with Air Force jets.  (pg. 13, and the book's opening sentences)

 

    Jack passes me the M16.  “Have you shot a gun like this before?”  I shake my very heavy head.  He hands me a magazine and shows me where to load it.  I’ve seen this in movies – the quick slap with the heel of the hand.

    Hmm.

    “Other way.  So the bullets are facing forward.”  (pg. 67)

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 764 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.92/5 based on 17,129 ratings and 2,153 reviews.

 

“If you want to destroy every last bacterium and shred of dead tissue, a maggot is your man.”  (pg. 174)

    Grunt was my third Mary Roach book, and there’s never much to quibble about in any of her books.  If you’re utterly offended by cusswords in what you're reading, be aware that there were 20 or so instances here, most of which were in remarks uttered by servicemen and half of which referenced fecal matter.

 

    Naturally, I found some of the chapters more interesting than others.  Your faves will be different from mine.  The research into making stink bombs to drop on any enemy, anywhere seemed silly to me, and I wondered whether other submarines had the “sleep deprivation” problem to the same degree as Mary Roach observed during her time aboard the USS Tennessee.  There's a teaser about this at the end of this review.

 

    Overall, I found Grunt to be a fascinating read, easily on a par with the other two Mary Roach books I’ve read Bonk and Gulp (reviewed here and here).  Three more of her books are on my TBR shelf, but I do find one thing worrying:  per the Wikipedia page on her it seems like she hasn’t written any more books since Grunt came out in 2016.  I for one would be bummed if she’s discontinued her writing career.

 

    9 Stars.  The promised teaser:  What was the average daily sleep time on a US submarine when it was monitored in 1949?  And what was the average daily sleep time on the USS Tennessee when Mary Roach was doing her research?  Answers in the comments.

Milk! - Mark Kurlansky

   2018; 343 pages.  Full Title: Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Food History; Cookbooks; Non-Fiction; Farming; Dairy Science.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    Once upon a time, you didn’t go to the supermarket for your milk, it was delivered to your doorstep on a daily basis, and it came in a glass bottle, not a carton.  There was a thick-papered cap on top, sealed with a twist, with a circular sticker in its middle bearing the milk company’s logo or name.

    Every morning, the milkman put your order in a small box (capacity was about 6 bottles) that was on your front porch.  You let him know what you wanted the next time he delivered by sticking a note in one of the empty, washed bottles that you put in the box.  Recycling was fashionable way back then.

    Because the bottles were clear glass, you could actually see the milk you received.  It had two phases – mostly “regular” milk on the bottom, and a bit of thicker cream on top.  Nowadays, milk is “homogenized”, meaning it only has one phase.  Back then, you could do your own  homogenizing (i.e., shaking it well before opening it), but occasionally your mom would scoop the cream out and use it in some recipe she was making.

    If you lived in a cold-weather place, like Pennsylvania for instance, you’d occasionally step out the door on a winter’s day to get your morning milk delivery, and find that it had frozen.  You’d know this because the solids at the top had expanded and pushed the paper cap upwards, leaving a weird-looking white “collar”.  This was no big deal, you still used the milk without any concern about contamination.

    This may sound like 19^th-century history to you, and it is, but it still was true into the 1950’s, and Mark Kurlansky’s recounting of it in Milk – A 10,000-Year Food Fracas triggered a Proustian reaction (a what?!  see below) in my long-term memory banks.

What’s To Like...

    Mark Kurlansky divides the 20 chapters of Milk! (we’ll dispense with the subtitle for the sake of brevity) into three parts, namely:

    Part 1 : The Safety of Curds (Chapters 1-9)

        The history of milk and other dairy products.

    Part 2 : Drinking Dangerously  (Chapters 10-14)

        Science and technology make milk safe to drink.

    Part 3 : Cows and Truth  (Chapters 15-20)

        Current and recent hot-topic dairy debates, and the answers.

    My favorite chapters (YMMV) were:

    Ch 01 : The Taste of Sweetness

        The ancient history of milk-drinking.

    Ch 03 : Cheesy Civilization

        The history of cheese-making.

    Ch 09 : Everyone’s Favorite Milk

        The history of ice cream.

   Ch 16 : China’s Growing Tolerance

        The changing Chinese milk and dairy products tastes.

    Chs 19 & 20 : The Search for Consensus & Risky Initializations

        The author’s views on the topics listed in the first excerpt below.

    I was surprised at the number of foods that are derived from milk and its byproducts: curds, whey, pancakes, sillabubs (huh?), possets (huh?), cheese butter, shortbreads, griddle cakes, mysa & syra (wha?), yogurt, sour cream, dodines (wha?), porridge, custards, powdered milk, applesauce (really?), cottage cheese, pudding (yum!), ice cream (double yum!), crème brûlée, ices, fudge, marshmallow fluff, cream sauces, chowders, and many more.  The origins and history of each are detailed in this book.

    I also learned several "dairy" pejoratives along the way.  “Kaaskoppen” is Flemish for “cheese heads”, which was their insult word for the Dutch.  Once upon a time the Japanese referred to us Westerners as “bata  dasaku”, meaning “butter stinker”, due to our disgusting dairy tastes.  And the Persians have an expression, “boro mastetobezan”, which translates to “go beat your own yogurt”, an idiom meaning “mind your own business”.

    I was amazed to learn that the majority of humans (60%) are lactose-intolerant, and saddened to read about the terrible impact “swill milk” had on infant mortality rates.  There are some Roman Empire era recipes included, which are surprisingly "modern-sounding" and at times doubled as medicinal advice.  More importantly, I learned how to make booze from dairy products if I am ever stuck in Iceland.

    My buddy, Moses Maimonides, makes a cameo appearance, so does Velveeta cheese, which was a mainstay in my collegiate cuisine options.  If you have trouble remembering whether it’s “Welsh rabbit”, or “Welsh rarebit”, you can find the answer here, and it might surprise you, and it was enlightening to read what Mark Kurlansky has to say about the GMO fracas.  The drawings and pictures were a nice touch, including a mind-blowing painting by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (ca. 1311-1348) depicting the Virgin Mary breastfeeding Christ.

Kewlest New Word ...

Proustian (adj.) : relating to or characteristic of the French writer Marcel Proust or his works, particularly with reference to the recovery of the lost past and the stimulation of unconscious memory.

Excerpts...

    Milk is a food with a history – it has been argued about for at least the past ten thousand years.  It is the most argued-over food in human history, which is why it was the first food to find its way into a modern scientific laboratory and why it is the most regulated of all foods.

    People have argued over the importance of breastfeeding, the proper role of mothers, the healthful versus unhealthful qualities of milk, the best sources of milk, farming practices, animal rights, raw versus pasteurized milk, the safety of raw milk cheese, the proper role of government, the organic food movement, hormones, genetically modified crops, and more.  (pg. 3)

    People do not want to live near a dairy anymore.  Cows defecate and they are extremely flatulent.  This was never an issue with the charming forty-cow farm with the little red barn.  But when a few thousand cows live next door, farting and producing mountains of manure that the farm endeavors to dry out and convert to fertilizer, they are very strong-smelling neighbors.

    Farmers with large herds usually have more manure than their pastureland can absorb.  The total annual waste in the United States is one hundred times more than what is taken in by human sewage treatment plants.  (pg. 319)

“A dessert without cheese is like a lovely lady with only one eye.”  (Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin).  (pg. 278 )

    There’s not much to nitpick about Milk!.  The black-&-white pencil drawings of the various cow breeds didn’t impress me; I would have much rather had color photographs/paintings of them.  It was a slow read, but that’s because I was fascinated by all the technical details therein, so that's not really a criticism.  

    It should be noted that there are 126 recipes (by Mark Kurlansky’s count, and I’ll take his word for it) interspersed throughout the book, some from as far back as the first-century A.D. by a cook named Apicius.  Reading though these recipes got tedious after a while, but that’s probably because my culinary skills are legendary, and not in a good way.  I once destroyed my kitchen when trying to make tomato soup from the can.  People with "normal" cooking skills will most likely find these recipes interesting, even to the point of trying some out.

    But overall I found Milk! to be a informative and interesting read, even if I skipped over those pesky recipes.  Milk! is my third Mark Kurlansky book (the other two are reviewed here and here), and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all three.  So if you’re into reading history and science, or concerned about food safety, or want to be well-versed when topics like GMO’s and breastfeeding come up at your next social engagement, or just want to try making some strange new dishes, Milk! is bound to be your cup of tea.

    8½ Stars.  Fur more Mark Kurlansky books are on my Kindle or my TBR shelf: Salt, Cod, The Basque History, and The Big Oyster.  I suspect all the food-themed ones will also have recipes in them.  We shall see.