Proust Was a Neuroscientist
by Jonah Lehrer
Sweets: A History of Candy
by Tim Richardson
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
by Tom Vanderbilt
My Own Country: A Doctor's Story
by Abraham Verghese
The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the
Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety
by Dalton Conley
Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women (Paperback)
by Alexa Albert
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Proust Was a Neuroscientist
by Jonah Lehrer
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, December 2007: Proust may have been more
neurasthenic than neuroscientist, but Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a
Neuroscientist that he (and many of his fellow artists) made discoveries
about the brain that it took science decades to catch up with (in Proust's
case, that memory is a process, not a repository). Lehrer weaves back and
forth between art and science in eight graceful portraits of artists (mostly
writers, along with a chef, a painter, and a composer) who understood,
better at times than atomizing scientists, that truth can begin with "what
reality feels like." Sometimes it's the art that's most evocative in his
tales, sometimes the science: Lehrer writes about them with equal ease and
clarity, and with a youthful confidence that art and science, long divided,
may yet be reconciled. --Tom Nissley
From Publishers Weekly
With impressively clear prose, Lehrer explores the oft-overlooked places in
literary history where novelists, poets and the occasional cookbook writer
predicted scientific breakthroughs with their artistic insights. The
25-year-old Columbia graduate draws from his diverse background in lab work,
science writing and fine cuisine to explain how Cézanne anticipated
breakthroughs in the understanding of human sight, how Walt Whitman intuited
the biological basis of thoughts and, in the title essay, how Proust
penetrated the mysteries of memory by immersing himself in childhood
recollections. Lehrer's writing peaks in the essay about Auguste Escoffier,
the chef who essentially invented modern French cooking. The author's
obvious zeal for the subject of food preparation leads him into enjoyable
discussions of the creation of MSG and the decidedly unappetizing history of
18th- and 19th-century culinary arts. Occasionally, the science prose risks
becoming exceedingly dry (as in the enthusiastic section detailing the work
of Lehrer's former employer, neuroscientist Kausik Si), but the hard science
is usually tempered by Lehrer's deft way with anecdote and example. Most
importantly, this collection comes close to exemplifying Lehrer's stated
goal of creating a unified third culture in which science and literature can
co-exist as peaceful, complementary equals. 21 b&w illus.
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Sweets: A History of Candy
by Tim Richardson
Amazon.com Review
Tim Richardson has always looked at life through candy-colored glasses (his
grandfather worked for a toffee company and his father was a dentist), but
in Sweets, as the world's first "international confectionery historian," he
takes a look at the history of mankind. From prehistoric cave paintings of
our forefathers eating honey to references of cocoa beans used as money by
the ancient Mayans, Richardson has left no gobstopper unturned. Through
intensive research, plenty of taste testing, and field trips around the
world to places such as Hershey, Pennsylvania, and the Haribo plant in
Pontefract, Yorkshire, "birthplace of all English gummy bears," Richardson
leads a whirlwind tour filled with unforgettable characters, intrigue, and
high stakes. Along the way, he explains our planet-wide obsession with
anything sweet--it's been scientifically proven that even newborn babies and
elephants love anything sweet--and offers up a lifetime of trivia for the
sweet-obsessed. Although Richardson is English and American readers might be
unfamiliar with his number one favorite sweet, Rhubarb and Custards, chances
are any sweet-lover will relish this quirky look at civilization and the
truly fascinating history of candy-making and consumption. --Leora Y. Bloom
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
The grandson of a toffee maker and the son of a dentist, candy fanatic
Richardson considers his book "the first-ever world history of sweets."
Although that may be a dubious claim, his work is indeed jam-packed with
quirky tidbits concerning Cadbury eggs, candy canes, Caramellos, caramel
creams, Charleston Chews, chewing gum, Chewy Mentos, Chupa Chups, chocolate
bars, conversation hearts and countless other confections. And while the
prospect of an entire book about candy might make any sugar-loving reader
feel like, well, a kid in a candy store, Richardson's lengthy account is at
times tedious and suffers throughout from too much personal commentary
(e.g., a list of his own "top ten sweets" and his idea for a new candy, the
bizarre-sounding "ice cream chew"). The London-based journalist skews his
study toward European sweets; although he does mention such American
classics as M&Ms and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, he spends a considerable
amount of time describing "Rock" ("a stick of peppermint-flavoured candy,
coated in a lurid pink colour, with letters running through it"), Y&S and
other candy that may be unfamiliar to American readers (the book was
originally published in the U.K.). He also offers thought-provoking analyses
of international candy preferences ("Taiwan is crazy for fruit jelly
sweets") and thoroughly examines candy history, tracing its journey from
East to West. Richardson hits the mark on occasion, such as when he comments
on the importance of candy ("Sweets are the memorials of our innocence"),
but his constant personal asides might make readers' stomachs ache.
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Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
by Tom Vanderbilt
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: How could no one have written this book
before? These days we spend almost as much time driving as we do eating (in
fact, we do a lot of our eating while driving), but I can't remember the
last time I saw a book on all the time we spend stuck in our cars. It's a
topic of nearly universal interest, though: everybody has a strategy for
beating the traffic. Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
(and What It Says About Us) has plenty of advice for those shortcut schemers
(Vanderbilt may well convince you to become, as he has, a dreaded "Late
Merger"), but more than that it's the sort of wide-ranging contrarian
compendium that makes a familiar subject new. I'm not the first or last to
call Traffic the Freakonomics of cars, but it's true that it fits right in
with the school of smart and popular recent books by Leavitt, Gladwell,
Surowiecki, Ariely, and others that use the latest in economic,
sociological, psychological, and in this case civil engineering research to
make us rethink a topic we live with every day. Want to know how much city
traffic is just people looking for parking? (It's a lot.) Or why street
signs don't work (but congestion pricing does), why new cars crash more than
old cars, and why Saturdays now have the worst traffic of the week? Read
Traffic, or better yet, listen to the audio book on your endless commute.
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My Own Country: A Doctor's Story
by Abraham Verghese
Publishers Weekly
When infectious-disease specialist Verghese, the Ethiopian-born son of
Indian schoolteachers, emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Johnson City,
Tenn., in the mid-1980s, he finally felt at peace ``in my own country'' at
last. But his work at the Johnson City Medical Center soon led him into a
shadow world of Bible-belt AIDS, often without the support of his
colleagues. Verghese discovered a local gay community that was then untested
for the HIV virus. If revealed, these people's closeted relationships would
have, writes Verghese, made them stand out ``like Martians.'' The author
tells the stories of several patients, including the gay man who must
reconcile with his father and the ``innocent'' man who has contracted AIDS
through a contaminated blood transfusion but who, concerned about society's
response to his plight, keeps his disease a secret even though he believes
that ``this thing, this virus, is from hell, from the devil himself.''
Verghese reveals his own confusions about homosexuality, immigrant identity
and his wife's fears about his health. Writing with an outsider's empathy
and insight, casting his chronicle in graceful prose, he offers a memorable
tale that both captures and transcends time and place.
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The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. What perfect timing for this optimistic, uplifting debut
novel (and maiden publication of Amy Einhorn's new imprint) set during the
nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were
trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver.
Eugenia Skeeter Phelan is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to
become a writer, is advised to hone her chops by writing about what disturbs
you. The budding social activist begins to collect the stories of the black
women on whom the country club sets relies and mistrusts enlisting the help
of Aibileen, a maid who's raised 17 children, and Aibileen's best friend
Minny, who's found herself unemployed more than a few times after mouthing
off to her white employers. The book Skeeter puts together based on their
stories is scathing and shocking, bringing pride and hope to the black
community, while giving Skeeter the courage to break down her personal
boundaries and pursue her dreams. Assured and layered, full of heart and
history, this one has bestseller written all over it.
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The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
From Booklist
Cochran and Harpending dispute the late Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion that
civilization was “built with the same body and brain” Homo sapiens has had
for 40,000 years. Humanity has been evolving very dramatically for the last
10,000 years, they say, spurred by the very civilizational forces launched
by that evolution. They initially retreat, however, to Gould’s 40,000-year
benchmark to consider how H. sapiens replaced H. neanderthalensis and to
argue for genetic mixing such that modern humans got from Neanderthals the
innovative capacity for civilization. Later, agricultural life created
problems necessitating adaptations, most importantly to disease and diet,
that persist to this day among inheritors of the populations that made them.
Lighter skin and eye color arose from other genetic reactions to
environmental challenges, and less immediately obvious changes further
discriminated discrete populations, as recently as late-eighteenth-century
Ashkenazi Jews, among whom intelligence burgeoned in, Cochran and Harpending
contend, adaptive response to social pressure. A most intriguing deposition,
without a trace of ethnic or racial advocacy, though directed against the
proposition that “we’re all the same.”
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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
From Publishers Weekly
Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social
order, a development that's cause for more excitement than alarm, argues
interactive telecommunications professor Shirky. He contextualizes the
digital networking age with philosophical, sociological, economic and
statistical theories and points to its major successes and failures.
Grassroots activism stands among the winners—Belarus's flash mobs, for
example, blog their way to unprecedented antiauthoritarian demonstrations.
Likewise, user/contributor-managed Wikipedia raises the bar for production
efficiency by throwing traditional corporate hierarchy out the window. Print
journalism falters as publishing methods are transformed through the Web.
Shirky is at his best deconstructing Web failures like Wikitorial, the Los
Angeles Times's attempt to facilitate group op-ed writing. Readers will
appreciate the Gladwellesque lucidity of his assessments on what makes or
breaks group efforts online: Every story in this book relies on the
successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an
acceptable bargain with the users. The sum of Shirky's incisive exploration,
like the Web itself, is greater than its parts.
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Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the
Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety
by Dalton Conley
From Publishers Weekly
Conley (Honky) makes a prescient analysis of how technology and free markets
have transformed American life, comparing the mid-20th century American with
the present-day incarnation. These are two very different animals—one
compartmentalized and motivated by the traditional American ethos of
success, and the other a psychological hybrid of impulses connected to work,
pleasure, materialism and consumption. The results of this brilliant and, at
times, chilling comparison, are manifest not only on these pages but in real
life. Cheap and easy credit, he writes, has been a major reason why the
United States recently dipped into negative savings for the first time since
the great depression. Conley examines how, technology has altered how
Americans earn and spend money, playing out the behaviors characteristic of
late capitalism, or simply an evolving economic system that, by attaching a
price to virtually everything from child rearing to dating, has helped
devalue people, the work they do and the material goods they desire. A
sociological mirror, this book is equal parts cautionary tale, exercise in
contemporary anthropology and a spiritual and emotional audit of the 21st
century American.
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Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women
by Alexa Albert
Amazon.com Review
A journey into a fascinating subculture, Alexa Albert's exploration of
Nevada's infamous cathouses began as a public-health study into the safe-sex
practices of these legal working girls and the effectiveness of condom
requirements in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. It took her three
years to gain access to the brothels, and when her project was eventually
approved by the head of the Nevada Brothel Association, she was surprised to
be invited to stay at Mustang Ranch, among the women of the brothel, for the
duration of her research. She learned that despite the legalization of
prostitution in several counties of Nevada, the working girls still faced
restrictive local ordinances and work regulations that kept them virtual
prisoners inside the brothel compound. Outside, they encountered the same
social stigma that has always haunted sex workers. In her compassionate,
engaging first book, Albert answers all the questions you might ever have
about prostitutes, providing a rich and nuanced depiction of a largely
hidden world. --Regina Marler --This text refers to an out of print or
unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps the most prominent legal brothel in Nevada, Mustang Ranch held
mythical status in contemporary Western culture until it was shut down on
racketeering charges in 1999. As a medical student, Albert was granted rare
access to this intensely private world in order to conduct a study on condom
use, and lived periodically at Mustang Ranch from 1993 to 1999. Her routine
study soon deepened in tandem with her curiosity about the politics of
prostitution and about the prostitutes themselves. In this straightforward
account, she details the brothel regimen (from the women's relative
captivity to what happens during various "parties") and explores the private
lives of the women who work there, as well as those of the "johns" and the
workers who service the Ranch. Yet the heart of the book lies in Albert's
exploration of the sense of family that thrives in the brothel with all the
fractious infighting, competition and camaraderie inherent in any community.
Her short history of the legalization of prostitution in Nevada revolves
around Joe and Sally Conforte who officially owned Mustang Ranch until
charges of tax evasion forced Joe into hiding in South America in 1990 while
illuminating the confluence of public opinion and economic forces that
spurred legalization. Acknowledging her own feelings (which range from
disgust to profound respect), Albert convincingly dispels myths about this
mysterious world and provides a strong defense for the legalization of
prostitution. (May 15)Forecast: More current and sociological than last
year's The Last Madam (which was set in New Orleans), this engrossing,
plainly told account should attract considerable attention as Albert travels
the country on her seven-city tour.