Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
by James Webb
NYPD: Stories of Survival from the World's Toughest Beat
by Clint Willis
Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the
Reproductive Revolution
by Robin Marantz Henig
Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
by Jed Horne
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside
by Katrina Firlik
Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan
When Computers Were Human
by David Alan Grier
________________________________________________
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
by James Webb
From Publishers Weekly
Former navy secretary Webb (Fields of Fire; etc.) wants not only to
offer a history of the Scots-Irish but to redeem them from their
redneck, hillbilly stereotype and place them at the center of American
history and culture. As Webb relates, the Scots-Irish first emigrated
to the U.S., 200,000 to 400,000 strong, in four waves during the 18th
century, settling primarily in Appalachia before spreading west and
south. Webb's thesis is that the Scots-Irish, with their rugged
individualism, warrior culture built on extended familial groups (the
"kind of people who would die in place rather than retreat") and an
instinctive mistrust of authority, created an American culture that
mirrors these traits. Webb has a genuine flair for describing the
battles the Scots-Irish fought during their history, but his analysis
of their role in America's social and political history is, ironically
for someone trying to crush stereotypes, fixated on what he sees, in
almost Manichaean terms, as a class conflict between the Scots-Irish
and America's "paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected,
politically correct power centers." He even excuses resistance to the
"Northern-dominated" Civil Rights movement. Another glaring weakness
is the virtual absence of women from the sociological narrative. Webb
interweaves his own Scots-Irish family history throughout the book
with some success, but by and large his writing and analysis are
overwhelmed by romanticism.
________________________________________________
NYPD: Stories of Survival from the World's Toughest Beat
by Clint Willis (Editor)
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2002
"An admirable selection of works . . . Meaty tales for the
law-abiding, armchair adventurer."
Police & Security News, December 2002
"Some of the best work done by New York's finest . . . These
selections paint a vivid portrait of the NYPD."
Eleanor J. Bader, New York Law Journal, December 11, 2002
"Provides an astute, gripping overview of what it means to work within
the largest police force in the United States."
Daniel Pulliam, Indianapolis Star, January 4, 2003
" 'NYPD' portrays a profession that is not all that different from the
people it works to protect."
Errol Louis, The New York Sun, January 15, 2003
"This work will be a welcome chance to discover several well-told
stories that are worth reading in full."
Book Description
New York has always inspired larger-than-life tales and great
writing—but on the topic of cops and crime it provides more raw
material than almost anywhere else. A long history of classic films,
television hits, and of course, books, have turned the New York City
Police Department into a symbol for the dark drama of urban police
work. And the rich and colorful vein of literature which has grown up
around this culture makes NYPD not only a gripping read but a literary
tour de force. Adrenaline Books takes you inside this gritty, tough
life of being a cop in New York City. In addition to works by
best-selling authors such as Peter Maas and Tom Wolfe, the book will
include selections that offer a broad and deep look at the
department's many faces: Carsten Stroud tells what it's like to track
down a killer; Richard Rosenthal offers a sense of the pressures and
risks of going undercover; and Bill McCarthy and Mike Mallowe offer a
guided tour of the city's dregs and the pressures of working with its
hardest cases. Philip Gourevitch's account of a cop's dedicated
efforts to resurrect a cold case; Marcus Laffey's already near-classic
articles on life as a patrolman; and Peter Hellman's best-seller
Chief, written with an NYPD chief of detectives help round out this
fascinating view of the NYPD and the forces that have made it such a
compelling subject for so many good writers. " ... Try Adrenaline
Books.... In three years, this 20-volume anthology series has earned a
cult following."—ESPN the Magazine
________________________________________________
Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the
Reproductive Revolution
by Robin Marantz Henig
From Publishers Weekly
In her judicious history of the development of in vitro fertilization
(IVF), NBCC finalist Henig (The Monk in the Garden) notes that many of
the objections posed to IVF in the 1970s would later be used against
human cloning, in particular the argument that artificial reproduction
interfered in intimate processes best left to nature and that it was
the first step on a "slippery slope" leading to genetic engineering
and selective breeding. Ironically, because IVF was such a political
hot potato, the U.S. government declined to fund research in the
field, leaving it essentially unregulated except by the imperatives of
a marketplace. Henig's narrative begins in the days when IVF was
controversial, experimental science; she describes the work of
maverick Columbia University researcher Landrum Shettles; of English
doctors Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, responsible for the birth
of the first "test tube baby," Louise Brown, in 1978; of Howard and
Georgeanna Jones, who made the East Virginia Medical School a
pioneering IVF center; and of doctors and philosophers in the new
field of bioethics who strove to get a grip on the moral implications
of it all. Few of the more frightening predictions about IVF have come
true, the author notes, but the rate of birth defects in IVF babies is
much higher than in normal conceptions. We don't know where
reproductive technology ultimately will take society, Henig concludes,
but it's likely that "we will adapt to new discoveries the way we have
so often adapted." Her level-headed book provides a welcome context
for the current debate over cloning.
________________________________________________
Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
by Jed Horne
From Publishers Weekly
Horne, metro editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, writes with the
clipped, raw urgency of a thriller writer in this humanist account of
what happened after the levees broke. As already widely reported,
residents who ignored the mandatory evacuation order (thinking
"Katrina... had all the makings of a flop") quickly found themselves
surrounded by bloated corpses floating in toxic floodwaters and
without a consolidated rescue effort. Horne quickly moves past the
melodrama of a striking disaster to recount the stories of individuals
caught in the storm's hellish aftermath or mired in the government's
hamstrung response: a Louisiana State University climatologist goes
head-to-head with the Army Corps of Engineers over inadequate flood
protection and faulty levees; a former Black Panther provides
emergency health care at a local mosque. Horne saves his sharpest
barbs for President Bush and the Department of Homeland Security ("if
Homeland Security... was what stood between America and the next 9/11,
then... America was in deep trouble") for failing to muster an
appropriate response. Big disasters spawn big books, and though
Horne's isn't the definitive account, it's an honest, angry and
wrenching response to a massively bungled catastrophe.
________________________________________________
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside
by Katrina Firlik
From Publishers Weekly
The brain is my business," says Connecticut neurosurgeon Firlik. "Many
of the brains I encounter have been pushed around by tumors, blood
clots, infections, or strokes that have swollen out of control. Some
have been invaded by bullets, nails, or even maggots." In these pages,
a carpenter with a nail in his left frontal lobe goes home within a
day of surgery; a boy develops a raging bacterial meningitis because
his New Age mother gave him herbs instead of antibiotics for a routine
ear infection; and an infant with hydranencephaly looks cute despite
the absence of brain matter in his skull. Along the way, Firlik muses
that a healthy brain has the consistency of soft tofu, and she flies
solo in the OR for the first time as she saves an 18-year-old victim
of a car accident who didn't buckle up. A woman in a male-dominated
specialty, Firlik doesn't get worked up over minor things that can be
construed as sexist; she finds that handling a patient's anxiety can
be more complicated than the surgery itself, and she expects to be
sued someday for malpractice. This witty and lucid first book
demythologizes a complex medical specialty for those of us who aren't
brain surgeons.
________________________________________________
Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan
From Publishers Weekly
[Signature]Reviewed by Pamela KaufmanPollan (The Botany of Desire)
examines what he calls "our national eating disorder" (the Atkins
craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded
book. It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that
might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a
steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never
look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.Pollan approaches his
mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat
represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All
food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi.
"[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely
what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living
creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our
foods from petroleum, at least not directly."Pollan's narrative
strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He
starts with a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in
their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa.
Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that
cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas,
and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken
McNuggets.Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the
prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a
supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the
freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food
industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers
to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other
writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.Later, Pollan prepares
a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the
world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small,
utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged
and hunted.This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too
thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take
over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old
International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a
pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws
himself into the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go
hunting with Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him.
Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota.
________________________________________________
When Computers Were Human
by David Alan Grier
James Fallows, National Correspondent, "Atlantic Monthly" : When
Computers Were Human is a detailed and fascinating look at a world I
had not even known existed. After reading these accounts of ingenuity,
determination, and true creative breakthrough, readers will look at
today's computer-based society in an entirely different way.
George Dyson, author of "Darwin among the Machines" : How did the
lives of people and the lives of numbers become so intimately
entwined? David Alan Grier's authoritative, engaging, and richly
detailed account of this neglected chapter in the history (and
prehistory) of computing abounds with remarkable characters, sheds
long-awaited light on their achievements, and could not have been
better told.
Michael R. Williams, Head Curator, Computer History Museum : The story
of computation before the invention of the computer is an important
one--one that has not been told in this way before. This narrative
grabs you right from the first page. Grier tells the human story
behind some of the greatest scientific accomplishments, and tells it
in a very readable way.
Theodore M. Porter, author of "Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of
Objectivity in Science and Public Life" : The history of the
electronic computer has become the topic of a fair amount of scholarly
work, and yet the wonderful story of the (collective) human computer
has barely been noticed. This book will appeal both to an appreciable
range of scholars and to more general readers. The style is pleasant
and informal; the mathematics, accessible and interesting.
----------
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
by James Webb
NYPD: Stories of Survival from the World's Toughest Beat
by Clint Willis
Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution
by Robin Marantz Henig
Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
by Jed Horne
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside
by Katrina Firlik
Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan
When Computers Were Human
by David Alan Grier
________________________________________________
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
by James Webb
From Publishers Weekly
Former navy secretary Webb (Fields of Fire; etc.) wants not only to offer a history of the Scots-Irish but to redeem them from their redneck, hillbilly stereotype and place them at the center of American history and culture. As Webb relates, the Scots-Irish first emigrated to the U.S., 200,000 to 400,000 strong, in four waves during the 18th century, settling primarily in Appalachia before spreading west and south. Webb's thesis is that the Scots-Irish, with their rugged individualism, warrior culture built on extended familial groups (the "kind of people who would die in place rather than retreat") and an instinctive mistrust of authority, created an American culture that mirrors these traits. Webb has a genuine flair for describing the battles the Scots-Irish fought during their history, but his analysis of their role in America's social and political history is, ironically for someone trying to crush stereotypes, fixated on what he sees, in almost Manichaean terms, as a class conflict between the Scots-Irish and America's "paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers." He even excuses resistance to the "Northern-dominated" Civil Rights movement. Another glaring weakness is the virtual absence of women from the sociological narrative. Webb interweaves his own Scots-Irish family history throughout the book with some success, but by and large his writing and analysis are overwhelmed by romanticism.
________________________________________________
NYPD: Stories of Survival from the World's Toughest Beat
by Clint Willis (Editor)
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2002
"An admirable selection of works . . . Meaty tales for the law-abiding, armchair adventurer."
Police & Security News, December 2002
"Some of the best work done by New York's finest . . . These selections paint a vivid portrait of the NYPD."
Eleanor J. Bader, New York Law Journal, December 11, 2002
"Provides an astute, gripping overview of what it means to work within the largest police force in the United States."
Daniel Pulliam, Indianapolis Star, January 4, 2003
" 'NYPD' portrays a profession that is not all that different from the people it works to protect."
Errol Louis, The New York Sun, January 15, 2003
"This work will be a welcome chance to discover several well-told stories that are worth reading in full."
Book Description
New York has always inspired larger-than-life tales and great writing—but on the topic of cops and crime it provides more raw material than almost anywhere else. A long history of classic films, television hits, and of course, books, have turned the New York City Police Department into a symbol for the dark drama of urban police work. And the rich and colorful vein of literature which has grown up around this culture makes NYPD not only a gripping read but a literary tour de force. Adrenaline Books takes you inside this gritty, tough life of being a cop in New York City. In addition to works by best-selling authors such as Peter Maas and Tom Wolfe, the book will include selections that offer a broad and deep look at the department’s many faces: Carsten Stroud tells what it’s like to track down a killer; Richard Rosenthal offers a sense of the pressures and risks of going undercover; and Bill McCarthy and Mike Mallowe offer a guided tour of the city’s dregs and the pressures of working with its hardest cases. Philip Gourevitch’s account of a cop’s dedicated efforts to resurrect a cold case; Marcus Laffey’s already near-classic articles on life as a patrolman; and Peter Hellman’s best-seller Chief, written with an NYPD chief of detectives help round out this fascinating view of the NYPD and the forces that have made it such a compelling subject for so many good writers. " ... Try Adrenaline Books.... In three years, this 20-volume anthology series has earned a cult following."—ESPN the Magazine
________________________________________________
Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution
by Robin Marantz Henig
From Publishers Weekly
In her judicious history of the development of in vitro fertilization (IVF), NBCC finalist Henig (The Monk in the Garden) notes that many of the objections posed to IVF in the 1970s would later be used against human cloning, in particular the argument that artificial reproduction interfered in intimate processes best left to nature and that it was the first step on a "slippery slope" leading to genetic engineering and selective breeding. Ironically, because IVF was such a political hot potato, the U.S. government declined to fund research in the field, leaving it essentially unregulated except by the imperatives of a marketplace. Henig's narrative begins in the days when IVF was controversial, experimental science; she describes the work of maverick Columbia University researcher Landrum Shettles; of English doctors Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, responsible for the birth of the first "test tube baby," Louise Brown, in 1978; of Howard and Georgeanna Jones, who made the East Virginia Medical School a pioneering IVF center; and of doctors and philosophers in the new field of bioethics who strove to get a grip on the moral implications of it all. Few of the more frightening predictions about IVF have come true, the author notes, but the rate of birth defects in IVF babies is much higher than in normal conceptions. We don't know where reproductive technology ultimately will take society, Henig concludes, but it's likely that "we will adapt to new discoveries the way we have so often adapted." Her level-headed book provides a welcome context for the current debate over cloning.
________________________________________________
Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
by Jed Horne
From Publishers Weekly
Horne, metro editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, writes with the clipped, raw urgency of a thriller writer in this humanist account of what happened after the levees broke. As already widely reported, residents who ignored the mandatory evacuation order (thinking "Katrina... had all the makings of a flop") quickly found themselves surrounded by bloated corpses floating in toxic floodwaters and without a consolidated rescue effort. Horne quickly moves past the melodrama of a striking disaster to recount the stories of individuals caught in the storm's hellish aftermath or mired in the government's hamstrung response: a Louisiana State University climatologist goes head-to-head with the Army Corps of Engineers over inadequate flood protection and faulty levees; a former Black Panther provides emergency health care at a local mosque. Horne saves his sharpest barbs for President Bush and the Department of Homeland Security ("if Homeland Security... was what stood between America and the next 9/11, then... America was in deep trouble") for failing to muster an appropriate response. Big disasters spawn big books, and though Horne's isn't the definitive account, it's an honest, angry and wrenching response to a massively bungled catastrophe.
________________________________________________
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside
by Katrina Firlik
From Publishers Weekly
The brain is my business," says Connecticut neurosurgeon Firlik. "Many of the brains I encounter have been pushed around by tumors, blood clots, infections, or strokes that have swollen out of control. Some have been invaded by bullets, nails, or even maggots." In these pages, a carpenter with a nail in his left frontal lobe goes home within a day of surgery; a boy develops a raging bacterial meningitis because his New Age mother gave him herbs instead of antibiotics for a routine ear infection; and an infant with hydranencephaly looks cute despite the absence of brain matter in his skull. Along the way, Firlik muses that a healthy brain has the consistency of soft tofu, and she flies solo in the OR for the first time as she saves an 18-year-old victim of a car accident who didn't buckle up. A woman in a male-dominated specialty, Firlik doesn't get worked up over minor things that can be construed as sexist; she finds that handling a patient's anxiety can be more complicated than the surgery itself, and she expects to be sued someday for malpractice. This witty and lucid first book demythologizes a complex medical specialty for those of us who aren't brain surgeons. (
________________________________________________
Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan
From Publishers Weekly
[Signature]Reviewed by Pamela KaufmanPollan (The Botany of Desire) examines what he calls "our national eating disorder" (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."Pollan's narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets.Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted.This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go hunting with Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota.
________________________________________________
When Computers Were Human
by David Alan Grier
James Fallows, National Correspondent, "Atlantic Monthly" : When Computers Were Human is a detailed and fascinating look at a world I had not even known existed. After reading these accounts of ingenuity, determination, and true creative breakthrough, readers will look at today's computer-based society in an entirely different way.
George Dyson, author of "Darwin among the Machines" : How did the lives of people and the lives of numbers become so intimately entwined? David Alan Grier's authoritative, engaging, and richly detailed account of this neglected chapter in the history (and prehistory) of computing abounds with remarkable characters, sheds long-awaited light on their achievements, and could not have been better told.
Michael R. Williams, Head Curator, Computer History Museum : The story of computation before the invention of the computer is an important one--one that has not been told in this way before. This narrative grabs you right from the first page. Grier tells the human story behind some of the greatest scientific accomplishments, and tells it in a very readable way.
Theodore M. Porter, author of "Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life" : The history of the electronic computer has become the topic of a fair amount of scholarly work, and yet the wonderful story of the (collective) human computer has barely been noticed. This book will appeal both to an appreciable range of scholars and to more general readers. The style is pleasant and informal; the mathematics, accessible and interesting.