Mixed Media

Book Review: The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine

The celebrated writer-physician Sherwin B. Nuland — a clinical professor of surgery at Yale, the author of nine previous books, the winner of the National Book Award — is a believer in miracles. Not the parting-of-the-Red-Sea kind of miracles that suspend physical laws, but phenomena and events that can’t be explained by current scientific knowledge, and perhaps never will be.

In “The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine,” a delightful, companionable collection of occasional articles almost all of which appeared in The American Scholar magazine, Dr. Nuland feels free to follow his interests where they lead him — into medical history, etymology, even art criticism. He writes about the joy of exercising, the grief of 9/11, the satisfaction of authorship, the pain of losing a cherished friend. But the most engaging and thought-provoking articles deal with subjects that are mysterious, unsettling.

These pieces can be enjoyed for the simple sci-fi pleasure of encountering the inexplicable. Dr. Nuland, however, has a larger purpose in mind: to undermine smug certainties about modern science. By emphasizing the extraordinary he seeks to challenge his profession’s often unreflective reliance on technology and restore the doctor-patient relationship, the touchy-feely human connection, to the center of medical practice.

Doctors, he insists, have to be more than technicians. They should be, first of all, humanists, intuitionists, appreciative of each patient’s individuality and particular situation, practitioners of a quirky, unpredictable, uncertain art. True healers understand this. “To become comfortable with uncertainty,” Dr. Nuland writes, “is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.”

And so he leads readers into “astonishing” realms where science provides no explanation. He travels to China to determine firsthand if acupuncture is an effective technique. After witnessing two operations and speaking to the president of the Shanghai Medical University, who himself had undergone two thyroid operations with acupuncture, Dr. Nuland comes away a believer — even though the procedure “has still not been explained in terms acceptable to most orthodox Western scientists using orthodox Western investigative methods.”

Science as we know it has gone at least part of the way in understanding acupuncture: somehow the needles stimulate the brain to increase its production of analgesic endorphins. But why that happens is not clear, and Dr. Nuland is willing to take a leap into the unknown in search of an explanation: “Perhaps philosophies may be required beyond those that have been so successful since the scientific method became a major current of Western thought.”

Written by Barry Gewen for the New York Times. Read the full review here.

Cornell classicist publishes new translation of 'Aeneid'

The Roman poet Virgil spent the last 11 years of his life writing the "Aeneid," an epic poem of a hero's journey from Troy to Italy, styled on Homer's "Odyssey" and "Iliad."

Frederick Ahl, Cornell professor of classics and comparative literature, has published a new translation for Oxford University Press, in an effort of labor that rivals Virgil's.

"It took me longer, actually -- I wasn't being supported by the emperor," Ahl said. "I just love the work and have ever since I was a child. But it's taken me most of my life to understand it."

What distinguishes this "Aeneid" is Ahl's use of Virgil's original meter and his line-by-line restoration of the poet's wordplay, an element often lost in translation.

"The Romans loved puns and anagrams, which translators tend not to translate," Ahl said. "In our thinking, if something is funny it cannot in any way be serious. But the ancients found that humor and earnestness went side by side. Almost all life contains the elements of the humorous and the pathetic and the touching -- and an epic poem certainly does."

Virgil created something like a symphony, Ahl said, except with "all the music notes for a score on one line."

"The wordplay, the puns and anagrams, are the pivotal chords that enable the poet to change register and to set up multiple resonances simultaneously. And if we ignore these multiple resonances then we are doing something akin to playing Beethoven on a tin whistle."

Ahl was committed to do justice to Virgil and his literary masterpiece.

Read the full article here.

Book Review: 'A Step from Death' is full of life

It's hard to know where to start praising Larry Woiwode's new memoir
A Step From Death. Perhaps with the language – perfect, poetic, layered.
Perhaps with the pace – wandering, peripatetic, interrupted, like memory itself. Or perhaps with the clumsy and unrelenting love with which he, as a father, addresses his only son, Joseph, for whom the book was written.

Woiwode and his family operate a ranch in western North Dakota, where the author relishes the physical demands of farming as a balance to the more interior work of writing. A writer, he believes, should also work.

If life on the farm builds up his family through the rigors of chores, sweat, and machinery repair, it also exposes them to accidents and tragedies. Woiwode relates these as he does the other bits of his past – in snippets peppered throughout the book – rather than long tragic episodes, which would have been hard to take.

Yet these bite-size chunks of memory pull the reader through: The first 25 pages are so riveting it's impossible to put this book down. Woiwode starts out on a sunny morning to make hay, turns back to fetch a jacket, and by the end of the morning his life has been changed forever.

Read the full review here.

Book Review: Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement

"Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing never can bring about reform," observed women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony.

Anthony knew whereof she spoke. She and her peers--the first generation of female activists--had doors slammed in their faces. They were shouted down when they rose to speak. Newspapers mocked them and clergymen called them instruments of the devil.

Even the majority of women took little interest in their efforts. And almost none of them lived long enough to see their cause prevail.

If you're looking for an upbeat, go-girlfriend view of history, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movements is not your book. The story that Sally McMillen tells is poignant, more a tale of self-sacrifice and delayed gratification than of triumph. But it's also a story of courage and conviction, about a small group of people who did, finally, change the world.

Click here to read the full review.

Book Review: The Invention of Everything Else

Nikola Tesla's biography reads like something created by Jules Verne and F. Scott Fitzgerald in a brainstorming session in an alternate universe. During his life, theories abounded about the inventor of alternating current (electricity as we know it) and radio. Some people thought he was literally from the future; others suspected Venus. There was even a rumor that he was a vampire. (It didn't help that at one point Tesla claimed to be receiving messages from Mars.)

Tesla's last days are the subject of The Invention of Everything Else, an affectionate new novel by Samantha Hunt. Interplanetary theories aside, the electrical engineer was actually from a small village in Serbia, where at age 7, he created an engine that was powered by June bugs. As an adult, he showed up in New York at Thomas Edison's factory with almost no money and a letter of introduction from Charles Batchelor, Edison's factotum. It read simply: "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man."

The grown-up Tesla tried to manufacture lightning and once nearly destroyed his New York neighborhood with an accidental, man-made earthquake.

"It is not uncommon for the police to show up at my doorstep, following up on neighborhood complaints of blue flashes or sixteen-foot-long bolts of lightning streaming from the roof," Tesla tells visiting friends.

Also, he talked to pigeons. But instead of turning him into the prototypical mad scientist, Hunt creates a loving portrait – pigeons and all – of a brilliant, charming man who was almost entirely unfettered by practical considerations, self-interest, or universally accepted limits.

Read the full article here.

Book Review: Climate change in the Medieval Warm Period

If you don’t think climate change produces winners as well as losers, consider this: In the 12th and 13th centuries England exported wine to France. Vineyards also flourished in improbable regions like southern Norway and eastern Prussia. A centuries-long spell of mild, predictable weather blessed Western Europe with abundant crops, healthy populations and budget surpluses sufficient to finance projects like Chartres Cathedral.

This is the credit side of a global balance sheet carefully itemized by Brian Fagan in “The Great Warming,” his fascinating account of shifting climatic conditions and their consequences from about A.D. 800 to 1300, often referred to as the Medieval Warm Period. The debit side is appalling: widespread drought, catastrophic rainfall, toppled dynasties, ruined civilizations. Abandoned Maya temples in the Yucatan and the desolation of Angkor Wat, supreme achievement of the Khmer empire, bear witness to climatic change against which royal power and priestly magic proved impotent.

Mr. Fagan, an anthropologist who has written on climate change in “The Long Summer” and “The Little Ice Age,” proceeds methodically, working his way across the globe and reading the evidence provided by tree rings, deep-sea cores, coral samples, computer weather models and satellite photos. The picture that emerges remains blurry — scientists still understand little about such weather-changers as El Niño and La Niña — but it has sharpened considerably over the past 40 years, enough for Mr. Fagan to present a coherent account of profound changes in human societies from the American Southwest to the Huang He River basin in China.

Longer summers and milder winters in Europe, especially stable from 1100 to 1300, allowed Norse explorers to range as far as Greenland and Labrador. At the same time a population boom in the rest of Europe led to radical deforestation, as trees were cleared to create farmland. By the end of the Medieval Warm Period half the forests that covered four-fifths of Western and Central Europe in A.D. 500 had disappeared.

Read the full review here.

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke dies

Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.

Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 a.m. after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.

Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956, lured by his interest in marine diving which he said was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space.

"I'm perfectly operational underwater," he once said.

Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.

He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.

He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.

From this Associated Press article.

Book Review: The Real Shakespeare

What do we really know about William Shakespeare? Apart from his writing (if it is, indeed, his writing), almost nothing. And what an unhappy thing that's been for scholars throughout the centuries.

But Charles Nicholl (British historian, biographer, and travel writer) seems quite cheerfully prepared to do much with little. One of the few solid sightings of Shakespeare in the public record (discovered only in 1909) is his appearance as a witness in a trial in 1612. There, Shakespeare gave testimony – and left behind the only words that we know are his outside of his literary output.

It's still not much. But in The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street, Nicholl joyously seizes on "this unexpected little window into Shakespeare's life" and turns it into an excuse for a guided tour of a tiny pocket of Shakespeare's experience.

Read the full review here.

Book Review: An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring For Family

“Caregiver” is a deceptively professional-sounding term for a role in which most of us are complete amateurs, and for one that is apt to descend upon us like a blow from fate, stunning and unforeseen. We have a great need to live with the illusion that we and those we love are immune to mortality, but inevitably, somewhere along the line, even if we ourselves are spared from illness, something cracks open — a father or a friend gets cancer, a mother succumbs to Alzheimer’s, a husband has a terrible accident, a child dies — and what Virginia Woolf once called “extreme reality” floods in. Like the 19 excruciatingly honest contributors to “An Uncertain Inheritance,” we may find ourselves tested to the limits of our endurance.

Our society would rather not focus on this area of experience and makes little provision for it. In the past, when families were much larger and life was more often cut short by disease, caregiving was more integrated into normal life. Women were brought up to become the selfless angels of the household, the built-in care system in any emergency. In Victorian novels, the sick and dying are usually surrounded by a great many people — from family members to servants — and there is something ennobling about the process. Great last-minute epiphanies occur, as well as uplifting reconciliations. The personal sacrifice involved in caregiving becomes its own reward.

Read the full review here.

Book Review: Not so fast, Mr. Watson

How often does a detective story upend history? Probably about as often as a science and technology journalist pens a page-turner. But with this month's release of The Telephone Gambit by Seth Shulman both these unlikely events are coming to pass at the same moment.

This slender volume (252 pages, with notes and credits) is a work of nonfiction – although the strangeness of truth definitely overtakes fiction here as Shulman explains how he unraveled Alexander Graham Bell's claim to have invented the telephone. We may never be absolutely certain, but "The Telephone Gambit" presents compelling evidence that Bell snuck a look at rival inventor Elisha Gray's patent application, stole a crucial element from it, and then lived an uncomfortable lie for the rest of his days.

This is not the work of a muckraker. No one wanted to reach such a conclusion less than did Shulman, a longtime admirer of Bell's. But that's exactly why this book is such a good read. Shulman carefully spells out not only the steps he took to piece together his story, but also the reluctance he battled en route.

Why would Bell – a man whose good character was noted by all who knew him – behave so dishonorably? How could he have stolen from a rival he had never met? And is it even possible that such a high-profile crime could have gone undetected for so long?

Click here to read the full article.