Saturday, September 22, 2012

The Female Brain




Title: The Female Brain
Author: Louann Brizendine
Publisher:  Bantam Books, 2007 (First)
ISBN: 978-0-553-81849-9
Pages: 239

It was quite unexpectedly that I came across this book at the library while searching for the ever elusive The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. It seemed preposterous that anyone should dare to claim a separate niche for the female brain. Firmly suppressing the urge to scribble ‘if any’ in brackets immediately after the title, I decided to have a look at it and it was indeed a decision I would never repent! The author is a recognized neuro-psychiatrist and practices on female mood changes and health. Grabbing freely from the acquired wisdom and experience of a practitioner, Brizendine goes on and on, bringing out the structural and functional differences between male and female brains. She always sweetens the argument with abundant references to case studies involving her own clients. All the developmental phases of the female genre is considered – right from fetal to the post-menopausal – along with comprehensive portrayal of the hormonal and chemical balancing acts occurring in the brain.

The author begins with a confident assertion that more than 99% of male and female genetic coding is exactly the same’. But it doesn’t prove anything when we remember that more than 98% of the genome is the same between humans and chimpanzees. Male brains are 9% larger, even after correcting for body size, but the number of cells are the same in both sexes. In women, the cells are more tightly packed, hence the comparative compactness. Women however lead in some faculties like language and communication, with the brain centre for language is nearly 11% larger in them. This make them better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of emotional events or romantic encounters. Men compensate for this by having a brain area devoted to sexual drive which is 250% larger than women – with all the consequent unnecessary complications! Brizendine acknowledges the fact that there is a dearth of women in top-level science and engineering positions, but argues that it is not due differences in capacity or talent as there is no such difference between pre-puberty boys and girls. As estrogen then floods girls’ brains, their emotional and communication skills get more focused and rising testosterone levels make boys grow less communicative and indulge in less socially demanding fields such as computers and science. It all seems to boil down to the differences in biology.

In childhood, the female brain is wired to promote social groupings and harmony among them. Communication is a very essential prerequisite for becoming part of social groups. Rising estrogen levels with maturity further enhances the already remarkable trait. After puberty, the rising and falling levels of estrogen and progesterone hormones make women irritable at times and off balance until they learn to live with these imbalances in their nature.

Falling in love and finding a mate is much more complicated than we thought. Even with all outward appearances of sophistication, female brain is still the old stone-age relic, suited for solving problems encountered during most of humanity’s incubation in prehistory. Studies conducted around the world and across various races from Germans to Taiwanese to Mbuti Pygmies to Aleut Eskimos show that women are less concerned with a potential husband’s visual appeal and more interested in his material resources and social status. Also, they prefer mates at least 4 inches taller and three and a half years older. So much for love! Once in love, the critical-thinking pathways in brain shut down helping to focus on that single person, irrespective of his shortcomings. “Falling in love is one of the most irrational behaviours or brain states imaginable for both men and women. The brain becomes illogical in the throes of a new romance, literally blind to the shortcomings of the lover. It is an involuntary state” (p.97). The brain states which deal with rejected love also differ between the sexes. Rejected men are 3 to 4 times more likely to commit suicide than rejected women who often sink into depression – they can’t eat, sleep, work or concentrate (p.109).

Brizendine then gives a detailed account about the comparative sexual desires and behaviours of males and females which is simply great, but we need not delve into the details here. The greatest transformation occurs in the female brain when she turns a mother. Motherhood changes the brain structurally, functionally and irreversibly. The continuous rewiring and creation of new pathways even cause the brain to shrink in size during some months of pregnancy. While the body is gaining weight, brain is losing it. Just before giving birth, it again increase in size as it reconstructs large networks of maternal circuits. The author then turns to the most controversial argument – that women have an innate ability to measure the emotional state of another person accurately by reading subtle expressional changes. If the author could be taken at face value, husbands should think several times before lying to their wives’ faces. The most unsettling part is that men don’t possess this facility! This difference in capacity to ‘mind read’ created great hurdles in many families who were the author’s clients.

The last great change comes when they reach menopause at which fluctuating hormone levels subside and keep a steady level. Estrogen and progesterone production is reduced to a very low level and the caring and loving nature of many is turned topsy-turvy. Many women exhibit unusual independence at this stage and quarrel or separate from their husbands. Author claims that with proper precautions, hormone therapy with estrogen will help recreate the old selves to a good extent. The book is also embellished with three appendices which deals with commonly asked questions of pros and cons of hormone therapy and the biological nature of sexual orientation in females.

The book is a very good one which must be read by every man to fully understand the persons they encounter from the other sex. Women also must read this to understand why they think the way they do at present and what might be wrong with them. It also lights up some dark myths of depression among women with neurochemical reasons and explains how it could be effectively remedied. It is an absolutely splendid work.

Some shortcomings also may be pointed out. Author’s assertion that since the average age of women before 20th century was 49, very few women reached post-menopausal age and hence effective studies of the phenomenon has not been done is not tenable. It may be true that not much studies have been done, but we should look for reasons elsewhere. The average age before 200 years was low because infant mortality rate was very high, not because there was a shortage of aged women. The book also portrays women as somehow superhuman with incredible faculties like extreme emotional intelligence, mind reading and verbal communication skills. This simply is a bit hard to believe and I sincerely wonder whether Brizendine did this partly to sprout a sense of inferiority in men after reading this book!

Though not technically part of the subject matter, I can’t resist quoting a piece of wisdom given in the work by Oprah Winfrey when she turned fifty, regarding aging. Every middle aged guy or gal should engrave these words in their hearts. It runs as, “I marvel that at this age I still feel myself expanding, reaching out and beyond the boundaries of self to become more enlightened. In my twenties, I thought there was some magical adult age I’d reach (thirty-five, maybe) and my ‘adultness’ would be complete. Funny how that number kept changing over the years, how even at forty, labeled by society as middle-aged, I still felt I wasn’t the adult I knew I could be. Now that my life experiences have transcended every dream or expectation I ever imagined, I know for sure that we have to keep transforming ourselves to become who we ought to be” (p.182)

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Monday, September 17, 2012

An Edible History of Humanity



Title: An Edible History of Humanity
Author: Tom Standage
Publisher:  Atlantic Books, 2009 (First)
ISBN: 978-1-84354-634-4
Pages: 242

Tom Standage is an engineer by profession and works as business editor at the Economist and is the author of The Turk, The Neptune File, The Victorian Internet and A History of the World in 6 Glasses. He has written about science and technology for numerous magazines and newspapers. In this novel theme, Standage argues – convincingly – that history is a series of transformations caused, enabled or influenced by food, which shaped civilizations and forced them to expand themselves, often by violent means against their neighbours in times of famine, thus setting the stage for the great drama of world history to enact itself. He then delves into the depths of history, reaching well into the murky tidings of prehistory, to bring with him insightful gems which prove his point. This is a history of food, its collection at first, then its farming, its trade and how the control of it accorded power and prestige for those who wielded it.

Rice, wheat and maize constitute the three main cereals eaten by mankind at present. All of the three were carefully chosen from their wild forebears by diligent early farmers who selected those properties which appealed to them most, like size of grain, short stalk and so on. As they farmed these crops, the plants gradually lost their ability to grow spontaneously in the wild, but developed features attractive to a hungry society, like larger cobs, thinner husks and ready-to-sprout-at-any-time seeds. By these early genetic mutations carefully selected by early farmers, the yield improved and farming replaced hunting and gathering as the mainstay of societies. Surplus food supply led to the birth of urbanized civilizations. The truth is that farming is thoroughly unnatural – it is a human achievement par excellence. A cultivated field is a product of technology, like an automobile. Agriculture, thus has greater impact on the environment than any other human activity as it led to widespread deforestation, environmental destruction, and  displacement of natural wildlife. It also involved genetic modification of plants and created monstrous mutants that do not exist in nature and often can’t survive without human intervention. Modern genetic engineering is just a twist in a field of technology that dates back more than 10,000 years. People who extol the virtues of ‘natural’ agriculture sadly misses this point.

Transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers ensured an increase in sustainable population. Hunter-gatherers moved frequently from place to place and bosom-children were a hindrance. A woman could allow a child to be conceived with a gap of 4-5 years so that the child can walk the great distances involved, on its own. With sedentary lifestyle associated with farming communities, this constraint vanished and a woman could conceive as often as biologically possible, with lots of people to attend to her needs. Food surplus liberated people from farming to pursue other careers. Food had to be redistributed in such societies and the control of which ensured emergence of nobility and kingship. Trade in food articles flourished and around the birth of common era, we find spices obtaining a key place in world trade. With the fall of Roman empire and the rise of Islam, trade slipped to Arab hands who usually made proselytizing a part of the bargain. Most of the trading ports on Indian ocean rim converted to Islam and their growing power turned Europe to a backwater which wholly relied on Islamic traders. A series of measures such as sharp rise in pepper price in 1410-14, monopolizing of Red sea route by Mameluke sultans of Egypt, sack of Constantinople and monopolizing of Black sea trade route by Ottoman Turks proved to be the last straw before Europe decided to shake off the stifling pressure from the east. Renaissance and age of European exploration had begun as a result.

Rapid colonization of the New World after Columbus’ expeditions ensured the transfer of food crops between the Old and New Worlds. Rice, wheat and sugar (a few among the many) travelled west, while maize and potato to the east. Europeans found that planting sugar in the ideal climate of the Caribbeans required a lot of cheap manual labour. Slave trade arose, which transported millions of Africans across the Atlantic, almost half of them perishing on the course. It then took centuries of effort, culminating in a civil war, to bring down the institution of slavery. Though potato was initially shunned in Europe by the clergy on the reason that it was not mentioned in the Bible, it soon rose to be the staple item in many countries’ dining tables.

As the world stepped into modernity, control of food supply began to affect the outcomes of wars and fates of regimes. Napoleon’s better logistics helped him achieve victory against his rivals. Follies of administrators in dictatorial regimes spread famines and deprivations which eventually destabilized the regime and its ideology. Stalin’s failed Industrialization drive in 1930s and the resultant famine, and the Chinese famine which followed Mao’s ill-guided Great Leap Forward are two recent memories which killed millions of people. USSR’s collapse in 1991 may also be attributed to increase in food prices and consequent shortage during the end of 1980s, riding on low oil prices which was the bread winner of the erstwhile Soviet Union. Coming on top of these was Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, which sealed the fate of the Communist state.

World population began its upsurge in 19th century. To meet the rising challenge of population growth, fertilizers began to be applied. The first such item was natural in origin – solidified bird excrement called guano, which formed entire uninhabited islands in South Pacific. The stock was extinguished in about three decades and sodium nitrate from Chile was then used for another three. By the beginning of the 20th century, it was more than apparent that an artificial fertilizer need to be invented to support growing populations. Nitrogen is the most critical element for plant growth, which is available as the major component of atmosphere where it is not reactive. Fertilizers provide nitrogen in a form which is reactive and which can be ingested by plants. Fritz Haber synthesized ammonia in 1909 in Germany for the first time. This was combined with sulphuric acid to produce ammonium sulphate, the world’s first artificial fertilizer. Carl Bosch did the engineering for Haber’s lab process, known as the Haber-Bosch process and still forms the backbone for ammonia production. With the application of fertilizers, the cobs became so heavy that the stalks began to topple over and die. New dwarf varieties of wheat and rice were invented, which revolutionized agriculture. Norman Borlaug developed hybrid wheat and the International Rice Research Institute developed hybrid rice.

The book is a real pleasure to read, and should be useful as a seed of further thought for many concepts described only in a nutshell. Since the subject matter envelops the whole of human history, the depth accorded to topics is naturally shallow, which is quite justifiable. The language is very fluid, elegant and successfully gathers reader attention. Since the theme of the work is unique and very well researched, it proves to be a delight for the reader. The book may also be credited with a succinct history of modern fertilizers and how that industry which feeds the world population came into being.

On the other hand, the author could have very well avoided some factual mistakes which sticks out glaringly, marring the integrity of the work. In one instance, it is asserted that the countries with largest Muslim populations were Indonesia and China (p.79) – well definitely not China, it is Bangladesh! In another occasion, it is given that “First Portuguese expedition to India landed near Calicut (modern Calcutta) on May 20, 1498 (p.92). Oh, and that was a grave error. Despite the similar sounding names, Calicut and Calcutta are separated by about 2000 kilometers of land. Standage’s geography seems to be poorer than some of the medieval Europeans’!

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Notes from a Small Island




Title: Notes from a Small Island
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher:  Black Swan, 2011 (First published 1993)
ISBN: 978-0-552-99600-6
Pages: 379

Bill Bryson is undoubtedly one of the funniest writers alive. As I mentioned in the review of his another title Down Under, you become his fan for life after reading anyone of his little gems of work. I started with his At Home, which I liked very much. By the time A Short History of Nearly Everything was reached, a genuine interest was born and with Down Under, I was enraptured with his style and now, this. Whereas Down Under dealt with his travels in Australia, this one references his journey in Britain, where he lived for two decades, before finally settling back in U.S, his home. The 7-week journey captured in the book was made just before his departure to U.S and presents in a condensed form Bryson’s accumulated wisdom spanning two decades he spent in the old country.

The book covers Bryson’s travels from the southern tip of Dover, which faces France on the continent, to the northernmost point of the country, John O’Groats in Scotland over seven weeks through train, automobile and sometimes by trekking, even. Along the weeks-long voyage Bryson makes fun of almost all aspects of British social life, but always with a tinge of deep-seated respect to its culture and social norms. The weariness which the author must have felt on this long, solo journey is not at all evident anywhere in the charming narrative. Even when there is a goof up, he calmly and good-naturedly acknowledges it and wipes away the ill will with a most hilarious account of the episode. Over the course of the expedition, the author travels through all the parts – England, Wales and Scotland. His decision to travel back home after two decades of stay in his adopted country is evident in several places – often with pangs of homesickness materializing at quite unexpected places, like in the middle of a movie which features American themes.

Though Bryson doesn’t spare any expense in making fun of all things enroute, his appreciation for Britain abounds and is made obvious in several pages like this one, “The glory of Britain is that it manages at once to be intimate and small-scale and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constanly filled with admiration at this – at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few moments pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, the meadow where Lewis Carroll strolled; or how you can stand on Snow’s Hill at Windsor and see, in a single sweep, Windsor Castle and the playing fields of Eton, the churchyard where Gray wrote his elegy, the site where The Merry Wives of Windsor was first performed. (p.324). See this rich tribute to the country which headed the allies in World War II, and obtained a Pyrrhic victory, “What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure” (p.379).

As we go along with Bryson in this memorable town-hopping trip, we get to know the rhythm that animates British social life. Pubs, hotels, museums and good walkways constitute the essence of amenities the towns keep in store for the travellers. He tastes every such facility in a town before he leaves for another. The narration is extremely interesting and arresting. However, unlike in Down Under, the whole purpose of the journey sometimes suggest itself to be somewhat pointless, considering the small size of Britain unlike Australia, which is a continent. Also the urban infrastructure is conspicuous by the monotony of features they represent. In every town, you get to know the same places mentioned earlier in this paragraph. Such homologous architecture is in fact caused by the compactness of Britain as a whole. Perhaps you may also find that though Bryson’s language is extremely witty and hilarious, it may not be entirely recommendable for children. Depending on the reader’s cultural background, he might come across some passages which may offend his stricter sensibilities regarding the décor of the language which may seem to cross into the terrain of obscenity, at least on one occasion.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Saturday, September 8, 2012

The Emperor of All Maladies







Title: The Emperor of All Maladies – A Biography of Cancer
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
Publisher:  Fourth Estate, 2011 (First)
ISBN: 978-0-00-742805-2
Pages: 470

Cancer – No other word terrorizes humanity harder than that. Often late to correctly diagnose, it snuffs life out of healthy individuals in the blink of an eye and drives the survivors into a lifetime of sorrow and misery. Though the disease was around and recognized for millennia, it was only after the Second World War that effective treatment regimen started to appear in the form of chemotherapy at first. Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author, is the right person to describe the biography of the dreaded disease, as he is a cancer physician and researcher. He is a Rhodes Scholar, and is now assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and practices at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine and The New Republic. The germ of the book was sown in him during his tenure as a post-doctoral fellow of oncology at the Massachusetts General Hospital – the legendary hospital where anesthesia was invented in 1846 and the centre of activity of many fictional medical thrillers.  During the course of his work, Dr. Mukherjee came across several patients who inexorably marched towards their deaths while the medical establishment stood silently by the wayside – in the full realization that nothing could be done to save those lives, except providing palliative care. This book is a noted one of its genre and has bagged several distinctions, including the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2011, and I’m sure the honours list won’t end with it.

Those people who blame modern lifestyle changes to the increased incidence of cancer may do well to remember that the dreaded disease is in fact very ancient. Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian physician who lived around 2650 BCE, records breast cancer with a comment that there was no available cure. Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, narrates the case of Atossa, Persian queen and wife of the mighty emperor, Darius. She too developed breast cancer which was surgically removed by a Greek slave, Democedes. A grateful Atossa prompted her husband to turn his next aggressive campaign to the west instead of the east – to Greece – so that the homesick slave could return to his homeland. The resultant Graeco-Persian was a pivotal moment in world history – in fact, we may safely contend that the moment moulded the course of future history from then on, resulting in the fall of Persia and the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Thus, cancer, even as a clandestine illness, left its fingerprints on the ancient world. The incidence of cancer seems to have increased over the ages, because most of them affect us as we grow old. For a 30-year old woman to develop breast cancer, the odds are 1 in 400, whereas for a 70-year old, it is 1 in 9. So, along with growth in life expectancy, incidence of cancer increased, coinciding also with receding of other killers such as tuberculosis, small-pox, and plague. Advanced early detection techniques also contribute to the statistics of increased incidence.

It was in the time of Hippocrates, around 400 BCE, that a word for cancer first appeared in literature: karkinos, from the Greek word for ‘crab’. The tumour, with swollen blood vessels around it might have reminded Hippocrates of a crab dug in the sand with its legs spread in a circle. Another Greek word, onkos, which meant ‘a mass’, ‘load’, or ‘burden’, made an appearance. Onkos, or cancer was imagined to be a burden carried by the body, from which the discipline of oncology would take its modern name. The medieval dark ages remained dark for medicine too, and only with the Renaissance do we witness further improvements. Breakthroughs like anesthesia (1846) and antisepsis (1867) caused a proliferation of surgical procedures.

Cancer comes in diverse forms – breast, stomach, skin, leukemias and lymphomas. Of all these, blood cancer (leukemia) has captured the nervous attention of a whole generation of playwrights and writers of every sort to make an impression on the public mind that it is uncurable. Leukemia, which is the uncontrolled growth of white blood cells, was identified in 1850s by the German researcher Rudolph Virchow, who coined the term leukemia from the Greek leukos, meaning ‘white’. World War II was a watershed moment in the history of technology, as well as medicine. Just prior to the war, the cure for cancer consisted of one of two things, excising the tumour surgically or incinerating it with radiation – a choice between the hot ray and the cold knife! By 1940, it was sadly, yet widely acknowledged that therapeutics against cancer was at a dead end. Something revolutionary needed to come up.

And the revolutionary thing indeed turn up, in a quite unexpected quarter. Though professing otherwise, both the warring sides in the World War employed chemical warfare on their enemies. Of all the chemicals used, nothing was more fearsome or devastating as mustard gas. It killed immediately and the survivors were forced to lead miserable lives owing to complications like chronic anemia. Researchers detected that the poison gas destroyed white blood cells (WBC) in survivors and surmised that it could form a part of an effective treatment against leukemia (which increased white cell count) in controlled doses. In the meantime, Sydney Farber, an American physician was wondering in 1947 whether he could control the pathological growth of WBC, using a chemical. Folic acid, was found to cause growth of WBC in anemic people, so Farber argued that if he could lay hands on an anti-folate (a chemical which works in a diametrically opposite way than folic acid), it could be used as medicine for leukemic patients. He eventually came across such a chemical structurally similar to folic acid, called aminopterin, which he first tried on a child suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia, with good results. The age of chemotherapy was born! However, in most cases, the remission was only temporary with the patient relapsing irrevocably to recurred illness, which was resistant to further chemotherapy. The cancer also travelled to other parts of the body, like the lungs, liver, brain and bone marrow, which is called metastasis. Researchers struggled hard to find a wayout and they were finally rewarded – using multiple drugs in combination, a fixed percentage of cancerous cells would be obliterated. Repeating the course several times, the percentage of abnormal cells would be reduced to near zero.

However, the chemicals used as drugs in chemotherapy were cytotoxic (damaging to the cells), which destroyed healthy cells as well as the cancerous. The body reeled under the heavy doses of drugs, with severe side effects, one of them being leukemia itself, at a later stage. There was no way to distinguish the tumorous cells. The birth of linear accelerators in physics labs during the 1960s helped to incorporate that also in the war against cancer, in the form of extended-field radiation. Clinical trials helped modify or discard established procedures too. Radical mastectomy, the surgical removal of large parts of the chest was the common procedure for breast cancer at that time, till it was challenged by feminist groups and innovative surgeons. A trial which lasted 10 years conclusively proved that the radical one was not fundamentally different in efficacy from simpler, less invasive procedures.

Relapse of the disease, after a brief remission, was a nagging problem for chemotherapy. Patients returned with metastasized cancer, often ending up in brain. The malignant cells somehow crossed the blood-brain barrier, which stopped the chemicals. Attempts to transport the drugs directly to brain via cerebro-spinal fluid through spine taps were also not promising. It was around 1970s that the importance of prevention dawned upon the researchers. Lung cancer is highly preventable, if the afflicted stayed away from tobacco smoking. Concerted legal and public awareness campaigns helped to bring the tobacco industry to heel. They acknowledged the risks tobacco posed to public health and were forced to print warning labels on cigarette packs. Development of pap smear test for cervical cancer and mammography for breast cancers opened a window of screening, but none of them reached the level satisfactory to pronounce as such.

Knowledge of cancer biology improved drastically after 1980s. Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of normal body cells caused by mutations picked up genetically or environmentally by the normal genes. The genetic mechanism consist of two ways – to enable growth and to control growth after maturity of the cell is reached. Oncogenes, which are mutated growth genes contribute to unbridled growth, just like a jammed accelerator in a car. On the other hand, inactivity in the control genes also fail to stop growth, just like a non-functional brake in an automobile. Developments in recombinant DNA technology and genetic engineering helped device new drugs which could hook on to aberrant proteins at the molecular level and keep them under harness. Herceptin was the first such drug, but the wonder drug turned out to be Gleevec, which became a panacea for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a rare form of cancer. This medicine removed all traces of pathogens and enabled patients to continue their lives for decades. But, molecular medicine carries its own risks too. The cancer gets immune to the drug by accumulating mutations again. The race against it cannot be static – there is not a dull moment in researchers’ attempts to fight cancer.

The book is a comprehensive history of cancer, reaching out to the dawn of history to the latest developments in genetic drugs. It is also a history of the medical profession, beautifully unveiling the troubled pathways it traveled to possess the glowing feathers it carries now in its diadem. Using an eclectic mix of science and history, Mukherjee produces a long-awaited delicacy in the feast of medical books. The description is clear and lucid, attractive even to lay readers. The handling of the subject is so professional that this book should adorn the shelves of every medical practitioner, as well as serious admirers of the popular science genre. Insightful comments and dispassionate narrative brings out objective truths in the cold light of reason. It is interesting to note that chemotherapy is like beating the dog with a stick to get rid of his fleas! The book ends with hope, but not with much enthusiasm for a cure in the near future.

The book would have done well with a neat glossary, especially since it juggles a lot of medical terms. Perhaps future editions would surely attend to this shortfall. The volume is a bit bulky too, with 470 pages. The readers don’t glide as smoothly with the author after the first 100 pages. The remaining parts are more interesting to medical practitioners than other readers. Also, some of the trial results presented as proof of argument don’t seem to be statistically significant. The study which analysed the death rate due to lung cancer in smokers is an example. Out of 789 deaths a trial group, 36 deaths were due to lung cancer and all of them were smokers. Mukherjee then asserts, “The trial designed to bring the most rigorous statistical analysis to the cause of lung cancer barely required elementary mathematics to prove its point” (p.249). There is no disputing the fact that smoking causes lung cancer, but doctor, the mathematics involved here may not be as elementary as you think. The conclusion must depend on the ratio of smokers to the total population. If it is so high as Dr. Mukherjee himself claims in a previous page, “in some parts of the world, nearly 9 out of 10 men were smoking cigarettes” (p.241), the result proves nothing. If smokers constitute 90% of the population, it is quite probable that out of the 36 dead, all of them were smokers. We could have also argued that all of them were right-handers as if right-handedness was a cause for premature death.

A really good work. The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Virtual History




Title: Virtual History – Alternatives and Counterfactuals
Editor: Niall Ferguson
Publisher:  Penguin, 2011 (First published 1997)
ISBN: 978-0-241-95225-2
Pages: 440

Niall Ferguson is one of the most renowned British historians. He writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world. He is a prolific author too, whose distinguishing characteristic is the clarity of thought as exemplified in many of his works, including The Ascent of Money (which was reviewed earlier in this blog). This book is a collection of would-have-beens of various crucial moments in world history, described by some of the prominent historians of today.

History is guided by critical events like wars, revolutions, popular unrest and such cataclysmic events which transform the policy of a government in a matter of very short time. It will then be forced to take sides on the burning question of the day and commit itself to the party they choose to make an ally. With hindsight, we are able to marvel at the seemingly trivial events which contributed to swing the outcome from one side to the other. Such hypothetical or counterfactual questions adds a lot of contemporary interest to the flow of events which actually did take place. It employes historians’ accumulated knowledge of facts and wise application of timeless wisdom to think about the repercussions of some very critical moments in history and wonder at the directions in which world history would have proceeded, had the outcome was somehow different. The book brings to focus several such forking moments in history like what would have happened if the revolutionaries lost the American war of independence, how Britian would have moved on along the route of parliamentary democracy had there been no Oliver Cromwell to finish of Charles I, and what would have taken place if Britain remained neutral during the First World War.

The book describes nine such episodes, beginning with 17th century Britain, right up to late 20th century USSR at its breakup. Every major event thought worthwhile by scholars – European scholars, rather – is covered in arduous detail. The subject matter is preceded by a lengthy and thoroughly off-the-track Introduction which tires the reader prodigiously. The treatment is unusually and unnecessarily pedantic, though written by Niall Ferguson himself. The author we gladly met in The Ascent of Money seems transformed to the role of a sadist who delights in the pain inflicted on hapless readers without much prior background of historiography of the variety Ferguson extols in the Introduction. The book should have been intended for light reading, considering the purely imaginary nature of events, but the author tries to build a grand edifice on quicksand. Anyone who manages to pass unscathed through the torturous 90 pages of the Introduction deserves to be congratulated for his heroic effort. Yes, the congratulations are due to me, as well!

Of all the counterfactuals and alternatives handled by various authors, the most relevant and close to readers’ minds are those related to events occurred in 20th century, particularly the questions like what would have happened if Britain stayed out of the First World War, if the Germans defeated Britain in the Second one, and how things would have turned out had there been no cold war. The book presents spine-chilling details of Nazis’ racial agenda and their social resettlement programs in captured territories in which the racially ‘inferior’ native population would be relegated to the ranks for providing manual labour to German soldier-peasants who would occupy the prime land with he State’s full power behind their backs. Education and such cultural advancements would be denied to them. As one Nazi planner remarked, the only thing the native needs to know is to understand the German traffic signs, lest they be overrun by speeding vehicles. Such scenarios for an Axis victory would have eventually doomed the fate of the whole world as Hitler’s plans were global in spirit, if not in letter. We would be astonished to realize that the outcome of the war depended so crucially on the decisions of some minor German tacticians which were not taken at the right moment. It argues that had Germany invaded Britian in May 1940, instead of September 1940, the outcome would have been entirely different, with the British Isles completely overrun by Nazi forces.

The book is extensively researched. Able historians who are at ease with the complicated task assigned to them show their mettle. Historians write history, not make it. But these historians are compelled to make some of their own history, though persistently guided through the path by firm convictions about the inevitability of some of the strong currents flowing across centuries, which connects disconnected events through a common thread. The long Afterword penned by Ferguson is a splendid attempt to incorporate all the nine counterfactuals discussed in earlier chapters into a coherent, integrated narrative of imagined history of the world from 1646 to 1996. The author atones for his crime committed against the reader in Introduction with this enjoyable Afterword.

The book has several disadvantages too. The language is terse and unappealing to general readers having no solid background of some chapters of European and American history. The seriousness accorded to subject matter is at variance with the title. The easy and speculative nature of the treatment expected by most casual buyers of the book would be cruelly belied by its structure and those readers are in for the shock of their lives. The book follows a decidedly West-centric approach to history. Some of the nine described episodes do not warrant the careful scrutiny they managed to obtain. What would have happened if John F Kennedy was not assassinated is one such trivial question. The answer is also contained in the meticulous, but critical chapter penned by Diane Kunz – not much.

The book is recommended only for very serious enthusiasts and lay readers may quite profitably abstain from it.

Rating: 2 Star