An informative guide to the gut in search of its best audience.
Stanford University scientists deliver an exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, survey of the human microbiome.
Buzzwords like probiotic and prebiotic make health news headlines, but how many of\ us really know what those terms mean? Here to explain those concepts, and everything else related to the role of bacteria in our bodies, are two Stanford University School of Medicine scientists with indisputable credentials. Both work in Stanford’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology—Justin as a professor and Erica as a researcher—and while their expertise is impressive and their writing clear, they share so much information that readers may get bogged down in the details and lose track of how it all relates to them personally. Readers looking for the practical applications promised in the book’s subtitle, for instance, may be frustrated by a wealth of what can seem like esoteric experiments and a dearth of details on more conventional matters like precisely how to produce the fermented foods the authors recommend adding to the diet. (Recipes for microbe-friendly muesli, smoothies, scrambles, and similar foods appear only in an appendix.) Meanwhile, scientists will be fascinated by the carefully reproduced studies that highlight surprising findings—stressing a lab animal, for instance, can change its gut microbiota—yet may have misgivings about the Sonnenburgs’ untested views on things like hand-washing routines and infant feeding. Sometimes proof and opinion seem at odds, as when the authors consider the gut bacterias’ possible impact on autism spectrum disorders; though the experiments cited are inconclusive, the Sonnenburgs express unexpected optimism that a connection will one day be found. The authors’ enthusiasm for their subject is evident throughout and may be enough to maintain interest in both lay and academic readers. Andrew Weil provides the foreword.
An informative guide to the gut in search of its best audience.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-628-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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