An awkward mix of hard and soft science from the frontiers of genetics and other fields.
A walk on the weird side of biotech and other trends with journalist Bronson, now a partner at venture capital firm IndieBio, and Gupta, who founded the company.
The San Francisco–based company funds stranger-than-fiction projects such as growing hamburger in petri dishes, and much of this book reads like a public relations vehicle for Bronson and Gupta’s “supremely cool” company and its industry. Taking turns narrating, the co-authors meld bromance, corporate history, and dispatches from the wilder shores of five supertrends: “China,” “Climate,” the “Genetic Revolution,” the “War on Truth” and “A.I. & Robots.” Some of the 33 chapters—with titles that consist of bizarre real-life headlines that are sometimes only tangentially related to their contents—e.g., “Meet the Pope’s Astronomer, Who Says He’d Baptize an Alien If Given the Chance”—end with screenshots of the authors’ gnomic text-message conversations. With dizzying leaps, the authors jump from topic to topic: how China is bankrolling global urban development, biotech advances such as a robot drone that plants trees, gene-editing kits used in high school classrooms, and “gummy bears” made from resynthesized proteins of a wooly mammoth. Often, the authors seem too ready to accept iffy claims, some from sources with financial ties to IndieBio. Gupta describes two minutes he spent up to his neck in ice-cold water at the urging of Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof; Gupta didn’t seriously challenge Hof’s view that Gupta wouldn’t get sick on his flight home because the plunge “fully activated [his] immune cells”—a potentially dangerous idea in a pandemic. Elsewhere, the authors serve up an alphabet soup of scientific terms that may deter anyone who hasn’t memorized the periodic table. The paradoxical result is a book—the first in a trilogy—that may daunt low-tech readers while proving too glib for the more scientifically literate. Let’s hope Bronson returns to form in the second volume.
An awkward mix of hard and soft science from the frontiers of genetics and other fields.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3431-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
An unflinching self-portrait.
The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.
In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.
An unflinching self-portrait.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593582503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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