An easy-to-digest science lesson tailored for general readers.
A pop-science overview of muscles from the author of Bones: Inside and Out.
Meals, a professor of orthopedic surgery at UCLA, begins with a quick history that reveals how thinkers from all cultures taught mostly nonsense about human anatomy until the European Renaissance, when artists and researchers became obsessed with getting it right, so they began dissecting bodies. By the 19th century, scientists were able to show how muscles create movement. This is a subject less straightforward than anatomy, and the author’s admirable effort to explain it, heavy with analogies and diagrams, is generally accessible but may cause a few struggles for readers unfamiliar with biochemistry. Science buffs will perk up when he delivers the basics. Humans have 650 muscles, more or less (some are born missing a few, usually without a problem; others have extras), and there are three types. Most familiar are skeletal muscles, which make up about 40% of our weight and are under conscious control. Smooth muscles work automatically to control our digestive tract, urinary tract, blood vessels, and other housekeeping systems. Uniquely, cardiac muscle cells contract regularly without any neurological stimulus—and can do so for more than 100 years if properly cared for. In the chapter on muscle issues, Meals largely focuses on fatigue, strains, injuries, and aging, and he offers an amusing account of physical training programs throughout history. The author wisely devotes several chapters to exercise and sports, paying special attention to conditioning, nutrition, and muscle-building supplements, including a mildly skeptical review of performance enhancers and an entertaining review of cheating. Readers who suspect that many animals have muscles that produce bizarre phenomena will find plenty to engage in the chapter titled “Zoological Survey.” For example, even though the octopus has “a large brain for its body size, roughly two-thirds of tentacle control comes from nerve centers in the tentacles themselves.”
An easy-to-digest science lesson tailored for general readers.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781324021445
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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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