Readers may occasionally seek less of Moalem’s enthusiasm and ego, but he has a lot of solid information to convey and a...
A compendium of facts and case studies on genes.
Moalem (How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do, 2009, etc.) examines two main ideas: 1) that your genes are not your destiny—environment and behavior can tune genes up or down or turn other genes on or off in the process of “epigenetic” control; 2) that nobody is “average.” We are all unique in our DNA and how our lives interact with that endowment, so beware of “average daily requirements” and other recommendations. Moalem illustrates these tenets with intriguing stories—e.g., a chef who switched from his meat-heavy, high-fat diet to emphasize fruits and vegetables only to discover that he felt lousy due to the fact that he suffered from hereditary fructose intolerance. Sadly the author relates the story of a little girl given codeine for pain following a tonsillectomy. She had an extra gene coding for the enzyme metabolizing the drug, which resulted in rapid production of excess morphine, which killed her. Moalem describes studies of stress in infant mice (leading them to “give up” when faced with adverse conditions as adults), dietary influences on bee larvae (those given royal jelly become queens; the others, workers) and bullying (one study shows blunted cortisol responses in adulthood). Moalem argues for the usefulness of knowing your genome but is also concerned that the information could be hacked and used against you. He recommends getting detailed medical histories from relatives and explains how even examining your face can be informative about your genetic history. The author covers a wide range of subjects: rare diseases, what’s bad about vitamins and supplements, drugs used in athletic doping, his case of altitude sickness and more.
Readers may occasionally seek less of Moalem’s enthusiasm and ego, but he has a lot of solid information to convey and a stylish way of telling it.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4944-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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