Go Ask Alice
Annoymous
So Andrew gave me this book. He picked it up for some reason, and when he was done he passed it on. Last night I was looking for something easy and distracting while I was cleaning my room (which for me is neither easy nor distracting) and I picked this up off my bookshelf. I know that some people will veiw it as some sort of blasphmey that even as a coompulsive reader in my tween and early teen years I'd never read it... but I hadn't. What are you going to do? Now I have.
Anyway. The point of this book is pretty clear. She's a pretty normal teenage girl who gets into drugs, has a hard time leaving them behind, finds herself in a number of regrettable situations, and ends up dead. Drugs are bad. I think that we can all understand this.
The thing is, I'm not sure that this girl is a particularly great example of the whole "drugs are bad" motif. Her story has a lot of things in it that are not quite typical of your teenage drug addict, and the message would be anything but encouraging for a kid who had tried drugs but was trying to stop.
First of all, she doesn't make a consious choice to take drugs the first time. Instead, she is given a coke laced with LSD at a party and that starts her down the path to destruction. Somehow, I'm not sure that the warning "don't take coke's from kids you only kind of know" is not the same kind of warning as "don't take drugs." And while I suppose that the message might be something along the lines of "just trying drugs can set you off in the wrong direction." And clearly she makes a number of (VERY) bad choices in the period that follows this first experience, that little bit of trickery made me feel bad for her.
Second, her descriptions of the experience of drug use are enough to make even a psychopharmacology nerd a little curious. Even though she clearly states about a million times toward the end of her diary that the experience isn't worth it, I'm not sure the descriptions of complete and utter bliss and drug induced euphoria would be particularly helpful in the hands of especially curious preteens. I suppose here the message that trying it once can mess you up is justified... since she makes being high sound pretty damn great. Too bad that one LSD trip leads inexorably to scratching your own face off and premature death.
Finally, at the end of the diary she seems to be well on the path to recovery. She's made new friends that aren't into drugs. She's got herself a responsible college boyfriend who is not into drugs and who has a relationship with her parents as well as with her. All of the last journal entries are those of a hopeful young woman who has left a dangerous and destructive past behind her.
And then in the epilogue, she's dead.
What happened? I mean really. I don't think that this is the message that you want to give to young people. "You'll be on the right track, you'll make new friends and make every effort to start a new life, but really there's no hope. Just when it seems that you are on the path to a full recovery and a useful life, your parents will find you dead when they get home from the movies!"
This is not helpful. Especially not helpful for any child that had tried drugs, as in "Well, now that I've tried drugs, I might as well not waste the effort to get off them, I'm screwed anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself!"
But I suppose the anti-drug message lives on. The way things turn out for her while she's on drugs is clearly not the life that people would wish for, her later resistance of some extraordinarily intense peer pressure is admirable, and her description of her "bad trip" and it's aftereffects are enough to scare the living daylights out of some of those previously discribed especially curious preteens. I suppose.
I think that the real problem with this book is that it seems too forced. Too constructed.
Young girl starts diary about how hard it is not to be accepted, and 20 pages in, she's a drug addict rolling her way straight towards death. Repeated use triggered by neatly spaced traumatic life events. Tries to clean up, fails, faces increadible peer pressure and has a bad trip, but parents always love her. Nice boy that she meets accepts her and even *kisses* her! Doesn't care that she's a former addict, or when she goes crazy, or when she's institutionalized. People that don't use drugs are good and loving. Drugs are bad.
It reads like not terribly well created propoganda. (Which according to the reviews on Amazon it just might be.) I even looked back at some of my journalling from around the same age that this girl is supposed to be. They read more like the journals of a 10 year old than a 16 year old. (And no, I am not just hyper-mature, I assure you.) To me that reeks of adult that has no recollection of what it was like to be 15 or 16. Maybe.
I suppose if I had read it in middle school it would be different. The reviews on Amazon are clearly clustered into jeers from jaded adults and raves from teen readers to whom it seemed honest and dramatic and real. Perhaps if I had read this in maddle school this would be one of those essays about returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking.
But I don't think that I would give this to my 13 year old to read, because it is a single minded message about destruction with the utter absence of hope, and if you believe, as I do, that addiction is an illness, than what we need is stories imbued with some element of hope.
***************************************************
Four other notes about reading, books and Barnes and Noble:
1.) On a re-reading childhood favorites note: Madeline L'Engle died this past weekend. I certainly hope that I don't have to write the "returning to a childhood favorite and finding it lacking" essay about any of those books, since I am certainly going to have to return to them once I finish my little ten book run... or maybe during the ten book run. Kids books make a great little distraction sometimes, and the library will have those. I do own them all, even if they are up in an attic somewhere, so I have no reason to visit Barnes and Noble for this rereading project.
2.) This book doesn't count towards the 10 that I have to read before I return to my wanton bookbuying ways. a.) Because it's not on the list that I made when I made the resolution and b.) because I read it so fast and it was so little that counting it would feel like cheating.
3.) Barnes and Nobel sent me an e-mail on Friday in which they explained that they are going to send me a book for *free.* Apparently, they have this book club thing, and because I signed up for one in the past they have me pegged as a reader type. They are clearly trying to create some buzz around a new author by sending out a bunch of advance reading copies of her book and getting us to talk about them. While this does mean that there is a new book on its way to me in the mail... it does not count as a trip to Barnes and Noble because I neither visited the store or gave them money in exchange for it.
and 4.) We stopped at a Barnes and Noble for coffee last week (since it was the nearest coffee selling place to where we were), and I didn't buy ANYTHING. (Well, execpt coffee, but that doesn't count.) GO ME!
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The Great Mortality
The Great Mortality
by John Kelly
I believe that this is the "free" book from the "Buy Two Get One Free" trap that sucked me in during that last fateful Barnes and Noble trip. What can you do? I blame it all on Andrew.
Anyway, this is a book about the Black Death. Not the most cheerful topic, but an interesting one. In case anyone hasn't noticed, I am literally and totally obsessed with medicine. It's a problem. It will hopefully be less of a problem when I get my happy self into medical school. Fingers crossed.
Anyway. The man that wrote this book has made his living writing about science and medicine, but it seems from his bio at the end of the book that he also has something of a history obsession. The combination makes for a pretty good book on a topic that falls somewhere along the intersection of medicine and history. He seems to understand more than enough about the science to talk about it (as much as anyone can, since the science of a epidemic so long ago is fuzzy at best anyway) but clearly the history is what excited him. More specifically, the detailed and horrific personal accounts written during the plague.
He says that he started this book "for a very modern reason. In an age of the avian flu, Ebola and AIDS, I wanted to take an anticipatory glance backward at the greatest pandemic in human history." In looking back, he has focused on the human story of the plague. He seems determined in the face of the destruction to see the strength of human character, and in that, I think that he's right. It truly is amazing that people kept writing wills, that they managed to bury bodies, that people got out of bed in the morning as the population was cut in half by something that they simply did not understand.
The destruction that the Black Death brought really is well outside the realm of comprehension. We're talking about a time in which, in most of Europe, one out of every two people died horribly. That's hard to wrap your head around. Even though Kelly makes every effort to keep the humanity of these residents of the Middle Ages intact by quoting their own words or focusing on the story of a single family or village to represent one area, I think that at some point, one has to become desensitized, at least I felt like I did. You can only read a sentence like "And in such and such a place in 1348 the Black Death claimed 40-50% of the city." so many times before it just starts to feel like "yep. That's what happens. Oh well." I know that sounds callus, but that's the way it is. Especially since as shocking as the level of devastation is, even with Kelly's great and admirable effort to keep the victims human, these are still people that died 800 years ago, and that helps to keep a certain distance.
Anyway, I do have to say that this is decidedly a book more for the history buff than the science buff, since the science is a little ambiguous. Kelly's writing is focused on the routes the plague travelled and how the character was slightly different in different places. (The English managed to bury everyone facing the same way in neat little rows, some other places failed to manage burials at all really.) He devotes a chapter to the anti-Semitic reactions as well as to the Flagellants, but the majority of the story is just following the plague from place to place.
At times it gets a little repetitive. The story may be slightly different in France than in England, but not too too much, and sometimes it seems as if the same little vignettes are repeated. Maybe that's meant to say something about how we're all really the same, but I could have done with a little less of it.
Of course, the history leaves the scientist in me staring at closed doors, because while Kelly is very clear on the PATH that the plague travelled around Europe, the actual METHOD of that travel is a little more ambiguous. The virulence and movement patterns of the plague of the great mortality are very different and much more frightening than those of the third pandemic of plague, which was in the late 1890s and studied with the technology of that day. Of course for me the question is "what is the difference?!" They have extracted plague DNA from these Black Death burial pits, but understandably I would assume that it's not enough to do an in depth analysis of virulence factors. Of course that is the stuff that I would be more interested in.
But what can you do when you're reading about something that happened about 800 years ago?
I'm not sure how much learning about the Black Death can inform us about the way that our world today would look in the face of a deadly pandemic. At least in today's world (or the part of today's world that anyone reading either this blog or this book lives in) people understand that disease is caused by microbes. This one belief I believe dramatically changes the way that we would experience illness even on a massive level. While there are certainly some ignorant bigots that will blame AIDS on gay people or other such foolishness, I like to believe that we are past the point of burning Jews because they must have poisoned the wells. I think that in the face of understanding what we are fighting, as we certainly would at least in part in the face of a pandemic would give people something to hold on to and something to hope for (a cure, a vaccine, etc.).
That's what's really amazing about the fact that the society in many places continued to function in the face of this pandemic. In their world there was no reason for it, there was no microbe to fight or protect against, no real way to treat symptoms or limit transmission. There was nothing to do but wait for death, and the fact that people held it together to the extent that they did in the face of something like that gives us a lot to hope for on down the road.
Three down, seven to go.
by John Kelly
I believe that this is the "free" book from the "Buy Two Get One Free" trap that sucked me in during that last fateful Barnes and Noble trip. What can you do? I blame it all on Andrew.
Anyway, this is a book about the Black Death. Not the most cheerful topic, but an interesting one. In case anyone hasn't noticed, I am literally and totally obsessed with medicine. It's a problem. It will hopefully be less of a problem when I get my happy self into medical school. Fingers crossed.
Anyway. The man that wrote this book has made his living writing about science and medicine, but it seems from his bio at the end of the book that he also has something of a history obsession. The combination makes for a pretty good book on a topic that falls somewhere along the intersection of medicine and history. He seems to understand more than enough about the science to talk about it (as much as anyone can, since the science of a epidemic so long ago is fuzzy at best anyway) but clearly the history is what excited him. More specifically, the detailed and horrific personal accounts written during the plague.
He says that he started this book "for a very modern reason. In an age of the avian flu, Ebola and AIDS, I wanted to take an anticipatory glance backward at the greatest pandemic in human history." In looking back, he has focused on the human story of the plague. He seems determined in the face of the destruction to see the strength of human character, and in that, I think that he's right. It truly is amazing that people kept writing wills, that they managed to bury bodies, that people got out of bed in the morning as the population was cut in half by something that they simply did not understand.
The destruction that the Black Death brought really is well outside the realm of comprehension. We're talking about a time in which, in most of Europe, one out of every two people died horribly. That's hard to wrap your head around. Even though Kelly makes every effort to keep the humanity of these residents of the Middle Ages intact by quoting their own words or focusing on the story of a single family or village to represent one area, I think that at some point, one has to become desensitized, at least I felt like I did. You can only read a sentence like "And in such and such a place in 1348 the Black Death claimed 40-50% of the city." so many times before it just starts to feel like "yep. That's what happens. Oh well." I know that sounds callus, but that's the way it is. Especially since as shocking as the level of devastation is, even with Kelly's great and admirable effort to keep the victims human, these are still people that died 800 years ago, and that helps to keep a certain distance.
Anyway, I do have to say that this is decidedly a book more for the history buff than the science buff, since the science is a little ambiguous. Kelly's writing is focused on the routes the plague travelled and how the character was slightly different in different places. (The English managed to bury everyone facing the same way in neat little rows, some other places failed to manage burials at all really.) He devotes a chapter to the anti-Semitic reactions as well as to the Flagellants, but the majority of the story is just following the plague from place to place.
At times it gets a little repetitive. The story may be slightly different in France than in England, but not too too much, and sometimes it seems as if the same little vignettes are repeated. Maybe that's meant to say something about how we're all really the same, but I could have done with a little less of it.
Of course, the history leaves the scientist in me staring at closed doors, because while Kelly is very clear on the PATH that the plague travelled around Europe, the actual METHOD of that travel is a little more ambiguous. The virulence and movement patterns of the plague of the great mortality are very different and much more frightening than those of the third pandemic of plague, which was in the late 1890s and studied with the technology of that day. Of course for me the question is "what is the difference?!" They have extracted plague DNA from these Black Death burial pits, but understandably I would assume that it's not enough to do an in depth analysis of virulence factors. Of course that is the stuff that I would be more interested in.
But what can you do when you're reading about something that happened about 800 years ago?
I'm not sure how much learning about the Black Death can inform us about the way that our world today would look in the face of a deadly pandemic. At least in today's world (or the part of today's world that anyone reading either this blog or this book lives in) people understand that disease is caused by microbes. This one belief I believe dramatically changes the way that we would experience illness even on a massive level. While there are certainly some ignorant bigots that will blame AIDS on gay people or other such foolishness, I like to believe that we are past the point of burning Jews because they must have poisoned the wells. I think that in the face of understanding what we are fighting, as we certainly would at least in part in the face of a pandemic would give people something to hold on to and something to hope for (a cure, a vaccine, etc.).
That's what's really amazing about the fact that the society in many places continued to function in the face of this pandemic. In their world there was no reason for it, there was no microbe to fight or protect against, no real way to treat symptoms or limit transmission. There was nothing to do but wait for death, and the fact that people held it together to the extent that they did in the face of something like that gives us a lot to hope for on down the road.
Three down, seven to go.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
The Female Brain
The Female Brain
By Louann Birzendine, M.D
Two down. Eight to go.
So Andrew picked this up and suggested it to me during the last Barnes and Noble trip. I've been sort of eyeing it for a while, unable to decide if I wanted to read it or not. These psychology books have the potential to make me frustrated and angry or happy and interested, and sometimes, it is very hard to predict which will happen before you open it up. I was skeptical of this one because of the cover image, which is one of those white curly phone cords made into the shape of a brain. This suggested to me that there might be a little too much perpetuation of female stereotypes going on. But ultimately, I decided to let the degrees of the author persuade me that she might be legit (Yale Medical School tends to put out some smart people) and give it a shot.
I enjoyed it for the most part, it was fairly interesting, and I think that the author did a very good job presenting sometimes very complicated information in a way that will be approachable to the average person, which is certainly something that I aspire to someday. In each of the chapters, (which were all titled for stages in a woman's life, things like "The Mommy Brain") she introduced a patient, and fit the neurochemical and hormonal changes she was talking about into the story of what was happening in that person's life. (I am guessing since there was no little note about how names were changed or patients agreed, they might have all been composites, making it easier to fit them to her points more exactly, but that's allowed, I suppose.)
I do feel like there were a couple of glaring problems. First of all, some things were made to seem like secrets that really are not. For example, in the very beginning she had a list of "Hormones your doctor might not know about." This list included oxytocin. Now I admit that might be a hormone that the average American isn't super-familiar with (i.e. any hormone other than estrogen and testosterone), but I am very skeptical of the assertion that anyone could make it through medical school anywhere without knowing all about it. It's silly (and maybe dangerous) to make people think that just because you are doing some interesting information synthesis you have some special knowledge that their doctors might not know about, especially when it's related to things you are about to assign importance to. Sure a specialist might know more, but there isn't an OB/GYN in practice (or there shouldn't be) that can't tell you at least a little bit about oxytocin.
There's a fine line between making things approachable to the average person and oversimplification. I think that she may have stepped on the wrong side of that line a couple of times. My real pet peeve I suppose is the way that she talked about MRI research. As if, we put people in the scanner when they're in love and see what they are feeling instantly, when really it's not quite that simple (or at all easily applied to real world situations.) The stuff we have people do in the scanner is carefully structured and in reality a little more artificial than "imaging love." But she makes it seem sometimes like the MRI scanners can be used to see emotions. (Ummmm. Not quite.) I am also put off by the language that she (and many other people) used taking about results of MRI scans. "We do this or ask the person to think about this and such and such part of the brain lights up."
I know that I have been guilty of describing it that way too, but I have tried to stop ever since a kid asked me if we would be able to see the lights through his skull. People tend to take doctors literally, and sometimes it's best to tell them literally what is happening. There are no little lights in your skull people, when they say "such and such part of the cortex lights up" what they mean is "more blood flows to such and such a part of the cortex."
If we told people that way, not only would it be more true and more helpful, but also perhaps the work that we're doing might seem less mystical and a little more like science. We're measuring the flow of blood in your brain, not the intensity of mystical in head chirstmas lights. I don't think that the other way of taking about it is helpful at all.
Sorry for that little vent.
Anyway, despite the oversimplifications. I did enjoy the book. I think that I am a little bit too close to the field to fit in as a member of her target audience, but that's not really her fault. She clearly didn't set out to write a book for the academic circle. I do think that I know a member of her real target audience thought, so I left the book with my mother. She'll enjoy it more than I did.
Woot. Eight more books until my next Barnes and Noble Trip.
By Louann Birzendine, M.D
Two down. Eight to go.
So Andrew picked this up and suggested it to me during the last Barnes and Noble trip. I've been sort of eyeing it for a while, unable to decide if I wanted to read it or not. These psychology books have the potential to make me frustrated and angry or happy and interested, and sometimes, it is very hard to predict which will happen before you open it up. I was skeptical of this one because of the cover image, which is one of those white curly phone cords made into the shape of a brain. This suggested to me that there might be a little too much perpetuation of female stereotypes going on. But ultimately, I decided to let the degrees of the author persuade me that she might be legit (Yale Medical School tends to put out some smart people) and give it a shot.
I enjoyed it for the most part, it was fairly interesting, and I think that the author did a very good job presenting sometimes very complicated information in a way that will be approachable to the average person, which is certainly something that I aspire to someday. In each of the chapters, (which were all titled for stages in a woman's life, things like "The Mommy Brain") she introduced a patient, and fit the neurochemical and hormonal changes she was talking about into the story of what was happening in that person's life. (I am guessing since there was no little note about how names were changed or patients agreed, they might have all been composites, making it easier to fit them to her points more exactly, but that's allowed, I suppose.)
I do feel like there were a couple of glaring problems. First of all, some things were made to seem like secrets that really are not. For example, in the very beginning she had a list of "Hormones your doctor might not know about." This list included oxytocin. Now I admit that might be a hormone that the average American isn't super-familiar with (i.e. any hormone other than estrogen and testosterone), but I am very skeptical of the assertion that anyone could make it through medical school anywhere without knowing all about it. It's silly (and maybe dangerous) to make people think that just because you are doing some interesting information synthesis you have some special knowledge that their doctors might not know about, especially when it's related to things you are about to assign importance to. Sure a specialist might know more, but there isn't an OB/GYN in practice (or there shouldn't be) that can't tell you at least a little bit about oxytocin.
There's a fine line between making things approachable to the average person and oversimplification. I think that she may have stepped on the wrong side of that line a couple of times. My real pet peeve I suppose is the way that she talked about MRI research. As if, we put people in the scanner when they're in love and see what they are feeling instantly, when really it's not quite that simple (or at all easily applied to real world situations.) The stuff we have people do in the scanner is carefully structured and in reality a little more artificial than "imaging love." But she makes it seem sometimes like the MRI scanners can be used to see emotions. (Ummmm. Not quite.) I am also put off by the language that she (and many other people) used taking about results of MRI scans. "We do this or ask the person to think about this and such and such part of the brain lights up."
I know that I have been guilty of describing it that way too, but I have tried to stop ever since a kid asked me if we would be able to see the lights through his skull. People tend to take doctors literally, and sometimes it's best to tell them literally what is happening. There are no little lights in your skull people, when they say "such and such part of the cortex lights up" what they mean is "more blood flows to such and such a part of the cortex."
If we told people that way, not only would it be more true and more helpful, but also perhaps the work that we're doing might seem less mystical and a little more like science. We're measuring the flow of blood in your brain, not the intensity of mystical in head chirstmas lights. I don't think that the other way of taking about it is helpful at all.
Sorry for that little vent.
Anyway, despite the oversimplifications. I did enjoy the book. I think that I am a little bit too close to the field to fit in as a member of her target audience, but that's not really her fault. She clearly didn't set out to write a book for the academic circle. I do think that I know a member of her real target audience thought, so I left the book with my mother. She'll enjoy it more than I did.
Woot. Eight more books until my next Barnes and Noble Trip.
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