Monday, August 4, 2008

Heroes and Cool People

No, this post isn’t about the (popular?) television series called “Heroes”, it is just a dynamic list of cool people. N.B. the list is in no particular order.

I’ll add more later.

Book Review: “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan

Simply, this is probably the most interesting book I have read. I would rank it as one of the five best non-fiction books I have ever read, and I think it should be required reading for anyone that eats. The book loosely examines the “natural” history of four different meals — McNuggets, a meal from Whole Foods, a meal from a local farm, and one from hunting and gathering. However, the focus of the book is questions like, “Where does our food come from?”, “How is it processed?”, “What are the implications of food produced in this manner?”, and “What are the relative merits of the various production methods?” Obviously, these are incredibly complex questions, and Pollan does not give simple answers (or any answers in some cases). He does, however, give us information to begin answering these questions.

Book Review: “Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science” by Atul Gawande

This is Atul Gawande first book, it was a National Book Award Finalist, and I heard about it while reading a glowing review of his second book, “Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance”. The bulk of the book is various stories from Atul’s residency, and a few stories are from other surgeons. I love reading about medicine and surgery so I really enjoyed this book. Atul is a very good storyteller, and the experiences that he and his fellow doctors have had is really interesting. At its heart, this is a book about what doctors know, what they don’t know, and how they have acquired the knowledge/skills that they have. He raises interesting points on the training of doctors (i.e., training is essential, but some patients die as a result), the limits of what doctors can do (e.g., treating pain), the difficulty of making a diagnosis with limited/imperfect information. To top it all off, the book is the perfect length (250 pages). Final Grade: B+