I honestly never meant for Geek Buffet to end up with a whole series of posts on vampire fiction, but here I am, adding to it again. (Previous posts here, here, and here.) I picked up The Historian to take with me on my long business trip in large part because it looked interesting enough and, perhaps more importantly, it looked long, thereby cutting down on the number of individual books I would be putting in my luggage. It turned out to be a good choice, so if you’re looking for summer travel reading as well, read on.

I mentioned before that most of my vampire fiction reading has ended up being at an interesting intersection of vampire and detective. The Historian doesn’t quite fit that model, although the story definitely provides enough mystery and suspense for the reader to make you have to know how it ends. (Or at least it did me.) The title, interestingly enough, could apply to any number of the characters in the book: the narrator, her father, or her father’s advisor. Truly, there are three stories going on in the book, from each of these historians’ perspectives, creating a very layered effect as the story travels back in time through three generations of characters and then forward again, (which at least one person I know found off-putting enough that she didn’t get past the first couple of chapters, but really, you should keep going.)

The stories are all really the same story, of course, and everything converges nicely at the end. The premise is this: The narrator begins the book by saying that she wishes to present the story of how her family became so involved in, and later known for, the search for Vlad Tepes, aka Dracula. She begins at the beginning of her own journey, when she was still in high school and discovered a strange book in her father’s library, blank except for a woodcut illustration covering the two pages in the exact center of the book depicting a dragon and the word “Drakula.” It is also accompanied by a bunch of very old letters addressed to “My dear and unfortunate successor.” Her curiosity piqued, she finally asks her father about them.

Thus her father begins telling her the drawn-out tale of how he met her late mother, meaning that his story starts when he was a history student studying for his doctorate. He found the strange book on his study carrel and took it to his advisor. The advisor had also found a book in his own youth, and ends up bequeathing the notes of all of his subsequent research into it to the narrator’s father. The advisor disappears from his office that very night, though, leaving behind a small pool of blood and nothing else.

The narrator’s father reads all the advisor’s letters about his research and discovers that the legend of Dracula may be much more real than previously suspected. In the library he meets a young woman who also appears to have been checking into Dracula, which seems like an entirely too-remarkable coincidence, given all the things that have begun happening in his recent life. She claims to be the illegitimate daughter of the missing advisor, born in Eastern Europe after he had interviewed her mother extensively about Vlad’s history in the region, (and incidentally fallen in love with her, but then apparently abandoned her.) After growing up, the woman decided to outdo her absent father by publishing even better Dracula research than his, in order to catch his attention. She joins the search for the advisor, which turns into a search for Dracula as the evidence mounts that Dracula is still alive and responsible for the advisor’s disappearance.

Their search takes them to Turkey, then to Hungaria and Romania, still at the time part of the Eastern Bloc. They discover huge amounts of historical evidence and lore about Dracula, and run into several other recipients of the mysterious dragon books who help them out along the way. The amount of historical detail is amazing, as is the incredible immediate relevance it takes on in the context of the search, 500 years removed.

I have to stop before I give too much away, but from the advisor’s storyline we move back out to the father’s story and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s mother, then to the narrator’s continued recounting of her teenage involvement in the search for Dracula, and then, at the end, to the narrator’s present life.

This book, in contrast to the ones discussed on Geek Buffet earlier, takes a much more traditional black-and-white view of vampires. This is not unexpected, given that it deals directly with the Dracula myth. Vampires are not redeemable creatures in this world, and Dracula is particularly evil, but in a interestingly three-dimensional way. Tracking his life through history reveals him as a much more realistic political figure of the time, and delves into the historical antagonism between the early Christian and Muslim worlds. Dracula was part of the Christian world and is revealed to have an order of monks dedicated to his preservation and patronage. He now appears to take a particular interest in historians and librarians. He is behind the appearance of the strange dragon books on chosen individuals’ desks, but his motivations, when revealed, are not quite what one expects.

It’s a darker book, but not gory, and not particularly horrific. I wasn’t quite sure how to categorize it when adding it to my Goodreads list. It’s certainly fiction, and deals a great deal with history, but is it also historical fiction? Is it fantasy? It’s not really horror, nor is it really a thriller, though it might be called a tale of suspense. Read it and tell me what you think.

-posted by Dana

I seem to have stored up a backlog of book reviews that I’ve been meaning to post, so I’ll start trying to clear them out of my head and onto the internet now. This first one is somewhat unusual, in that it’s actually non-fiction, which I haven’t been reading much of lately.

This book actually has to be paired with a radio story. Back in May, before I had to leave for my 3-week business trip to Asia (I’m chronicling that over on my personal blog), I heard this piece from the Kitchen Sisters on NPR, from their Hidden Kitchens series: The Sheepherder’s Ball: Hidden Basque Kitchens. While my own cooking skills are notably underdeveloped, I find this series fascinating for the way it explores history and culture through the initial touchstone of recipes and food. In this case, they revealed the existence of a sizable Basque community in the US that I had never heard about before.

Francisco and Joaquin Lasarte came to America in 1964 from Basque country in northern Spain. Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who repressively ruled the country for nearly 40 years, made life miserable for the Basque people, suppressing their language, culture and possibilities.

The result was a massive exodus, and the only way to come to the United States for many Basque was to contract as sheepherders. There was a shortage of shepherds in the American West, and Sen. Patrick McCarren of Nevada helped craft legislation in 1950 that allowed Basque men to take up this lonely and difficult job.

Neither Lasarte brother had any sheepherding experience when they arrived in America.

The rest of the story goes on to tell about the traditions that grew up around this sheepherding community, including their annual ball and a Basque-language radio show that was on the air for 25 years. During part of the story, though, they interviewed Mark Kurlansky, “author of The Basque History of the World.” This was enough to send me venturing out of my normal library routing of prowling the fiction area exclusively, into the unfamiliar upstairs world of non-fiction. I had seen the book before in bookstores and so on, and now I had the final push to actually read it.

As it turns out, this was a fairly good book to pair with the Kitchen Sisters’ show, because Kurlansky also loves food. The book is studded with traditional Basque recipes that have a connection to the history he was addressing in the corresponding chapter. The Basque themselves seem to place a large emphasis on food, forming many gastronomic societies in their towns and cities, and producing many famous chefs in Europe and beyond.

The non-food history is interesting, too. Kurlansky really does try to provide a history of the Basque people from conjectures about their earliest origins, which are still unknown, to the beginning of the 21st century. Most people know the Basque today as a violent separatist group in Spain, and possibly also as a linguistic curiosity, since their language is unrelated to any of those surrounding it (and possibly any other language in use today.) But Kurlansky’s overall history makes them a real and distinct people, showing the process that led the people who lived in semi-autonomous peace with the Roman conquerers and several later monarchies to become viewed as rebels.

In addition to their unique language, which the Basque themselves view as a defining feature of what makes a Basque a Basque, they are also unusual in that they are a people and a land that straddles a border. Though many of us identify them with Spain, of the 7 regions of the Basque Country, 4 are in Spain and 3 are in France, all in the mountains on the border. This has put them in a strange position in history a number of times, and during WWII, they were able to smuggle Allied pilots out of France and into Spain through their specialized knowledge of the land. It was quite interesting for me to read modern Spanish history from the Basque side, having been a Spanish major in college with a class specifically on the Franco era. (However, the book never does mention the exodus of Basque to the US as sheepherders during that time.)

Despite their long history of peaceful cooperation when allowed to rule themselves, the modern era has seen the governments that claim their territory consistently eroding Basque autonomy. The Basque have always been viewed as a strange minority, not to be entirely trusted. Kurlansky makes it clear both how the ETA came to be a separatist organization, and how ETA is separate from the actual Basque government. Some of their goals are the same, but many of their methods diverge. The end of the book shows Basque culture on the rise on both sides of the border, including a renewal of the language after years of repression.

Even though the book never does mention the exodus of Basque to the US as sheepherders that originally inspired me to try to learn more, I’m certainly glad to have read it. I will admit that the writing in some places isn’t as tight as I thought it could have been, with Kurlansky unexpectedly jumping to a the modern world from what had previously been much older history without a particularly clear link, but it’s still a fast and interesting read, and it’s certainly written for a general audience.

-posted by Dana

We seem to be having some sparse posting of late, but the summer travel season (including such things as vacations, business trips, weddings, moving, and preparing for new schools or jobs) is well underway, which is terribly distracting for our writers, alas. Hence, a blogroll addition to keep you distracted.

Jefferson Mok is a classmate from Grinnell who has just moved to Burundi to “establish a residential shelter for female child soldiers who need assistance to reintegrate into their communities.” Simple, yes? Especially as the sole representative of his organization. You can follow his adventures so far at his blog. He spent the last two years working with asylum seekers in Chicago, and is now going to try to help at the source. We wish him the very best of luck! I, for one, am somewhat in awe at the task he’s taking on.

If you’ve had a child in the last ten years or so - or rather, if you’ve seriously contemplated having a child for more than about fifteen minutes of your life - there’s one fact you’ve probably heard: Caesarean rates in the first world, especially in the US, are too high. Every few months brings along another article like this one, deploring the Caesarean rate and explaining (1) why it’s so high and (2) what doctors and patients should be doing to solve it, and aren’t. In many circles, unmedicated natural childbirth is held to be the best possible birthing experience — “our birthright” according to one midwife — and women who end up having a Caesarean for causes which aren’t immediately and obviously life-threatening for the baby (for instance, prolapsed cord) quite often feel that they’ve somehow been denied a good birth, or that they have let themselves or the baby down. On Plans, we were discussing how “birth is not a competition”, but human nature is such that some people will inevitably regard it as one; to have had an unmedicated birth somehow gives you a head start in the Good Parenting Stakes, and to have had a Caesarean shows lamentable weakness.

This is not to argue that Caesareans are indeed riskier than (most) natural deliveries, and that there are possible far-reaching complications; the risk of placenta accreta in a subsequent pregnancy rises with each Caesarean birth, and the uterus can begin to weaken if it’s repeatedly cut into. The writers or these articles are also correct that the rate of Caesareans could be reduced; the main problem here is that many hospitals refuse to allow women to try for natural deliveries if they’ve already had a c-section, and many midwives won’t take them as homebirths because of the higher risks involved. So while I don’t particularly care for the tone of some of the “Down with C-sections” articles, especially since I’ve had one myself, they do have a lot of valid points about letting women try for natural births, how moving around during labour can encourage progress, how induced labour can backfire, and so forth.

What I find fascinating here is how familiarity has come to breed contempt; though you wouldn’t know it from reading the more hardcore literature, c-sections have been around at least as long as people have been able to write about them. Back in the day, a child born by c-section was seen as almost mystically affected by it; it meant that you were truly strange and special, marked from your birth by the fact that you were “not born”. How much respect their mothers received for having undergone it is hard to say, since these women invariably died. However, since they had made the ultimate sacrifice for their children (an unpleasant sort of apotheosis of motherhood, but still an apotheosis of a sort) it’s safe to assume that they weren’t denigrated.

Of course, caesareans were very rarely done; they were performed only when the mother was obviously either close to death or already dead. (Antonia Fraser, in The Wives of Henry VIII cites a 17th century Venetian law which mandated Caesareans for women who had just died in advanced pregnancy). While mythology teems with figures born in odd ways (Athena springing from the head of Zeus, the five children of Saturn being rescued from his stomach by Zeus), it’s impossible to know who was the first real child born by Caesarean. It certainly was not Julius Caesar, despite the occasional claim that the procedure was named after him, since as his mother lived a good many years after his birth. According to this interesting article, a number of major Roman figures were rumoured to have been C-section children; the vagueness of the reports (as well as the statistical unlikelihood of all of these reports being true) makes you wonder if some of these stories were invented after the fact, as supposed early indicators of the person’s fated life. It’s worth noting that the story about Queen Jane Seymour being delivered by Caesarean is almost certainly untrue; as Antonia Fraser points out, she was well enough a few days after her son’s birth to be sitting up and receiving visitors after the christening; a very unlikely occupation for a woman who had just been c-sectioned without the benefit of either antiseptics or sutures).

A likely-authentic Caesarean baby was St. Raymond Nonnatus, whose manner of birth was considered sufficiently notable to be incorporated into his name, as the “Not Born”. Another interesting, possibly-authentic case is that of Robert II of Scotland. All accounts of his birth agree that his mother, Marjorie Bruce, was thrown from her horse while riding in late pregnancy, and that her son’s delivery and her death had occurred within the next few hours. The high-colour version of the story has Marjorie being delivered by Caesarean at the roadside, and declaring her son to be the future king before dying. The more cautious state simply that she died after a fall from her horse and that the baby may have been delivered at Paisley Abbey (which doesn’t rule out a Caesarean, of course). Certainly the story of Robert II’s miraculous delivery became well-known; it’s hard to believe that Shakespeare didn’t have it in mind when MacDuff, who was not “born” due to a posthumous Caesarean, turned out to be the one person able to kill Macbeth. Incidentally, Robert II was the founder of the Stuart dynasty, and Shakespeare wrote Macbeth to be performed for the first Stuart king of both Scotland and England - James VI/I. Shakespeare, like any long-lasting courtier, had to have flattery down to a science.

It’s tempting to think that the story of Robert II’s delivery is just a post-hoc invention designed to show that he was fated for greatness in founding a dynasty (he wasn’t in direct line for the throne originally, after all). The thing that makes me think it may be true is the nature of his mother’s injury; thrown from her horse and badly injured. It’s not unlikely that her pelvis was injured in some way, and that could make a natural delivery very difficult, and a live birth unlikely. The Caesarean story may, after all, be true.

There are a lot of odds and ends of legend surrounding Caesareans; they became more common in the nineteenth century but still had an appalling mortality rate. Nobody can be certain, but it seems to have hovered around 80%. With the discovery - and consistent use - of antiseptics and suturing, c-sections became survivable both for mother and child. These may not have been the earliest survived Caesareans - there’s an interesting factoid which pops up in the Wikipedia entry on the subject and in a number of other places; supposedly the nineteenth-century “indigenous healers of Kahura, Uganda” routinely performed c-sections which were survived by both parties, and which were observed by “a number of European travelers.” This statement is duplicated in any number of places but I can’t find an original source to track it down to, so I’ll admit to being somewhat skeptical. Stories of the fabulous medical achievements of “primitives” were common in the days when travelling was a rare and rough activity, but if the healers of Kahura really did manage these rough-and-ready Caesareans without harm, there doesn’t seem to be any record of their passing the art down. This is not to say that they never attempted a c-section, or that some mothers may not have survived. But the reports of their operations being routine and safe asks for closer examination.

With the increasing safety of Caesareans came a concurrent decrease in status for the Caesarean baby; once regarded as potential saints, mystics, rulers, or at least marked for distinction in some way (and being “not born” had its own inherent status) they’ve dwindled to being ordinary babies born in an ordinary way. But in compensation, their mothers are usually around to watch them grow up, and it’s hard to imagine too many infants wanting to trade the one for the other!

Last Summer, I did a light post about how much people are reading.

I’ve been reading a lot of reading reports lately, and a lot of press about the reports. The press is depressing, the actual reports don’t paint nearly as dire a picture and I’m working on a post about that later.

A few key things caught my eye today. According to a new report put out by Scholastic Publishing, kids who are high-frequency internet users are more likely to also be high-frequency readers (going online once a day but also reading for fun once a day). Also, 64% of online users ages 9-17 say they participate in activities that extend the reading experience when online.

AND HOW.

I was happy to read this, because I was already planning a post on how kids use the internet to deal with books.

This is not an in-depth study, but rather things I’ve noticed in my internet surfing.

There is the obvious side of kids reviewing books online and participating in such activities as Reader Girlz, which brings readers and authors together in really cool ways. Or really, just the plethora of authors that can be found on MySpace, and the amount of teen readers who have friended them.

If you ever take a gander at Yahoo! Answers, a good chunk (As of this afternoon, 25%) of the “Books and Authors” questions are asking for book recomendations,  with several people chiming in with their favorites.

Then there’s the fan fiction. Remember that old prompt of “write a story based on what you think will happen next” when you were in school? What if you did that for some of your favorite books? Online fan fiction a large community for almost any book, of readers thinking so deeply about a book, they’re writing what was happening between the lines. Or what they wished had happened instead. Some pieces of fan fiction are longer than the book that inspired it!

Have you checked out YouTube lately? Kids are making book trailers for their favorite books, such as this one made by the Irondequoit Public Library Teen Advisory Board for Jenny Han’s Shug. And I can’t talk about YouTube and books without talking about the awesomeness that is Potter Puppet Pals. Yes, puppet shows based on the Harry Potter characters.

And then there’s the flair. Oh, the flair. For those unaware, Pieces of Flair is an application for Facebook where you can make and send virtual buttons. It’s a reference to the movie Office Space. But while as of this afternoon, there were only 294 number of pieces of flair devoted to Office Space, there are thousands devoted to books. I wanted to  see how many pieces of flair were devoted to the Twlight series. I stopped counting after 1500. Harry Potter has more, because it has flair about the books AND about the movies. (There is Twilight movie flair as well, but not as much given that the movie hasn’t been released yet.)  Some pieces of flair  show art from the book,  or feature favorite quotations and lines. Some  offer predictions on upcoming books, some declare allegiance to certain characters, and some mix books together. Book flair is 4decorating this post! Books or series featured are (from the top) Babymouse by Jennifer Holm, Twlight by Stephenie Meyer, Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, Confessions of Georgia Nicolson by Louise Rennison, Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot and Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney.

The internet is changing the way we view books, and I’m not talking about how we read them. I’m talking about how we experience them. Kids  and teens are communicating with their favorite authors and other fans around the world. They’re creating extra content based

on the books they’re reading. They’re having fun with it!

64 % of internet users ages 9-17 use the internet to go beyond reading. It’s amazing to see, and it’s really fun to take part in.

A typo (I think that’s what it is) in today’s lead NYT campaign story caught my eye:

Mr. Obama also has sought to tie Mr. McCain to the country’s current economic woes, charging that the Bush administration has been “the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history.”
“And now John McCain want to give us another,” he said.

Among journalists, the usual practice when someone we’re quoting makes a minor grammatical error is to quietly correct it in print. In part, this is because (don’t gasp) not every quote is totally word-for-word accurate; reporters’ brains, like everybody’s, naturally edit lots of “ums” and “likes” and sometimes change a tense or two. So, the thinking goes, there’s usually no harm in cleaning things up for clarity’s sake.

But Obama gives us a different situation. As (among other people) David Foster Wallace eloquently argued in his oughtta-be-a-classic 2001 Harpers essay on American usage, we have to accept both that (a) black dialects are valid and internally consistent varieties of our language and (b) they’re not the culturally dominant mode of communication.

(Major caveat: I don’t know shit about actual black dialects, and couldn’t tell you for sure whether “John McCain want” might be part of Obama’s. Please bear with me anyway.)

Having a presidential candidate who sometimes speaks in a black dialect — who, in fact, deliberately embraced a black identity in high school — changes the game. What better way to push us toward linguistic equality than to accurately report Obama’s culturally black speech?

Obama, the king of self-consciousness, is aware of this divide. See this New York Magazine piece from before Obama decided to run:

“I mean, the fact that I conjugate my verbs and, you know, speak in a typical midwestern-newscaster voice—there’s no doubt this helps ease communication between myself and white audiences,” [Obama] says. “And there’s no doubt that when I’m with a black audience, I slip into a slightly different dialect.”

Transcribing Obama’s “black” speeches unedited would also reinforce the latently racist qualms that lots of white people have about him. But those qualms are rooted in a truth — that his ethnic identity is not West Virginia’s. A truth that merits reporting, if it can in fact be done accurately by the overwhelmingly white press corps. Don’t you think?

One of my “projects” this spring and summer has been finding and fixing up a cheap bicycle for use around Berlin. I began attending lost-property auctions a couple months ago and had luck at my second: I scored a 21-speed bike with a mangled back rim for 5 euros. I took a couple bicycle maintenance classes through the ADFC (German Bicycle Club), purchased a new rim, and with AFDC’s workshop assistance, replaced it myself! It’s not a bike to write home about, but my trusty steed has already been on two long bicycle excursions and does the job for rides to the shop and such.

On our first excursion, I managed to score a flat tire; thankfully my companions had a repair kit along and we were back on track within 10 minutes. I decided then that I should always be prepared myself, and went out last week and bought a cheap kit at the Euro Store. But I didn’t have any way to attach the kit to my bicycle, so I got crafty yesterday and sewed a simple cinch sack that attaches to my bike.

I reclaimed the material from the pocket of a pair of shorts my roommate had given me for sewing projects; the fabric is similar to that used in men’s swimming trunks, which I thought would dry quickly in case of rain. The fabric is also machine washable in case it gets dirty on my bike. As the pocket was already half-sewn, I just needed to trim to my size, sew a cinch track around the top, and sew together a cord from scraps.

The sack holds: 1 tire repair kit in plastic case (band-aids and mini screwdriver added for good measure); 1 package baby wipes for cleaning hands after repairs; 1 package travel kleenex (because I’m sneezy and they’re handy).

I installed it under the bicycle seat, double-knotting the cinch cord around one end of my luggage rack and using a rubber band to fasten the other end. Another solution would have been to sew a cord or loop fastener into the upper seam, but I wasn’t thinking that far ahead at the time Velcro, if you have some lying around, would also work splendidly.

Coming soon: watch me as I attempt to fashion bicycle panniers from three IKEA thermal picnic bags!

There was a great op-ed in the NYTimes this past Sunday called “Put A Little Science in Your Life“. The author, Brian Greene, is a professor of physics, and he makes a compelling argument that we could be doing a little better in teaching science. Specifically, teaching it in a way that helps the students retain their natural sense of wonder at all this neat stuff, rather than boiling it all down to some really dry numbers and making sure you follow the exact proper procedure for everything. Is there really a reason that science can only be interesting during elementary school and then not again until you reach high level independent research?

Some excerpts, although of course you should go read the whole thing:

When we consider the ubiquity of cellphones, iPods, personal computers and the Internet, it’s easy to see how science (and the technology to which it leads) is woven into the fabric of our day-to-day activities. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives. When we assess the state of the world, and identify looming challenges like climate change, global pandemics, security threats and diminishing resources, we don’t hesitate in turning to science to gauge the problems and find solutions.

And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there’s simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future.

These are the standard — and enormously important — reasons many would give in explaining why science matters.

But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

As a practicing scientist, I know this from my own work and study. But I also know that you don’t have to be a scientist for science to be transformative. I’ve seen children’s eyes light up as I’ve told them about black holes and the Big Bang. I’ve spoken with high school dropouts who’ve stumbled on popular science books about the human genome project, and then returned to school with newfound purpose. And in that letter from Iraq, the soldier told me how learning about relativity and quantum physics in the dusty and dangerous environs of greater Baghdad kept him going because it revealed a deeper reality of which we’re all a part.

It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world.

[...]

As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work — we begin life as little scientists. But most of us quickly lose our intrinsic scientific passion. And it’s a profound loss.

A great many studies have focused on this problem, identifying important opportunities for improving science education. Recommendations have ranged from increasing the level of training for science teachers to curriculum reforms.

But most of these studies (and their suggestions) avoid an overarching systemic issue: in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details.

In fact, many students I’ve spoken to have little sense of the big questions those technical details collectively try to answer: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How does the brain give rise to consciousness? Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, “Wow, that’s science?”

[...]

At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B. When A happened a few hundred years ago, it’s a long climb to the modern era. Certainly, when it comes to teaching the technicalities — solving this equation, balancing that reaction, grasping the discrete parts of the cell — the verticality of science is unassailable.

But science is so much more than its technical details. And with careful attention to presentation, cutting-edge insights and discoveries can be clearly and faithfully communicated to students independent of those details; in fact, those insights and discoveries are precisely the ones that can drive a young student to want to learn the details. We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars.

Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this drama. We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living.

Er, well, I ended up excerpting almost the entire thing, but I suppose that’s a hallmark of a well-written piece, that it all flows together so well that you feel like you can’t really leave out very much of it or you’ll lose the context for the bits that really spoke. Anyway, this piece certainly spoke to me, because I have a long-standing desire to learn physics from a class that utilizes MacGyver episodes and emphasizes the coolness of the universe, rather than the class I did have in high school, where a math teacher in disguise taught us calculus before any of us had ever actually gotten to that point in the math curriculum and told us it was physics. Which definitely left me feeling like the actual physics-ness of the physics had all been taken away. Oh, yes, and I learned biology from a teacher who didn’t believe in evolution. And my first introduction to chemistry was by a teacher who made us first take a spelling test of the names of all the lab equipment (before we’d even been told what it was for.)

For this reason, I am grateful to Mr. Greene, and all the other scientists and science writers out there who take the time to try to explain the general public why they think science is so cool. I may not have been very satisfied by my classroom science experiences, but there’s still so much that I can learn about, and so much to wonder at. (Hence my previous excited post about the ScienceBlogs book club.) I actually know a person who got an undergraduate degree specializing in the history of science, and I was really jealous to find out that was even possible. That seems to be an area where the sense of wonder is preserved, because we tend to be looking back in awe at these people who discovered what are now considered absolutely essential concepts, but which hadn’t been truly understood/accepted before that.

I also really appreciate Mr. Greene’s insistence that “science is a perspective,” a way of thinking and understanding things, because it’s certainly true, and I think most of us here at Geek Buffet found ourselves nodding in total agreement to his very clear way of stating that view. How this perspective has come to be seen lately as so hostile and threatening is something I’ll probably never really understand, but wouldn’t it be great if we could reintroduce that sense of wonder to general science education and overcome such ridiculous sentiments?

I’ll be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on these issues.

-posted by Dana

Past book reviews of science books:

• 4/2/2007: Soul Made Flesh: A Tale of Neurology
• 6/6/2007: Galileo: Scientific Crusader, Father
• 6/25/2007: Remembering why the planets are so cool
• and the book review that never got written but should have was for the other Dava Sobel book, Longitude

This is just a very quick post to point out that ScienceBlogs has started their own version of an online book club. They’ve chosen two science professors (one evolutionary ecologist and one evolutionary and developmental biologist) and two professional science writers to read, discuss, and review new science books for the general audience. Since they are currently in the discussion of the first book chosen, it is unclear to me if the panelists will remain the same each time, or if they will change depending on the book being reviewed. In any case, the first book is Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, by Carl Zimmer, and I look forward to following this and future book discussions with interest. Reading suggestions are always good, no?

-Dana

Almost exactly a year ago, Geek Buffet’s Sports category was inaugurated with the post “Altitude Discrimination?“, about FIFA’s controversial decision to ban matches at altitudes above 2500m. Today, I spotted this article saying that FIFA has suspended the ruling.

It appears the initial ruling had undergone some changes since I noticed the original article. According to the one today, the rules ended up going into effect this way:

Fifa imposed a limit for international matches of 2,750m (9,022 ft) altitude in December.

Under the ruling, players could only take part in matches above this altitude if they had had one week to acclimatise, rising to 15 days for games above 3,000m (9,843ft).

Clubs have to release their players for internationals only five days ahead of internationals.

Due to the protest from many countries in South America, particularly Bolivia, FIFA is now forming a committee to look further into the true effects of playing in extreme conditions, including high altitude, as well as “heat, pollution or humidity.”

Hopefully I’ll notice when those results get reported on, whenever that happens. I’d be interested to see what they find, and how they decided to test such things for the specific purposes of soccer-playing.

-posted by Dana