And the winner chosen by our panel is:
It is a really good book about the new transhuman experiences and exploration as man and machine come together. Rebecca’s post here goes into more detail of our decision.
My favourite of the books was With The End in Mind, as the subject it covers, death. is something that needs to be discussed more in modern society.
I will be going to the announcement, so looking forward to seeing who will be the winner on Monday
Welcome to my blog for the third stop on the tour for the Wellcome Book Prize #BlogTour. Follow the hashtag #WBP2018 on twitter to find the others participating in this:
The Wellcome Book Prize is focused centred on science and celebrates the best new books that illuminate our encounters with health, medicine and illness. This means that the subjects covered by the prize do not always make the easiest of reading. This year we have a fictional book on the pressures of continuing the family line in Nigeria, there is a book that considers the future of humanity and the possibilities of trans-human development. Most of us reading this would not be alive if it were not for the pioneering work of Joseph Lister, or the work that has taken place in vaccine research, subjects brilliantly covered by two of the shortlisted books. The drug culture in Western societies is now endemic, but how it affects families is often glossed over; one of the books on the shortlist talks about just how it can affect anyone at any level of society. There are three things guaranteed in life: your computer crashing, taxes and death, the final book on the shortlist is prepared to tackle the taboo subject of death.
Today I am sharing an extract from The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman. She is a reporter at Science and has written for Nature, Fortune, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Stanford and Columbia, she began medical school at the University of British Columbia and completed her medical degree as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford and has covered biomedical research politics from Washington for two decades. She lives in suburban Washington with her husband, two sons and two dogs. She loves walking the dogs, talking with friends and reading histories and biographies.
To remove the history of human exploitation from vaccines and medicines that were developed in the postwar era is impossible. The knowledge that allowed their development is woven into them. Should we therefore shun them? Definitely not. Take rubella as a case in point. As I write this in the summer of 2016, 1,700 babies in a dozen countries have been born with abnormally small heads or other brain malformations; their mothers were infected with the Zika virus while pregnant. Zika’s emergence is a vivid reminder of what life was like in the United States in 1964. Then, there was no rubella vaccine and tens of thousands of American babies were born gravely damaged by the rubella virus, which selectively harms fetuses in the womb. Like Zika, rubella homes in on the brains of fetuses; it also ravages their eyes, ears, and hearts. But today, thanks to the vaccine that was perfected in experiments on institutionalized orphans and intellectually disabled children, indigenous rubella has been wiped out in the Western Hemisphere. Cases occur only when they are imported from other countries. We can’t turn the clock back. The only way we can partially make it up to these children and untold others is to honor their contributions by making them meaningful – by continuing to vaccinate against rubella and the other diseases that made childhood a perilous journey before vaccines against them existed. We also need to strive constantly to enforce and improve the regulations and laws that protect research subjects so that in the future such abuses never happen again. We might also remember, when judging the men who took advantage of vulnerable human beings in order to advance both human health and their own careers, that they were creatures of their time, just as we are of ours. Rather than training our criticism on them, it might be more useful to ask ourselves this: what are we doing or accepting or averting our eyes from today that will cause our grandchildren to look at us and ask, How could you have let that happen?
With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
To completely re-write the original quote that Benjamin Franklin made; there are three things that are certain in life; taxes, your computer crashing and death. The final of these inevitable events will happen to every single person on this planet at some point in the future. Even though it is one thing common to all life, it has reached the point where it is seen now as a taboo, something that we deliberately choose to ignore or rarely talk about when pushed. Death though is something that Dr Kathryn Mannix has faced throughout her career, and this book, With the End in Mind, is a collection of stories of the last moment of people from all walks of society.
Probably the most poignant stories are those about the children and teenagers who have barely got started at life before it is tragically taken away from them. She talks to patients that have rooms full of their family, dealing with the anger and unfairness of it all, we learn about a young man who does not have long to live, but was still considering suicide as he is so despondent that he will never leave a legacy, but he is one of the first in the country to carry a plan detailing what should happen should he become ill. The media attention raised awareness and they saw a huge rise in others wanting to do the same thing. People react to their terminal illnesses differently. One of her patients was a mother who still feels that she needs to keep up her glamorous appearance, but pouring herself into tight jeans was not helping with the pain; a few subtle changes helped immensely and allowed to be comfortable in the final days. Some of the hardest cases are those that have one close loved one who are not sure how they will cope alone.
It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life. ― Terry Pratchett
All of the stories in this book are sad; people grieving the loss of their loved ones, but in amongst the tears there are moments of comfort and illumination on how to deal with death, all coupled together with the calm and considered advice from Mannix. What she is a big advocate of is communication, telling people what is wrong with you, getting them to ask sensitive questions, finding out if people want to be at home for their last moments, or have no real preference. There is a Pause for Thought moment at the end of each chapter where there are suggestions and practical details are discussed. This book is not going to be for everyone given the subject matter, but it is a step in the right direction to seeing death as an intrinsic part of life and coping with it in the best way for you. Can highly recommend this moving book and I think it should be essential reading for anyone who has any concerns about death
The Vaccine Race: How Scientists Used Human Cells to Combat Killer Viruses by Meredith Wadman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Around 60 years ago it was still possible for pregnant mothers exposed to German Measles or rubella, to have children that were born with crippling birth defects. No one really knew how the virus affected the unborn child, nor did they know the best way to fight against this disease. It was understood how you could make a vaccine to combat the virus that caused this illness and others like chicken pox, rabies, and polio, but early attempts with animal cell-based vaccines caused as many problems as the illness they were trying to cure.
In 1962, a young biologist, Leonard Hayflick, in Philadelphia extracted cells from an aborted foetus that managed to turn the tide. These clean cells allowed scientist to create vaccines that were safe for almost everyone to use, and it carried the bland description of WI-38. This tiny collection of cells would be expanded time after time to be used to protect over 150 million children in America. Some of the cells he extracted and the methods he developed to get safe vaccines have saved billions of lives around the world.
But it almost didn’t happen. Given the source of the cells, there were countless political hurdles to overcome as well as complaints from pro-life groups who were incandescent with rage about it, but the scientist persevered and the vaccines got made and sent out in the world. Wadman has pieced together this story of how the cells were created, how the testing that was done on the uninformed and how that couldn’t happen these days. The distribution of these medicines helped create some of the worlds largest companies as the profits poured in. Whilst getting the detail right is important, the narrative that is so crucial in these books got a little lost in amongst all the technical explanations at times. It is a very important story that Wadman is telling though, especially given that fact that we may well be on the dawn of a new era in medicine with the rise of immunity against antibiotics. The one flaw though is that the book is very American centric with little UK and European interest, which is a shame as I feel that this would have a broader audience otherwise.
The Durrells of Corfu by Michael Haag
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.
The Durrell’s are one of those well know families that have permeated the British literary culture. There is Lawrence Durrell whose most famous work is The Alexandria Quartet. Then there is Gerald Durrell, founder of the world-renowned Jersey Zoo and author of many books, including My Family and Other Animals, about growing up with animals in the homes in Corfu. The TV series that is proving so popular is loosed based on My Family and Other Animals and the others in the Corfu Trilogy and the books themselves are loosely based on the real-life events that took place when they were living there.
In this book Michael Haag has gone behind the literary curtains to see what really happened, The children were all born in India, to Lawrence and Louise Durrell. Lawrence Durrell was a civil engineer responsible for building some of the railways of India. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1928, and Louisa and the Leslie, Margo and Gerald moved back to London. They stayed there for a short while before relocating to Bournemouth. By 1935 they had been persuaded to move to Corfu by the eldest Lawrence, who was living there with his wife. It was here that the interest that Gerald had in all thing animals became an obsession. It was aided by his friendship with Theodore Stephanides, a Greek doctor, scientist, poet, philosopher, who nurtured his passion for animals. At the outbreak of war in 1939, they all moved back to the UK.
It is an enjoyable book to read about their slightly chaotic family life in Corfu, full of personal anecdotes and details gleaned from personal documents to fill in the gaps of the stories from the books. He tells the stories of Louisa, Leslie and Margo, the family members often in the shadow of there more famous family members. This unconventional upbringing gave us two world-famous authors, though I did have a wry smile that Gerald Durrell was a best selling author before his more literary brother, Lawrence. Even though my wife met Gerald Durrell once, and we have a lot of his books around the house, I have never read any of them! Something that I am intending on rectifying very soon.
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Surgery prior to the nineteenth-century was brutal and messy. There was no anaesthetic and therefore the best people in the business were the fastest who could remove a leg from the hip in just one minute; yes one minute! Occasionally the knives and other tools were wiped before being used on the next victim, I mean patient, but were often not. Tables were normally covered in the blood and gore of the previous unlucky patients and if the shock of the operation didn’t kill you, then the infection that you got probably would. Something had to change and it was a man called Joseph Lister, a quiet Quaker Surgeon who was to start the medical revolution.
He witnessed the beginnings of this revolution when he saw a man operated on under a crude anaesthetic; the operation was fast but he felt no pain waking later to ask when they were going to start. He was educated at University College London initially studying botany, but then registered as a medical student and graduated with honours as Bachelor of Medicine, and entered the Royal College of Surgeons. His first post was at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary where he became the first assistant to James Syme and ended up marrying his daughter.
At this time the commonly accepted knowledge was that infections were airborne, caused by bad air, or miasma. Hospitals were aired to let out the bad air, but there were almost no facilities for washing hands and the bloodstained gowns were worn to show their experience to the watching crowds. But the understanding of how infections are passed was beginning to change with the work of Loius Pasteur. Whilst at the University of Glasgow, Lister undertook his own experiments and realised that cleaning the tools and the area around the wound with carbolic acid. He was one of the first to ensure that the surgeons under him wore clean gloves and wash their hands before and after each surgery. Just these simple acts meant that your chances of survival went from negligible to quite high. As with anything, changing the status quo is often trying to move a mountain, but the new intake were those that were inspired by the work that Lister was doing and were embracing the new way of doing things. Not everyone thought that he was right, so much so that the Lancet cautioned others against his radical ideas. Slowly his ideas were accepted with significant support from others, and he even operated on Queen Victoria herself to remove an abscess.
There is lots of blood, pus and gore in here as Fitzharris does not hold back when discussing the way things were; not one to read when you are having your lunch! Rightly he was called the father of modern surgery as countless people have benefited from his research and innovations. All these new ideas he developed meant that you were less likely to die just from being in the hospital. It is one of the better books that I have read on medical history, Fitzharris writes in an engaging way on a subject that is not going to appeal to everyone, but in amongst all the blood is the fascinating story of Joseph Lister. Can highly recommend this. 4.5 Stars
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It was supposed to be an important gathering, a Japanese businessman has joined the great and the good in the vice-presidents home in a small Latin American country to be persuaded to invest in a factory in their country. The president has called off, preferring to sit at home and watch his favourite soap opera. Mr Hosokawa was wary about attending, but when he heard that his favourite opera singer, Roxanne Coss, had been booked to sing to the private gathering, he decided to attend.
After she had finished singing, there is a pause and the house is suddenly full of men with guns, who were there to kidnap the president. When they find he is missing there are incredulous and angry, almost not believing them and thinking he is hidden amongst the people there. As the tension mounts, a hostage dies and the partygoers realise that it is not a game anymore. A day or so later there is a knock at the front door, the soldiers open it and on the other side is a Swiss guy who was supposed to be on holiday, is there on behalf of the Red Cross to begin negotiations. A list of demands is drawn up and he is sent off with them.
The government is not wanting to negotiate unless some of the hostages are released, and the women and children a few others are let out, but they soldiers decide to keep the opera singer, and life in the house settles down into an awkward routine. A chess board if found and Coss decides that she needs to practice her singing to keep her voice in check and it turns out one of the guests is an accomplished piano player; slowly the authority of the Generals and their soldiers begins to ebb away.
This is an interesting take on the usual action-packed hostage trope, Patchett has let the sluggish responses of a government feed into the characters in the home as people on opposite sides start to talk, develop relationships and try to act like this is actually normal life. It isn’t but even then, love manages to flourish even under the most trying of circumstances. If I had one quibble, I thought that the epilogue was a little unnecessary as a way of tying things up, otherwise a really enjoyable read.
Gavin Maxwell: A Life by Douglas Botting
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.
Gavin Maxwell was born on the 15th July 1914 the youngest son of Lieutenant-Colonel Aymer Maxwell and Lady Mary Percy, fifth daughter of the seventh Duke of Northumberland. As the fourth child he had a sheltered upbringing in the small village of Elrig, in Wigtownshire. He was late being sent off to boarding school and struggled to mix with other children, preferring animals which he always had a natural affinity with. He attended Oxford, leaving with a 3rd class degree shortly before World War II. He managed to get a commission with the Scots Guards, the regiment that his family were associated with and moved down to Pirbright for training. His fitness was suspect though and he was moved sideways into the newly created SOE. He was an ideal instructor after the years spent roaming the wilds of Scotland and his keen eye as a shooter meant he was a crack shot. In the end his fitness meant that he couldn’t stay and left the army.
After the war, he borrowed £11,000 from his mother, technically an early inheritance, and bought himself an island. He set up a business to catch and process basking sharks, but it failed and he ended up selling it. He dabbled in car racing, having always had a love of speed, but wasn’t hugely successful at that either. He tried various activities to occupy him, including painting, something he loved but wasn’t particularly proficient at, but it did lead him to find a place that was to be a part of his life for a long while to come; Sandaig. This idyllic house was located on the coast with pure white sand, springy green turf and with the nearest neighbour two miles away it was to become his refuge, his Avalon. Whilst he was there he put down his brush, picked up his pen, and wrote the story of his attempt at shark fishing, Harpoon at a Venture.
This book was critically acclaimed and was to be the first of many books that he would write. The desire to travel would take him to Iraq with Wilfred Thesiger and Gavin Young and more books would be forthcoming, including the renowned A Reed Shaken By The Wind of his travels around the marshes of southern Iraq with the Arabs that called it their home. It was here he was to encounter the animal that would define the next stage of his life, the otter. He managed to acquire a small cub called Chahala, but it died shortly after receiving it. He asked if another could be found and soon after an another otter was brought to him; this he called Mijbil. This was the otter that he returned to Sandaig with. This animal was to bring him immense joy and a certain amount of chaos and distracted him in his writing. Mijbil was tragically killed, supposedly in an accident, but many knew it was a deliberate act of cruelty.
More otters were sought and it was these that were to inspire his to write his masterpiece Ring of Bright Water, a title taken from a poem by Kathleen Raine called “The Marriage of Psyche”. The book about the wilds of Scotland and the otters became an instant bestseller and made Maxwell famous overnight. The income from the book meant that he could clear of some of the debts that he had got from his extravagant spending and it meant that he could fund a series of travels to Morocco for material for the next book he was planning.
Maxwell suffered from bipolar disorder who had massive highs and lows, he was a closet homosexual, something that was illegal at the time and it made him an immensely complex character. He had turbulent relationships with the few women in his life and was even married briefly to Lavinia Renton for a short period. The most intense relationship was with Kathleen Raine who cursed him and the house after a particularly stormy row. He had come from a wealthy family and he could spend money like water, buying cars and properties with no consideration as to the way of securing an income from them. Even though he was a writer of rare talent, he was considered to be very difficult to deal with, asking for large advances, early payments against royalties and frequently very late for submissions. He drank heavily and smoked a great deal, probably a contributory factor to the cancer that he succumbed to at the end of his life.
Botting’s superb republished biography of Maxwell is timely given the rise of interest in nature and landscape writing. He was a friend of Maxwell, and this shows in the book as he has been able to write about details that someone who never knew him would not have been able to discover. Maxwell lived life to the full and Botting is honest with his profile of him too writing about the good and the bad, the successes and the failures with a critical but not unkind eye. This superb biography reminded me of the one by Artemis Cooper of Patrick Leigh Fermor, another writer who redefined a genre. This book has been given the Eland treatment with their distinctive branding and is a worthy addition to their collection of classic books.
Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
As the wife of Akin, Yejide’s primary role is to provide a child. It is what her mother in law, Moomi wants too, as well as the wider family and it is the miracle that Yejide wants too. It has driven her to seek answers from God, drag a goat to the top of Mountain of Jaw Dropping Miracles, undertake a pilgrimage and even consult the western medicine that some Nigerians are adopting. Akin’s relatives insist that he has to take a new wife to uphold the family honour, this is a step too far for Yejide and she will fight it with all her strength. She has a phantom pregnancy and sails past the usual nine months, but still no baby.
Akin’s brother, Dotun, marriage has just imploded, and he has moved in with them. He has a reputation as a womaniser and Yejide begins to consider that this may be the way that she can get the child that she and in particular her husband’s family crave.
Is a story full of love, life, death, tragedy with uplifting moments, all with the politics of the country as a turbulent backdrop. Yejide is in between cultures as the old Nigerian ways clash with the new world and Western medicine and there is plenty of deceit and lies as the plot twist and turns and the truths are laid bare for each person in the family to see. I thought it almost had too much going on with the subplots but it was neatly executed. The characters are flawed and believable and occasionally funny and shows the pressure that a can placed on one individual to perform what is expected of her. Adebayo has conveyed the way the county works through this small family is a style that is definitely her own. If you like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie then you should give this a go.
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