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Originally posted by Scicurious
On April 8, 2009, at 12:02 AM
As I'm sure everyone knows by now, Sci LOVES getting books in the mail. Even if I paid for them, I still love seeing them show up in a box. Even better is when I pick them out of a store and get to cuddle them on the way home. So you can imagine how happy Sci was to see this show up at the door:
I've always wanted a specialized psychiatric dictionary, almost as bad as I've wanted a specialized pharmacologic dictionary. It's a good thing to have handy, and is an even cooler thing to get in the mail. So Sci pranced around happily with her dictionary for a minute. All I have to do is review it and...
...and then Sci realized she was going to have to READ THE DICTIONARY.
Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary, 9th Edition, by Robert J. Campbell, MD.
Originally posted by Brian Switek
On April 6, 2009, at 8:10 AM
One of the unwritten rules of creating a good horror yarn is that the location your story takes place in has to be as frightening as your monster. The setting almost has to act an an extension of the bloodthirsty antagonist; a place that can more easily be seen as its lair than a place of human habitation. In Lincoln Child's latest novel Terminal Freeze that place is Fear Base, a rotting military facility shivering the the shadow of Fear Glacier, and it is stalked by something utterly horrifying.
Readers of The Relic, another horror novel penned by Child and his sometimes partner Douglas Preston, will feel right at home as they delve into Terminal Freeze. Fear Base is a dusty, dark, and labyrinthine place just as foreboding as the natural history museum in which Preston and Child's first hit novel was set. (Child's choice of setting also closely recalls that of John Carpenter's The Thing, based on the short story "Who Goes There?") A further similarity to the earlier work is that the story follows a diverse group of characters with a scientist, in this case paleoecologist Evan Marshall, as the hero.
The basic storyline is as follows; a group of scientists discover something frozen in the ice, a creature with two predatory, cat-like eyes. At first they think it is a Smilodon frozen in ice, but as more information comes to light they are less sure of their initial hypothesis. Such a momentous discovery soon grabs the attention of the people who underwrote the expedition, the Terra Prime documentary network, and soon the scientists are sidelined as the film crew turns the base into a media circus.
The plan is to thaw the creature in front of a live worldwide audience, but before that happens the creature disappears. The Terra Prime bosses try to finger who stole the creature, and their anxieties increase of their crew starts to turn up dead. Maybe that thing in the ice wasn't dead after all, and those who stay at the base have an awfully difficult time figuring out how to kill it.
All of this makes for a familiar, but satisfying, story. It is not the best creature-centered horror story ever written but it is far better than most of the similarly-themed pulp put out in any given year. Still, I couldn't help but feel that Terminal Freeze is an amalgamation of other stories. The setting is almost straight out of The Thing, the protagonists try a method of killing the creature that fans of The Thing From Another World will immediately recognize, the creature's demise is very similar to that of the antagonist of Peter Benchley's White Shark, and there are many, many similarities to Child's earlier collaborative work, The Relic.
The correspondence between The Relic and Terminal Freeze is anything but coincidence. The scientists in Child's new book even cite the "Callisto Effect", a sort of saltationism with a vengeance, that was the pet theory of Dr. Frock in The Relic and Reliquary. It states that when a species becomes too numerous or starts to lose evolutionary vigor a monstrous superpredator suddenly appears and kills until it can kill no more. The new beast in Terminal Freeze is such an animal, a mammal/reptile hybrid that appeared at just the right time to cause the extinction of other creatures, even though its existence is never fully explained. In this way Terminal Freeze is sort of a sequel to The Relic as it clearly occurred in the same fictional universe, and I have to wonder (and, admittedly, hope) whether more novels about "Callisto Effect" creatures are being planned.
There are a few drawbacks to Terminal Freeze, however. First is that the characters are a bit stereotyped. There is the obsessed film producer, the stuck up actress, the wise old Native American, our "everyman put into the wrong situation" hero, etc. Those who act immorally ultimately get what is coming to them and it seems that the monster is an agent of higher powers as much as an earthly threat. This is conventional monster movie stuff; monsters act as a final judgment for the immoral. There is also a helluva lot of scientific jargon, particularly involving sound. I cannot explain why without giving too much of the novel away, but the scientists use so much jargon so frequently that they resemble the stereotyped scientists of 1950's b-movies more than any academics I personally know.
In some parts of the novel it seems that Child wants to show off what he knows about a given subject and does so through his characters. In one part the paleoecologist has to perform an on-the-spot autopsy. He protests that he has not studied a cadaver since grad school and wouldn't know what to make of it, yet he delivers a point-by-point study of the obliterated body that would make any forensic professional proud. Child falls into this trap of showboating his own knowledge through his characters multiple times in the book, and it certainly makes it seem more like classic schlock than realistic horror.
If you are a fan of creature features with a free weekend and a few bucks to spend I would certainly recommend picking up Terminal Freeze. It is quick, fun, and wouldn't make a bad movie if done right. If you're are not particularly fond of monsters causing mayhem in an isolated Arctic base, though, you might want to give this one a pass. It's satisfying for fans but those looking for a superior book might want to check out The Relic instead.
Originally posted by Jessica Palmer
On April 1, 2009, at 7:00 AM
I've been as eager as a brain-starved zombie to get my hands on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen mash-up concocted by Seth Grahame-Smith for Quirk Books. It sounded a like Regency Buffy: zombie-slaying Lizzy Bennet indulges in arch quips while skewering zombies and ninjas with her Katana, all in time for the Netherfield ball. The obvious question was, could this conceit actually work for the length of a novel?
Originally posted by Grrlscientist
On March 30, 2009, at 2:55 PM
Unlike most people who were raised in a religious household and grew up surrounded by religious people, I never experienced a "crisis of faith" since I never believed there was a god any more than I believed there was a Santa Claus or a Tooth Fairy. However, some of my friends are religious and because I value them as people, I have listened to them from time to time as they pondered aloud the deep questions that all of us face in the wee hours or after experiencing a significant loss or other life-changing event -- the same questions that journalist, William Lobdell, addresses so eloquently in his memoir, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace (Collins; 2009).
Joanne Manaster reviews two books about distinguishing science fact from science fiction in our everyday lives: Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre, and Lies, Damned Lies and Science, by Sherry Seethaler.
Originally posted by Grrlscientist
On March 27, 2009, at 10:59 AM
I have lived and worked with people whom I have decided, in retrospect, were more than merely hateful and mean-spirited, they were just plain evil. So when Barbara Oakley asked me to read and review her book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend (Prometheus Books; 2008), I readily agreed. This well-written and very readable book is an exploration of evil people who exhibit an extreme form of Borderline Personality Disorder, which profoundly damages the lives of so many people, including the author. But we are not alone: some of history's most evil dictators, bankers, corporate CEOs and murderers apparently suffered from sociopathy, which is the extreme form of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
Originally posted by Janet Stemwedel
On March 26, 2009, at 11:58 AM
What is it like to be a woman scientist? In a society where being a woman is somehow a distinct experience from being an ordinary human being, the answer to this question can be complicated. And, in a time and place where being a scientist, being a professional -- indeed, even being American -- was still being worked out, the complexities of the answer can add up to a biography of that time, that place, that swirl of intellectual and cultural ferment, as well as of that woman scientist.
The astronomer Maria Mitchell was not only a pioneering woman scientist in the early history of the United States, but she was one of the nation's first professional scientists. Renée Bergland's biography of Mitchell illuminates a confluence of circumstances that made it possible for Mitchell to make her scientific contributions -- to be a scientist at all. At the same time, it tracks a retrograde cultural swing of which Mitchell herself was aware: a loss, during Mitchell's lifetime, of educational and career opportunities for women in the sciences.
Originally posted by David Dobbs
On March 23, 2009, at 9:34 AM
I've had mixed reactions to Gladwell's writing over the years: I always enjoy reading it, but in Blink, especially, when he was writing about an area I knew more about than in his other books, I was troubled not just by what seemed an avoidance of neuroscientific explanations of attention and decision-making, but by an argument that seemed to come down to "The best way to make decisions is the quick gut method, except when it's not." I was also troubled by ... well, I couldn't put my finger on it. But Joseph Epstein has:
Too frequently one reads Gladwell's anecdotes, case studies, potted social-science research and thinks: interesting if true. Yet one feels naggingly doubtful about its truth quotient. So much Gladwell writes that is true seems not new, and so much he writes that is new seems untrue. Preponderantly, what he reports feels more like half- and quarter-truths, because they do not pass the final truth test about human nature: They rarely, that is, honor the complexity of life.
This was certainly the case with Blink, as shows glaringly if you consider it side by side with Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, which covers the same basic topic -- how we make decisions -- in a way that's just as fascinating, just as anecdote-rich, but much more cognizant of the breadth and course of the science on the subject.
It's not just that Lehrer's book comes later and is more up-to-date. It's that he looks at the science harder and more fully. Someone observed of Gladwell -- I can't recall the writer or the publication -- that he seems avoidant of science that is at all technical, lest it gum up the fine simplicity of his sentences and smooth flow of his prose. I think there's something to that, and it explains why he came up with a relatively facile answer to the question of how to make good decisions (in a blink, except when that doesn't work) rather than showing, as Lehrer did, not only that the best mode depends on the situation but that the art of deciding well is the art of recognizing which decision-making strategies and tactics will work best in a given situation.
There are strong lessons about science writing here, or about writing well on any complex subject.
Here's something new, ScienceBlogs Book Clubbers—hopefully the first of many. When we stumbled across Joanne Manaster's science book review channel on YouTube, we were riveted, and we thought you might be, too. We will be posting Joanne's videos here on an informal, ongoing basis, and we've listed her on our contributors page. Let us know what you think!
Welcome to The ScienceBlogs Book Club, Seed's virtual venue for hosting discussions on stimulating new titles in science, featuring reviews from across the ScienceBlogs network.
I've always wanted a specialized psychiatric dictionary, almost as bad as I've wanted a specialized pharmacologic dictionary. It's a good thing to have handy, and is an even cooler thing to get in the mail. So Sci pranced around happily with her dictionary for a minute. All I have to do is review it and...
What is it like to be a woman scientist? In a society where being a woman is somehow a distinct experience from 
