Some great articles in here, but a few snoozers as well. The one about smallpox just about gave me nightmares. ( )

Some great articles in here, but a few snoozers as well. The one about smallpox just about gave me nightmares. ( )

So far I've found all the Best American Science & Nature Writing anthologies that I've read to be well worthwhile. I used to try to read Scientific American, but most of the articles were not well-written and I had trouble getting through them. These anthologies at least guarantee that the article will be well-written.

Some of my favorites from this year:

Helen Epstein's "Something Happened" on the questions surrounding how AIDS spread to humans
Richard Preston's "The Demon in the Freezer" about the stockpiles of small pox around the world
Hampton Sides' "This is not the Place" on the vicissitudes of Mormon archaeology ( )

2000 is the inaugural volume in the wonderful Best American series, which is still going strong 10 volumes later in 2010. In the Introduction and Forward the vision for the series is explained, and it says the pieces must be timeless and not ephemeral. Since 10 years have gone by, I can say about half of them still hold up, the rest seem like period pieces from another era.

My favorite pieces include Natalie Angier's "Men, Women, Sex, and Darwin" which is a revealing look at how men see women, and women see men, in the age old debate concerning older men being attracted to younger men (or the other way around). Angier suggests it's not because men are attracted to more fertile women for Darwinian reasons, but because women are attracted to older men because they are less egotistical(!). I don't know if I believe it, but there are other eye opening perspectives in this piece. Atul Gawande in "The Cancer-Cluster Myth" shows that it's nearly impossible to find any case where cancer cases cluster - in towns or streets or schools - due to environmental factors (toxic dumps etc..). Cancers cluster for no reason at all, it's the mathematical nature of the distribution of random events, yet people refuse to believe there is no reason and look for a cause.

Brian Hayes in "Clock of Ages" talks about the efforts to build mechanical clocks that will last thousands of years, such as the Long Now Foundation. Humorously, in the end he surmises any such clock will eventually cease to be maintained by future ancestors, because they will be far more interested in building their own long-lasting clocks, and so the cycle repeats. Cullen Murphy in "Lulu, Queen of the Camels" gives a fascinating overview of the efforts by wealthy Arab's to biologically enhance the camel, to run faster for racing, to produce more milk, meat, better temperament etc.. even to create a new species by cross breeding with Lama's. It ends on the ominous note that as the world sees more desertification from global warming, the camel will become more important and will be the domestic animal of the future.

Richard Preston's "The Demon in the Freezer" (later a book of the same name) is an epic piece on smallpox that is just as relevant today as it was 10 years ago. Forget Ebola, Anthrax or any other scary disease, a single person with a vial of liquid smallpox could do a "soft kill" of the United States because the virus spreads to fast, is so deadly, and there are no stocks of immunizations available to stop it. Apparently Russia has a few tons of the stuff leftover from the cold war without much control, it seems like a bigger threat than nuclear. Fascinating piece and extremely scary, written before 9/11 and the anthrax mailings.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2010 cc-by-nd ( )

They don't have 2002 in Sonoma here ~ ( )