A Medieval Bestiary: When a book breaks your heart

Posted on September 20, 2012 by admin

A Medieval Bestiary. Published by eBook Treasures. iPad. £4.99

Reviewed by Maggie Koerth-Baker

A Medieval Bestiary is just not that into me.

We should have gone so well together. It was a scanned copy of The Royal Bestiary, a 13th century manuscript stored in the British Library, enhanced for the iPad with text and audio interpretation on every page. I was a giant nerd. Clearly, a match made in heaven.

But I don't think it's going to work out.

It's not that the book is terrible. In fact, parts of it are, objectively, pretty damn cool. We are, after all, talking about an opportunity to virtually thumb through the pages of a very old book. And the scans are excellent. You can see stains on the vellum, and the margin lines drawn by the scribe or illustrator to make certain that text and images were put into just the right place on every page. You can zoom in on the beautiful, colored and gilded drawings of bees and eagles, lions and centuars. On every page, there is, indeed, a little tab that you can tap to learn more about the animals you see in the pictures – especially helpful for the book's many imaginary animals, such as the leucrota. Leucrotas, you may be interested to know, happen when a male hyena mates with a female lion. The result of that partnership looks, for some reason, rather like a horse, but with a forked tail and a creepy, Jack Nicholson smile. The Medieval Bestiary assures me that the leucrota's "teeth" are actually a single piece of sharp bone, curved into a U shape. If I tap the "Listen" button, this information will be read to me by a soothing, female, British voice.

In short, A Medieval Bestiary does everything it promised to do. In fact, I'm sure this book could make somebody very happy. (Maybe an art student?) Just not me. That's because, while it does do everything it promised, A Medieval Bestiary does only that. And not a bit more. I, unfortunately, need the bit more.

The truth is that some of this is my fault. I read the description and then set my expectations rather higher than I should have. I can't really blame A Medieval Bestiary for being the book it is (and said it was) rather than the book I want to be. And yet. And yet.

A book like this needs context. I need to know about the genre of bestiaries, in general. Did the authors make up the clearly made-up animals (and the clearly made-up information about real animals)? Or were they writing down longstanding traditions? What was the point of the book? Am I supposed to be studying the natural world, or exploring my own morality? Do books like bestiaries have a role in the development of true taxonomy and biology, the same way that alchemy had a role in the development of chemistry and physics? I have no idea. Because A Medieval Bestiary doesn't tell me. In fact, I had to run a couple Google searches to even figure out the book's real name. This is the full extent of context it offers on itself:

A bestiary is a book of real and imaginary beasts, though its subjects can extend to plants and even rocks. It combines description of the physical nature and habits of animals with elaboration on the moral or spiritual significance of these characteristics.

This amazing book was produced in the first decade of the 13th century, and is one of the earliest bestiaries to feature vivid paintings of animals. They are set on gold grounds and in colourful frames, supplanting the line-drawn renderings that populated earlier bestiaries. These lavish illuminations would have made this a costly book to produce, and so it is likely that it was produced for an aristocratic, or even royal, owner who could read Latin or had a chaplain who could do so.

Even more frustrating was the interpretation within the book. A Medieval Bestiary is in Latin (and written in that sort of fancy medieval font that makes it difficult to read even if you do know Latin). But there is no translation of the actual text. The interpretation merely describes the illustrations. In some cases (but not all) that includes a summary of the text around the image, but even then that's almost worse, because what you get are stunted plot points of a story that probably would have been a lot more interesting to read for itself.

Basically, I look at A Medieval Bestiary and think of all that it could be, but isn't. Particularly with the iPad book format, there's such an opportunity here to add lots of context: History, philosphy, quotes and links to other works. Done right, a reader could come away from this understanding more about medieval society as a whole and the development of science from magical/religious art to rational tool. Instead, A Medieval Bestiary just wants to tell you what's going on in the pictures. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm too old and too wise to waste much time thinking I can change a book into something it's not.

Besides, in the course of breaking up with it, I discovered that A Medieval Bestiary had been kind of misleading me all along. I paid the equivalent of $8 for this book (I was offered a free review code, but couldn't figure out where to apply it during the ordering process). But, turns out, this isn't exactly unique content. In fact, the whole thing is available as free PDFs on the website of the Royal Library. Some of the scanned pages there even come with the exact same interpretation as is offered in the iPad version. Which just kind of serves to make the shortcomings of the iPad book that much more apparent. I don't mind paying $8 for something really cool. I mind paying $8 for an iPad version of something I can get for free as a PDF. If the publishers – eBook Treasures – were going to convert A Medieval Bestiary to iPad, why not take advantage of that and do some stuff that you couldn't do with PDFs?

Sadly, I think it's time this book and I went our separate ways. Hopefully, we can still be friends. And, who knows, maybe in the future, when A Medieval Bestiary has had some time to grow, we can rekindle the relationship.

The British Library: Books of Beasts in the British Library: the Medieval Bestiary and its context (the book published on iPad as A Medieval Bestiary is listed here as Royal 12 C. xix)

Explore and learn more about medieval bestiaries as a genre at The Medieval Bestiary website (not affiliated with eBook Treasures or the iPad version of The Royal Bestiary)

Image: An illustration from the The Royal Bestiary, depicting a unicorn laying its head on the lap of a lady. Presumably, the illustrator had never seen a unicorn, nor (one suspects) a lady.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net, the science columnist at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of Before the Lights Go Out.

When an Autism Diagnosis Comes as a Blessing

Posted on May 14, 2012 by admin

Blazing My Trail: Living and Thriving with Autism. Published by the author. Kindle, $7.99.

Reviewed by Steve Silberman

It's fashionable to say that autism has become a fashion.

If you think overweening psychologists are hastily applying labels like Asperger syndrome to quirky nerds who should be perfectly capable of making their way in the world with no special help, assistance, or accommodations, you have plenty of company. This past January, for example, the New York Times ran two op-eds in one day making that claim, including one by a young novelist named Benjamin Nugent who declared, "Under the rules in place today, any nerd, any withdrawn, bookish kid, can have Asperger syndrome."

The source of his authority on the subject, apparently, was that Nugent himself once received such a diagnosis as a teenager — at the urging of his mother, a psychology professor — and appeared in an educational video called Understanding Asperger's in a "wannabe hipster polo shirt." Now, however, Nugent has come to believe that the behavior his mother took for the telltale signs of a developmental disorder was merely his geeky teenage lifestyle, which included spending "a lot of time by myself in my room reading novels and listening to music." He went on to say that the cure for his misdiagnosis was moving to New York City, where he was finally able to meet other formerly bookish kids and schmooze with them in cafés. Having left his dreary foray on the spectrum behind him — followed by a "long time" of sulking in his mother's presence for having put him through the ordeal — he's now a professor of creative writing in New Hampshire.

Nugent's glib report surely provided a kind of comfort to some readers, who could return to their lives secure in the knowledge that many of these "Aspies" whom one keeps hearing about are simply "withdrawn, bookish kids" unnecessarily labeled by their histrionic parents with the help of psychologists eager to vault aboard the latest diagnostic bandwagon. After spending the past couple of years interviewing and spending time with autistic people and their families for a book, however, I can tell you that Nugent's experience is the exception, not the rule.

Everyone I've met who has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome or other form of autism faces profound challenges in day-to-day life. Even the most "high-functioning" autistic people (a term I now avoid using, because it renders certain forms of cognitive disability harder to see, while obscuring the gifts and competence of those branded as "low-functioning") work tremendously hard to find and sustain friendships; to manage the jarring changes that intrude into the most carefully planned-out schedules; to maintain their composure in noisy sensory environments; to get hired for jobs worthy of their intelligence and skills; and to navigate their way daily through a minefield of unspoken social rules and cues designed by and for people whose brains are wired differently from their own.

That's one reason the revision of the criteria for autism in the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the bible of psychiatry used to determine diagnosis, access to services, and reimbursement from insurers — has become so controversial. Even psychiatrist Allen Frances, who led the task force that developed the criteria in the DSM-IV, has gotten into the act, claiming that spectrum diagnoses have become "faddish." Many autistic self-advocates suspect the American Psychiatric Association is about to pull a diagnostic sleight-of-hand by shaving off a portion of the population that would have been eligible for an Asperger's diagnosis under the DSM-IV criteria, and give them a newly minted diagnosis of Social Communication Disorder, which has no legacy services or support systems. Some fear the APA is trying to finesse the increasing scarcity and overloading of services for autism, when budgets are being slashed in the name of austerity, by manipulating labels to lower demand.

There is no question that people diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome have an authentic need for help, long after they've "aged out" of the meager support provided to kids until they turn 21. Contrast Nugent's breezy anecdotes about pissing off his schoolmates by "trying to speak like an E.M. Forster narrator" with this description of attempting to absorb an ordinary conversation written by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, one of the most passionate and articulate disability-rights bloggers, and author of a new ebook called Blazing My Trail: Living and Thriving with Autism. "When I hear, I see the spelled-out words in my mind, and I have to internally read and translate those words in order to understand their meanings. As a result, even in quiet environments, I cannot keep up with verbal input for more than five or 10 minutes without falling behind, unless the other person slows down his or her speech and leaves a number of pauses in which I can respond. Pacing is everything."

Or consider this list of activities that Cohen-Rottenberg identifies as particularly challenging:

Food shopping

Sweeping and mopping the floor

Cooking

Driving

Running errands

Going to appointments

Planning, executing, and transitioning between tasks

Working at a job

Making friends

Autistic people in Cohen-Rottenberg's generation never got the chance to be diagnosed with Asperger's as kids, because the diagnosis didn't exist. It's easy to forget that just 40 years ago, there was no concept of a broad, inclusive spectrum that encompassed accomplished professionals like Temple Grandin and autistic people who may never learn to speak or put on their clothes in the morning without help. (Indeed, Grandin's debut memoir, Emergence, was initially billed as the first book by a "recovered" autistic person, because the idea that an autistic woman could enroll at a university, earn an advanced degree, and become a leader in a demanding field didn't seem possible.)

On websites for parents, an autism diagnosis is often framed as a heartbreaking event, an occasion for grieving the typical child they'd planned for. That's understandable and human, but it's illuminating to read statements like "Don't Mourn for Us" by autistic adults like Jim Sinclair, one of the pioneers who has inspired a generation of self-advocates to view their autism as an essential part of who they are, rather than as a pathology they might be cured of someday.

For Cohen-Rottenberg, who was 50 years old when she was diagnosed, the label arrived as a blessing. She felt she finally understood why she had been relentlessly bullied and teased when she was young; why she found certain environments that other people enjoyed (such as crowded restaurants) unendurable; why her first marriage went off the rails; and why she had to work so hard to parse non-verbal cues that her peers can take for granted. "I was like a person with mobility issues trying to run a marathon every day and keep up with people whose bodies worked differently from mine. Burnout was inevitable," she writes. "In a few short years, I seemed to go from a lifetime of being super-functional to struggling with basic things… It was my lifelong ignorance of being autistic that was catching up with me."

Unlike many of the ebooks reviewed at Download the Universe, Blazing My Trail offers no multimedia bells and whistles; it's just text with a few family photographs. But it represents the promising potential of the form to provide a venue for highly skilled writers who might never have been able to convince a corporate publisher that their message was capable of engaging a mainstream audience.

Cohen-Rottenberg's first ebook, The Uncharted Path, available as a PDF, recounted her difficult upbringing and her path to diagnosis. "My attempts at making contacts always felt a bit like trying to drive a car by gripping the steering wheel with my teeth," she wrote. Blazing My Trail continues the story, and addresses how she and her second husband, Bob, have worked as a team to manage her sensory sensitivities and social challenges while building a happy life together. Her unaffected honesty makes Blazing My Trail an uplifting journey — not in the usual sense of being a heroic saga of a narrator "overcoming" disability with pluck and guile; but by bearing witness to the power of accepting and celebrating oneself exactly as one is.

Cohen-Rottenberg comes through her writing as a wise elder of her tribe and a role model for young people, as well as a smart critic of social attitudes toward disabilities, both visible and invisible. "If we lived in a society that took human diversity for granted, that made room for difference as a deeply held value, every one of us would benefit," she says. "Our view of one another would become much more expansive, much more respectful, and much more compassionate. Ultimately, we might even see one another as perfectly different and perfectly human."

Steve Silberman is writing a book about autism and neurodiversity called NeuroTribes: Thinking Smarter About People Who Think Differently for Avery/Penguin 2013. He is a contributing editor of Wired magazine and one of Time's selected science tweeters (@stevesilberman). He lives with his husband in San Francisco.

Steven Gilbert Really, Really Wants You to Know About Poison

Posted on March 29, 2012 by admin

A Small Dose of Toxicology, 2nd edition, by Steven G. Gilbert, 2011, E-pub, Kindle, pdf,

Reviewed by Deborah Blum

In 2004, a Seattle-based researcher, Steven Gilbert, published a 280-page paperback titled A Small Dose of Toxicology. You might not guess from that modest title that the author was on a scientist on a crusade. But he was. He is.

"It's critical that we scientists be more engaged with the public," he says."We're talking about environmental issues that are having a bigger and bigger impact on our lives." He had big goals for the book too – he wanted it to contribute to public awareness, to encourage people to demand more of a government response, greater corporate responsbility. He wanted it to change things: "We have an ethical responsibility to our children."

Gilbert had a long-time background in the study of poisonous things. He received a PhD in toxicology from the University of Rochester in 1986. He was founder of the non-profit Institute of Neurotoxicology and Neurological Disorders in Seattle, an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. His particular area of study was in the area of low-dose exposures to toxic chemicals, an area that he was uneasily aware remained poorly understood.

And after some years, he just wasn't sure that the paperback was having the hoped for effect. Or that his publisher was particularly enthusiastic. So he decided to take it on as a DIY project. "I was originally disappointed. Then, I thought, well I could do this myself." First, he started a website, Toxipedia, which provides a free, searchable database of information on toxic chemicals. And then he started his own e-book publishing company, Healthy World Press, and published the second edition of A Small Dose of Toxicology himself.

The book is one of three now published by Healthy World and all follow the same model. They are offered as free downloads in either e-pub, Kindle, or pdf format from the Toxipedia website. There's a requested donation to Gilbert's non-profit but it's not required. "My first goal wasn't to make money," he said. "It was to have an impact."

I contacted Gilbert after discovering his e-book on the Toxipedia site. This was not, um, my first visit there in search of poisonous information. It's a natural consequence of writing a book about poisons and blogging on that same subject over the last few years. Really. Although sometimes I worry that the search history on my hard drive, riddled with visits to Toxipedia, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and their ilk suggests the habits of a fairly iffy character.

But anyway – and more to the point, I recognized in Gilbert's work an awareness not unlike my own - that we exist in a chemical world, that we've yet to map that complicated terrain or fully understand its risks. And that as our adventures in chemistry – taking as a simple example, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – change our planet, there's an imperative need to do tell that story better.

Still I was curious.

One can admire the crusade and still wonder if it's actually accomplishing anything. I wondered whether Gilbert's decision to go to e-self publishing improved the paper product in any meaningful way. And it's with those questions in mind that I now want to address the book directly. For comparison purposes, I downloaded it in two different versions on my iPad, as an e-pub (which went direct to my iBooks library) and as a pdf. It's also possible to simply read the book on-line here.

At its most basic, A Small Dose of Toxicology remains a reader-friendly reference book. As my pdf version tells me, it's still 280 pages. It has 21 chapters (although I had to count them because in the e-version, they are not numbered in the table of contents). The book starts with an overview – "Toxicology and You" , followed by a brief history of poisons and their studies, followed by chapters that focus on a specific toxic substance or issue. The first three chapters do this through a lens of everyday consumption: alcohol, caffeine, nicotine. The book then explores such famously poisonous materials as arsenic, mercury and lead before moving onto subjects such as as endocrine disrupters and radiation exposure.

In other words , it contains many small doses of information about many toxic things. You can see exactly why a poison-obsessed writer like myself would go for the material. But the better thing about it is that it's not written for someone like me. Gilbert is aiming for a more general audience (he tells me he hopes to see it used in high school classrooms) and he succeeds in making this a solidly written, clear, and occasionally fascinating exploration of toxic chemistry.

Of course, it's hard to make poison too boring. Still, he has a nice technique of using everyday examples to create level-headed explanations, for instance in this section on calculating a toxic dose:

"There are approximately 100 mg of caffeine in a cup of coffee. The actual amount of caffeine depends on the coffee beans, how the coffee was prepared, and size of the cup. And adult weighing 155 pounds (about 70 kg) who consumes this cup of coffee would receive a dose of 100 mg divided by 70 kg or 1.4 mg/kg of caffeine. The importance of including body weight becomes clear if you consider a child who weighs 5 kg (about 11 pounds). If this child consumed the same amount of coffee, the dose would be 100 mg/5 kg or 20 mg/kg, more than ten times higher than the adults."

And he weaves such examples throughout his story, later calculating the half-life of a cup of coffee in the body (about four hours), later again looking at the effect of pregnancy on that half-life question: "During the last two trimesters of pregnancy, caffeine metabolism decreases, and the half-life increases to about twice normal, or 8-10 hours. This means that after caffeine consumption both the material blood levels and the infant's exposure will stay higher for a longer period of time."

These facts and examples are neatly ordered. Each chapter begins with a "quick facts" chart, followed by a history of the specific poison and its use in society (lead in pipes and paint, mercury in thermometers and so forth), followed by case studies – the recent discovery of lead in children's lunch boxes where it was used to stabilize the plastic – followed by information about health effects, ongoing research, and government regulations.

Occasionally, though, the author goes beyond textbook into advocacy: "We need to reduce the use of lead in a wide range of consumer products," Gilbert writes in the chapter about that heavy metal. These opinionated moments and his sense of story telling, lift the book beyond standard textbook. Although I suspect that also means that it won't appeal to readers from the anti-environmental movement.

But, you may ask, couldn't he present the advocacy and information just as neatly in a print format? And I've come to believe that he couldn't. Oh, the downloaded books have some of the usual glitches we find in these early days of e-book publishing. I complained earlier that the table of contents in the pdf version didn't provide page numbers for chapters. The iBook version I downloaded skipped the table of contents entirely (I could have tried again for a better result but I just flipped over to the pdf for the information).

But, but, the e-version does work in ways that would just not be possible in print – by which I mean that it offers a dazzling array of live links to additional information and resources. The introduction is followed by four pages of links to regulatory agencies and other organizations around the world that archive information on toxic materials. Further links stud the text and there are yet more at the end of each chapter. Not to mention links to graphics, powerpoints, interactive posters.

Gilbert is especially proud of his Milestones of Toxicology poster, which you can link to from the book or here from the website. The poster has now been translated into ten languages, mostly recently Arabic. A Chinese translation is in the works. He also likes the idea that as publisher of his own e-book, he can keep it updated. When I talked to him, he was already planning to add new research papers into the book and, in fact, planning a third edition that would make better use of his website and contain more hyperlinks to Toxipedia.

Yes, empire-building already out in the digital universe. But in a good cause. We really do need to know more about poison.

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-selling The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She is a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.