science

american-wolf-nate-blakeslee Like watching Planet Earth in your mind’s eye, American Wolf, is an adventure that lets you experience moments on Earth that most people haven’t even dreamed exist. Author Nate Blakeslee tells the story of O-Six, one of the most famous Yellowstone wolves. O-Six was shot by a hunter during a brief period in which wolves were removed from the endangered species list. Blakeslee tells O-Six’s story through a variety of lenses covering issues of politics, environmentalism, and humanity.

Told in a very Eric Larson style narration, American Wolf is a literary, non-fiction work that covers fact with the guise of fiction. Blakeslee’s sources include everything from interviews to field notes, and his method for compiling these facts build beautifully into a narrative form that tells more like a story than an account of history. Part of what adds to the literary element of American Wolf is the multiple points of view that Blakeslee takes up throughout his telling.

O-Six is only one of many characters who makes an appearance in American Wolf. Others include O-Six’s murderer, alias Steven Turnball; wolf expert Rick McIntyre; the wolves of O-Six’s pack and those of rivalry tribes; as well as senators, governors, and even Barack Obama. Blakeslee’s drama weaves between wolves hunting food, humans hunting wolves, humans fighting humans, and wolves fighting wolves all the while allowing readers to see all sides, even if one side is clearly preferred.

While Blakeslee advocates strongly for the wolves in American Wolf, he does not do so at the expense of the other players on the field. He very pointedly captures the arguments from all sides: arguments about the controversial reintroduction of the wolf to Yellowstone in the early 1990’s and the debates around when and if to remove the wolf from the engendered species list and thereby open the wolf to being hunted. We hear from ranchers, from hunters, from environmentalist, and politicians, seeing the intricacies of what one act can do to a person, a town, a country.

Blakeslee does a fantastic job of capturing the unique and desolate beauty of Yellowstone from the point of view of a creature few who’ve travelled to Yellowstone have even seen. Barreling through trees, battling against bears, fighting for survival, Blakeslee makes his readers feel like they are there, swooping through the forests and plains of Yellowstone beside the wolves. And when you aren’t in the park, the battles are just as heated in civilization.

A beautiful, moving, and essential piece of literature during a politically heated time, American Wolf was published in 2017 by Crown Publishing. You can purchase a copy of American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee at your local bookstore.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions is NPR correspondent Richard Harris’ attempt to bring awareness to the very poor science that he sees as dominating the biomedical field today.

While the title suggests a macabre narrative thread, Rigor Mortis is actually a pun on the lack of rigor that is going into the science experiments Harris discusses. Harris provides historical, social, and environmental contexts and stressors for the issues that he brings up, while also providing an overlay of solutions. Harris recognizes the difficulties in implementing his solutions given the various factors mentioned above. However, he nonetheless feels that scientific rigor must improve for science to keep moving forward.

In Rigor Mortis, Harris targets what he sees to be the major roadblocks in doing good science. Among these are the lack of incentive to do science well, the sheer challenge in reproducing studies that have already been conducted, the fact that most studies are done on animals and not humans and studies don’t always account for that, the lack of authentication of cell lines before use, a lack of guidelines for conducting certain types of experiments, and pressures surrounding publishing and funding. And these aren’t even all of the issues that Harris brings to the table.

The reproducibility problem is something that surfaces again and again in Rigor Mortis. As Harris points out from the outset, “there’s little funding and no glory involved in checking someone else’s work.” Not to mention the fact that people who try to do so often have a hard time actually reproducing the experiments. This difficulty can arise because of a lack of information from the original experimenters or social stigma that reproducing someone else’s work is in fact questioning that work instead of checking it.

From creating incentives for reproducing studies to simply sharing data and working collaboratively, Harris provides a host of suggestions for scientists, universities, labs, and journals to encourage the rigor of science and help the field to actually move forward, instead of spin in circles as he feels it so often does.

Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Richard Harris was published by Basic Books in April of 2017. You can purchase a copy at your local bookstore today.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

Centered on Books

Book Reviews, Literary Discussion, and Author Interviews

‘American Wolf’ by Nate Blakeslee

‘Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions’