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Get Out Your Monocle! Exploring the Past in the Public Domain

Switzerland, by Sir Frank Fox. 

Originally published by Adam and Charles Black in 1914. Published by Project Gutenberg for Kindle and in other file types. Free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

If you limit yourself to reading just the ebooks available for free on the internet, as I have been doing lately, you wind up inhabiting the world prior to 1923. American copyright laws are complicated, but books published before that magical year, 90 years prior to this one, are in the public domain. It's about as close to time travel as you can reasonably get.

To really immerse yourself in the era, you can read the travelogues of Sir Frank Fox, a kind of early-twentieth century Bill Bryson. An Australian journalist who spent much of his life reporting for newspapers in London, he wrote books about the natural history, geography, and ethnography of various lands, and there are five of them—on Australia, Bulgaria, England, the Balkan Peninsula, and Switzerland—available at Project Gutenberg for free. For this review, I read Switzerland, published in 1914.

As a rule, one of the risks of inhabiting this pre-1923 world is drowning in a sea of unnecessary words. Today the fashion is to write with extreme clarity, projecting each scene into the reader's mind as if he or she were watching a movie, and to snip out all excess verbiage. Not a hundred years ago—reading Fox is a bit like codebreaking, with sentences that sometimes encompass eleven or twelve clauses and words that aren't used much anymore, like “waggish” and “beneficient.” His very first chapter includes a hilariously lengthy Socratic dialogue rebutting the idea that mountain people are more virtuous and vigorous than lowlanders, owing to some magical quality of the mountain air—not the introduction that a modern writer would use, but curiously charming nevertheless, once you adjust your ear to his style.

It's worth noting, too, that this pre-1923 world as represented by its literature is a pretty Anglocentric one. Fox's readers were British subjects, or former British subjects, so perhaps it's no surprise that he is eager to caricature “the Swiss race” and make his own sweeping generalizations about why they are the way they are, while simultaneously tearing down other sentimental depictions. And the chapter on Swiss prehistory is threaded with regular assertions that human society is on an ever-upward trend, with pathetic (yet noble) nomads at the bottom and the 1914 European at the crest.

But it's an interesting experience, revisiting the literary fashions and the inherited wisdom of a time not so long ago. To the modern reader interested in geography and ethnography, and not afraid to put on a monocle and go along for the ride, Switzerland is fun reading. The prehistory chapter includes a great summary of what was known about the villages-on-stilts that fringed many Swiss lakes in Celtic times. The chapter on local writers includes an anecdote about the time Byron, visiting the fashionable salons along Lake Geneva, attempted to scandalize polite society as he had in Britain, and failed. Apparently the Swiss found him tedious. And the chapter on the Alps, along with a compact treatise on the formation and decay of mountains, includes this note:

“M. Charles Rabot [a geographer and mountaineer] asserts that the glaciers in Argentina are also retreating, and surmises, from data perhaps not so well established, that there has been a general retreat of glaciers during the last half of the nineteenth century throughout Spitzenbergen, Iceland, Cetnral Asia, and Alaska. He suggests that the cause is a present tendency towards equalisation of the earth's temperature. Others more boldly affirm that the Swiss glaciers, as well as other great ice masses existing on the globe, are remnants of the last Ice Age, and are all doomed to disappear as the cycle works round for the full heat of the next Warm Age. But the disappearance, if it is to come, will not come quickly, and the doom of ice-climbing in Switzerland is too remote a threat to disturb the Alpinist.”

That passage falls with quite a different meaning on our ears today, and one of the great pleasures of reading Fox is looking for these harmonies and dissonances, the moments that reveal how much has stayed the same and how much has changed. If that sounds like fun to you, then there's a cache of free ebooks waiting for you on Fox's Gutenberg author page.

Happy time-traveling.

 

 

Veronique Greenwood is a former staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

 

The Wrong Way to Write about Epigenetics and Violence

"The Ghost in the Cell," by Scott C. Johnson. Published by Matter. Available via Web, ePub, Kindle. $.99.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

It's a prize that scientists have sought since the early nineteenth century: a biological marker that predicts violent behavior in humans. In the 1830s, phrenologists believed head bumps could reveal a criminal personality -- often, prostitutes and the poor were said to have bumps that marked them as deviants from birth. But today, it seems this pursuit may have moved beyond the realm of pseudoscience.

Thanks to recent discoveries, we have evidence that the genes of abused children are marked by the experience. Over time, these effects leave them prone to depression and make it harder for them to control their violent impulses. Could we be on the cusp of discovering a scientific approach to a social problem? In an essay for Matter magazine, former war correspondent Scott C. Johnson suggests that we are. Unfortunately, Johnson fails spectacularly to explain the complexity of this problem, and winds up telling a story that distorts both the science and the reality of abuse in many people's lives.

Autism, Inside and Out

Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect by Amy Harmon. A New York Times/Byliner Original. Available for Kindle, iPad, Kobo, and Nook, $2.99.

And Straight On Till Morning: Essays on Autism Acceptance, edited by Julia Bascom. Published by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. Available for Kindle, $2.99.

Reviewed by Steve Silberman

In the early 1990s, a mother told a conference of autism professionals that the upside of having a teenager on the spectrum at home is that they will never want to do the things that often get kids in trouble. There will be no need for awkward conversations about sex, because people with autism are either uninterested in or incapable of intimacy. Parents won't have to worry about a late-night knock on the door from the local sheriff, because autistic teens have no desire to party. If these generalizations now seem naïve, offensive, or some combination of the two, this mother had a lot of company in her assumptions. The notion that people on the spectrum are disinclined to seek connection with others is embedded in the very word autism, which is derived from the Greek word for self, autos.

One of the world's leading authorities on the subject, psychologist Tony Attwood, devotes only a handful of pages in his Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome to sexuality and relationships. Specifically, there are two references to "lack of desire," four to pornography, two to exploitation by predators, and two to celibacy. Casting a further chilling effect on the notion of romance, Atwood cautions potential suitors that people on the spectrum may find a friendly touch on the arm "unpleasant and even difficult to tolerate, let alone enjoy" because of sensory sensitivity, and compares embracing an autistic partner to "hugging a piece of wood." This is the historical backdrop that looms -- albeit invisibly to most readers -- behind the publication of a new ebook by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter Amy Harmon, Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect.

A Few Pounds of Microbes, Only Ounces of Insight

Honor Thy Symbionts, by Jeff Leach. Kindle

Guest review by Kevin Bonham

In 2003, the Human Genome Project--an effort to sequence every gene in a human being--was completed. The success, announced to great fanfare, was supposed to herald a new era in health care. Unfortunately, the promises of personalized medicine, in which treatments are tied to a person's genetic sequence, have not yet come to fruition. A few of the reasons for this are obvious (at least in hindsight). Knowing the location and sequence of a gene is one thing, knowing what it does is quite another. And understanding the role that a gene or gene variant plays in a disease, especially when many afflictions are influenced by tens or hundreds of genes, is even harder.

Complicating matters further is the re-emerging realization that genes are not destiny, and now many new "-omics" projects are beginning to gain attention. From the transcriptome (what genes are actually expressed), to the proteome (proteins and protein modification), to the epigenome (modifications of the DNA that regulate gene expression), more and more researchers are attempting large-scale analysis of entire biological systems and trying to extract meaningful information from enormous data sets. In his new ebook, Honor Thy Symbionts, Jeff Leach aims to tackle what is, in my opinion, the most fascinating of these new -omics revolutions: The Human Microbiome Project.

I desperately wanted to like Leach's book. Even though I've repeatedly heard the refrains, "There are 10 times more bacteria cells in your body than human cells," and "There are 100 times more bacterial genes in your gut than there are human genes," and "Bacteria account for 5 to 10 percent of your body mass," these facts never cease to amaze me. And I've been to enough microbiome-related research talks to know that the microscopic bugs that live in our guts can have profound impacts on our health--from metabolic disorders and type-II diabetes to multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease. The microbiome deserves a book-length discussion, but Honor Thy Symbionts falls short.

Problems

Problem 1 (I think this is the underlying reason for all of this book's problems): It's not a book, it's a collection of "essays" that are really just blog posts.

In fact, you can go to Leach's website and read almost all of the "chapters" for free on his blog. As I read his alleged book on my Kindle, it was abundantly clear that Leach simply did a large-scale copy-paste, without much additional effort. Spelling and grammatical errors abound, and phrases like "In a series of blog posts starting with this one[...]" only serve to call attention to the fact that I paid three dollars to download something I could just as easily have read on the Internet for free. In one chapter, the text refers to a graph that apparently didn't make it in the migration to Kindle. And since each chapter is really just a blog post, there's no cohesive narrative to tie the book together. Even the unifying "theme" of the microbiome is misleading, since several of the chapters don't even mention microbes.

 

Problem 2: A lot of the science is overstated.

Throughout this book, I had the same feeling of professional scientific unease I get when reading Malcolm Gladwell, without the benefit of Gladwell's ability to spin a narrative. For instance: 

Though improved hygiene has many benefits, scrubbing soil from our bodies and food has thrown our immune system into an over reactive tailspin and is responsible for the skyrocketing increase in allergies and autoimmune disease.

There are several lines of evidence suggesting that hygiene may increase the risk for many inflammatory disorders, but there are plenty of other factors that may play a role, and a marginal increase in risk is a far cry from an "over reactive tailspin."

In another case, Leach describes compelling research suggesting that fiber intake can alter the levels of certain types of microbes. But then he leaps to a prescription how many grams of fiber we should eat each day (an amount significantly higher than current nutritional guidelines).

And in yet another case, Leach spends several pages discussing research on the protein consumption of spider monkeys. Based on this study, he draws conclusions about everything from human diets to agribusiness, sociology and the economics of poverty and health, finally concluding the chapter by pointing out that

This all assumes, of course, that the protein leverage theory plays any role in all of this. Maybe it doesn’t.

At least he admits the ambiguity this time. But then why all the self-assured conclusions? At times I wanted to pull my hair out.

Further complicating this scientific over-reach is Leach's failure to cite the research he's referring to. There's an extensive collection of references at the back of the book, but no link within the text to the reference itself. This seems to be another symptom of copy-pasting from a blog post. The blog posts have web links, but they were apparently were stripped out when the conversion was made.

Problem 3:  Inconsistency of style and complexity.

Leach jumps back and forth from lofty rhetoric:

It is at this interface between the terra firma of our evolutionary past and the enhanced material standard of living[...]

to colloquialisms that border on inanity. Sometimes he makes the jump within a single sentence: 

In just a few thousand centuries, our kind has gone from nesting in trees, to making stone tools and digging roots, to kindling fires, to subduing flora and fauna, to erecting massive cities, and finally to downloading Angry Birds over 1 billion times (and counting).

Leach routinely throws in random and unnecessary digs at creationists. At one he point calls health-care workers who recommend baby formula "predatory." I found the constant movement between grandiosity and link-bait trolling to be jarring. 

Leach also routinely mixes lay-accessible and jargon-laden writing. I know what 16S ribosomal RNA and shotgun pyrosequencing (misspelled as prosequencing) are, but I doubt the target audience of this book will. In some cases, the jargon is useful and adequately explained, but in others it just seems like Leach is trying to show off.

Redeeming Qualities

Despite these glaring problems, I don't think Leach should be written off entirely. A lot of the science he talks about is interesting and important. Our obsession with cleanliness probably does play some role in the increased prevalence of allergies and autoimmunity, even if it's not the only cause. People probably should be eating more fiber, even if we can't make a specific grams/day recommendation. The cheap cost of corn and expense of protein probably explains at least a portion of the paradoxical association of poverty and obesity, even if we can't draw a straight line between spider monkey diets and our own. And the main thesis of this book, that our dietary decisions need to be increasingly informed by our emerging understanding microbiome, is almost certainly correct.

Strangely, Leach himself makes much the same point in the introduction to this book.

While researchers are cautious and right not to oversell the microbiome (much work is still needed to confirm causation for many ailments), the direct or indirect implication of microbes in a staggering number of ailments and diseases of the modern world, reinforces that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift from the orthodox notions of health and disease.

It's a shame that the author failed to exercise some of that caution himself.

Final Verdict

 There are too many problems for me to recommend this book. Prepare an enormous grain of salt and head over to Leach's blog instead. You'll get most of the same material, including web links to the relevant research so you can fact check any claims that seem overwrought. Meanwhile, I will anxiously await a book that tackles the microbiome and does justice to this amazing new field of research.

 

Kevin Bonham is a graduate student studying the immune system at Harvard University. He blogs about microbes and the immune system at We, Beasties on the Scienceblogs network.

A Year of Downloading the Universe

By Carl Zimmer

It's now been a year since we started exploring science ebooks here at Download the Universe. By the time we got the site off the ground, people had already started producing some digital gems. The first work reviewed at Download the Universe, The Elements, brilliantly dismantled the ingredients of a book and rearranged them to take advantage of the touch-sensitive iPad. In 2011 science writer Laurie Garrett had taken the leap to Kindle in order to write I Heard the Sirens Scream, a harrowing account of how the United States responded to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks.

Yet we were also dismayed to discover find a lot of wasted opportunities. David Dobbs delivered the first unbridled attack on a stinker, a silly pamphlet called Smile that promised that grinning will solve just about anything. Likewise, I reeled at The Demise of Guys, an incoherent ebook by a prominent psychologist convinced that men were lost to porn and online games.

Both of these books were published by TED, based on talks that they had hosted. While there's a lot of good stuff to be watched on TED, there are a fair number of talks that pretend to be based on solid science when, in fact, their foundation is a thin, cracking skin of ice. Smile and The Demise of Guys didn't seem to be carefully vetted by an editor who would push back against poppycock. Both ebooks felt as if they had been simply waved through like cars in a line of traffic. In fairness, we did give positive reviews to some other TED Books--Controlling Cancer, What's Killing Us, Living Architecture to name three. But that unevenness makes us wonder if the quality of ebooks depends on the author and the author alone.

Absentee editing was not unique to TED. Meandering Mississippi was based on a series of newspaper articles--by which I mean they were little more than cut and paste into a new format. An ebook about dinosaurs was little more than a digitized cable documentary. An ebook about the Titanic somehow managed to lack any passion.

It would be a shame if ebooks became nothing more than hastily assembled spin-offs of print books, documentaries, or lectures. Fortunately, as this past year progressed, we had lots of good reasons to keep our hope for ebooks alive. New ebooks turned up that exceeded our expectations, or simply popped up far off the grid, beyond our preconceived map of what ebooks could be. I still enjoy turning the pages of Leonardo's anatomical notebooks, intercalated with insights from modern anatomists. For some of the best ebooks the term "ebook" barely even functioned. Snowfall was a ravishing account of a deadly avalanche hosted by the New York Times web site. Ironically, when it was turned into a more conventional ebook (if ebooks are mature enough now to even be conventional), it became a far less satisfying experience.

This past year also offered hope in the form of new publishing outfits dedicated to ebooks, many of which were about science. They were few in number and small in size, but they typically showed a level of care and creativity that much bigger publishing companies lacked. Symbolia offers comics science journalism. Byliner and Matter produced some excellent pieces of "in-between" science writing--too long for a magazine article, too short for a book.

Top honors go to the Atavist, a Brooklyn publishing house that produced an impressive string of pieces over the past year, on subjects ranging from moon rocks to brain-controlled robots to the mysteries of consciousness to a hunt for tree kangaroos. While readers can buy a stripped-down Kindle version, they can also buy an edition with elegantly incorporated maps, audio recordings, and other features.

Like many other journalists and scientists, we also dipped our collective toe into the ebook waters. David Dobbs joined Download the Universe having already written the best-selling My Mother's Lover. Deborah Blum published an absorbing account of a sensational murder trial called Angel Killer. I helped build an app to accompany a textbook about evolution I co-authored. Seth Mnookin edited a Matter ebook about regenerating organs.

I expect we will delve deeper in the year to come, both as writers and as reviewers. Over the past year, we've published over 80 reviews and essays, and we've got a healthy inventory of titles we're looking forward to writing about in the months to come. The ebook business is continuing to grow, but it's still hard to find out about new science titles. We plan to keep making it a little easier.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

Great Investigations Deserve Great Ebooks

In The Wrong Hands, by Ryan Gabrielson, California Watch/Center for Investigative Reporting. $.99, Kindle Single.

 by Deborah Blum

For well over a year, the investigative reporters at California Watch (part of the non-profit center for Investigative Reporting) have been pursuing a story involving abuse of mentally ill patients in state care -  and of institutional indifference to that abuse.

That investigation, led by Ryan Gabrielson, focused on five state operated centers that house "some of society's most vulnerable citizens - men and women with severe autism, cerebral palsy and other intellectual disabilities living in taxpayer funded institutions." To sum up the results, it found that center residents had been beaten, tortured and raped by staff members. And that a police force, set up to protect resident safety, had apparently helpfully looked the other way.

The stories, first detailed in a series called Broken Shield, are best described as horrifying, a litany that includes the taser burning of a dozen patients, the rape of others, and the death of a quadriplegic patient with cerebral palsy, who died of internal bleeding after three cotton-tipped swabs tore through his esophagus. None of these incidents, as the investigation makes clear, were thoroughly evaluated by the well-paid police force assigned to those centers. In many cases, including the worst ones, no charges were filed.

There's another interesting issue here--the platforms which California Watch used to tell this story--but I'd rather start by considering its importance, its indictment of the way we care for helpless and troubled people, in particular the system in California. And to acknowledge that I'm not alone in this reaction. Everyone from newspaper readers to state officials was appalled. The stories prompted major reorganizations of centers, investigations by outside experts, and new legislation, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, mandating far stricter law enforcement oversight. This month, the state agreed not to seek Medicare reimbursement for care at the most troubled centers. This is a story that matters, one of the reasons I wanted to bring it up here.

These powerful changes are foremost a result of really powerful reporting. But California Watch also amplified that effect by making sure that its findings were heard across multiple platforms. The stories were placed on its website. They were distributed to newspapers across the state, running in all eight of the state's largest newspapers. They were showcased on radio programs, partly through the center's partnership with KQED. Videos were provided to television stations. California Watch even produced a graphic-novel style video, which illustrated the trauma suffered by patients and their families.

And in December, the Center for Investigative Reporting published the series as a 99-cent Kindle single titled In the Wrong Hands: How a Police Force Failed California's Most Vulnerable Citizens. In one sense, the single is perhaps the least impressive part of this approach. It's a workmanlike summary of the original series rather than a uniquely good e-publication in its own right. The story-telling remains in a basic newspaper format;  there's a puzzling lack of illustration, audio, video or really anything would bring additional life to the telling.

This is less of a problem in a gorgeous narrative or exceptionally fun-to-read story. But this is neither of those things. In the Wrong Hands reads like what it is --a repackaged newspaper series rather than a well-articulated book. It's dense enough and dark enough to occasionally be a challenge to read--exactly the kind of story that benefits from other kinds of media--perhaps even some of California Watch's own novelistic video. I suspect that with a little more time and care, this could have been  a more substantial and more meaningful e-single, one that would have reached  an even wider audience (when I checked on January 21, its Kindle single standing was 364,414).

I respect--and even admire--the California Watch model for distributing news and for solvency in a digital age (briefly outlined here at the Nieman Journalism Lab). But as someone who also has hopes for the e-publishing age that we are growing into, I'd like to argue for setting a high professional standard for e-books, both short and long, one that really moves them beyond old-time print. If we're building a new model of story telling then there's nothing wrong wanting it to be a really good one.

And, after all, a great investigation--which In the Wrong Hands was--deserves a great platform.

Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook, published her first e-single, Angel Killer, last year. She writes for numerous publications, blogs about chemistry at Wired, and teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Darwin In the Age of Ebooks

The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits , by Charles Darwin. (Free: available on iBooks and Kindle)

Reviewed by Virginia Hughes (guest reviewer)

Charles Darwin wrote many books and many types of books, the most famous of which you can download for free on iBooks or Kindle . How to choose?

If you want a really good story, go with Voyage of the Beagle, the charming journal Darwin kept while working as a naturalist on a ship that went from England to South America, Tahiti, Australia, the tip of Africa and back. The first sentence is enough to pull you in:

The neighbourhood of Porto Praya, viewed from the sea, wears a desolate aspect.

If you’re looking for scientific import, nothing beats Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the book that outlined his theory of natural selection and would forever change biology. You might also try The Descent of Man for provocative ideas about race, gender, and sex, or The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals for its lively photographs of faces that would inspire a future science of lie-detection.

It’s hard to think of a reason to read Darwin’s last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, unless you’re curious about exactly those things. But for all you vermiphiles, there’s probably no better format for this volume than an e-book.

Darwin began thinking about worms in October of 1837, a year after disembarking the Beagle, when his uncle Josiah told him a curious story. Three years before, Jos had spread a layer of cinders on a field near his home in the English countryside. Since then the cinders had sunk several inches and been replaced with a layer of fine and uniform particles of soil known as vegetable mould. Could it be the work of the worms?

Intrigued, Darwin spent a few weeks closely observing his uncle’s fields. Sure enough, he discovered that the grass was littered with tiny cylindrical castings of worms. The next month, he formally presented his uncle’s idea to the Proceedings of the Geological Society of London: The digestive process of earthworms, en masse, is responsible for creating the vegetable mould that helps crops grow. In this way, Darwin said, the lowly worm is a “geological power.”

That short paper planted a seed for a more substantial book about worms but, because of his many other writing projects, Darwin didn’t get around to finishing it for 44 years. The book isn’t terribly long—some 222 pages on my iPad—but after reading a few pages I thought it might take 44 years to finish.

For better or for worse, the first two chapters—Habits of Worms and Habits of Worms Continued—feel like a transcription of Darwin’s laboratory notebook. Some of his experiments are fun to read about, like when he exposed his potted household worms to the noise of a metal whistle, a bassoon, piano banging, and shouting, all to prove that the critters were deaf. Other observations are not so fun, like the 23 pages describing which end of a leaf a worm pulls into its burrow (for English plants: 80 percent were tugged from the tip, 9 percent from the base, and 11 percent from the middle). Even in the tedious sections, though, the narration has a satisfying intellectual payoff. For example, Darwin uses the worm’s leaf-pulling methods—which are neither random nor instinctual—to argue that the animals have some level of intelligence.

After 86 pages of worm habits, Darwin finally gets into the meat of the theory, describing in detail the soil observations that he made at his uncle’s house and in the decades since. The next chapters are more historical and thoughtful, asking how worms may have played a part in the “burial of ancient buildings” and the “denudation of the land.” It may have been no coincidence that Darwin chose decomposition as his final scholarly subject. By that time he was old, sick and beginning to talk a lot about his own death. He died in April 1882, six months after Worms was published.

While slogging through the book, I kept wondering how it could have been so popular, selling thousands of copies within weeks. Not only that, but Darwin apparently received a lot of fan mail. Readers sent him all sorts of their own stories and questions about earthworms.

Perhaps, rather than a well-paced narrative meant to be read cover to cover, Worms was bought as a handy reference book. Back then, after all, if you saw a strangely shaped worm mound in your backyard garden, you couldn’t do a Google image search to diagnose it.

Thinking of it that way, maybe Worms was a proto-Wikipedia. Darwin constantly references the worm writings of other naturalists, just like Wikipedia’s numerous footnoted citations. Each chapter begins with a paragraph of disjointed clauses that outlines the ideas within, just like the hyperlinked contents box at the top of every Wikipedia page. And you can read the book’s chapters in practically any order—easy as scrolling down a browser window.

Actually, reading Worms the e-book is arguably better than reading about worms on Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, I could bookmark multiple pages, highlight passages and write notes in the margins. Best of all, I was never left wondering about the validity of the source material: This is the authoritative voice of one of the greatest biologists of all time.

So if you’re into worms, by all means download Worms and crawl into its deep, sleepy passages. If you’re not into worms, just read the Wikipedia summary.

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist and Popular Science, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

Fear and More Fear in Central America: An Ebook Look at John McAfee

John McAfee's Last Stand by Joshua Davis. Published by Conde Nast. Kindle, $0.99, or as part of Wired's Nook ($4.99) and iPad ($3.99) editions of the Jan 2013 issue.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

When the Belizean government announced on November 12 of last year that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning about the murder of his neighbor on the white-sand island of Ambergris Caye, it was just the latest, grimmest installment in one of the strangest tech stories of 2012. The former anti-virus tycoon's Central American escapades had become news six months prior, when his jungle compound had been raided by the government on suspicions that he was manufacturing meth.

No drugs were found, but after the raid, Joshua Davis, a Wired contributing editor, began investigating McAfee's doings, spending time with the gun-spangled man himself and his array of young female companions. When McAfee went on the lam after the murder, saying he'd be killed if he turned himself in, Wired published Davis' profile as a 47-page ebook, John McAfee's Last Stand. It paints a picture of a fascinating paranoiac whose fear brought him to the top of the anti-virus industry and to the bottom of a hole dug in the sand where he hid, covered by a piece of cardboard, while officials searched for him after the death of Gregory Faull. It's an engaging read, even now that further chapters, including an escape to Guatemala, an accidental disclosure of his location by Vice magazine, and expulsion to Florida, have been added to McAfee's story.

Snow Fall: A Gorgeous Ebook Comes to Life on the Web

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. By John Branch. The New York Times and Byliner.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

On Wednesday night, a mysterious new article appeared on the New York Times site. News of it began to leak out via Twitter, and people who headed over to read the first chapter of Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, an account of a backcountry ski run turned deadly, found a piece not only grippingly reported but physically gorgeous, laced with soaring animations of the mountain, a looping GIF of the wind over the snow, and haunting audio and video captured by the survivors. Here's a sample of the reaction, from Atlantic correspondent Yoni Applebaum:

That @johnbranchnyt feature on Tunnel Creek? If this is the future of journalism, it looks beautiful: nyti.ms/UGCPpU

— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) December 20, 2012

 

By Thursday morning, the rest of the story--five further sections in all--had been posted, and we'd learned that Snow Fall, a groundbreaking example of journalism enhanced by the web, would appear without multimedia features in the Sunday edition of the NYTimes and be the first ebook released through a new collaboration between the New York Times and Byliner.

I've read the story and examined both the Web and ebook versions, and I'm here to tell you: buy the ebook if you'd like to carry the text around with you, but please, please do yourself the favor of reading it online.

The story starts on the back side of Cowboy Mountain in Washington. Two days' powder lie thick over the landscape, and professional skier Elyse Saugstad and a group of 15 other ski industry professionals and local experts have just joyfully begun the descent of an out-of-bounds run named Tunnel Creek. Standing in a copse of old-growth trees, Saugstad looks uphill and sees something that should not be there: a two-story-high wall of snow. Seconds later, she and an unknown number of others are buried in a river of ice that, if it had not already crushed them to death, would suffocate them within minutes.

These skiers and boarders weren't noobies. Over and over again, you hear, in the survivors' own voices in the embedded videos, that this was a dream team of backcountry skiers with decades and decades of experience between them. They would have known if it had been unsafe to go. But in meticulous reporting John Branch gently teases out the new technologies that have given out-of-bounds skiers enough of a boost in confidence that avalanche deaths have leapt in recent years, along with the cultural effects—the politesse, the bravado of even smart skiers—that clicked together like the parts of a deadly machine in Tunnel Creek.

The comparison that immediately comes to mind is with Young Men and Fire, the last book written by Norman Maclean. Maclean's 1992 masterpiece is a reconstruction of the Mann Gulch Fire, a disastrous 1949 blowup in Montana that consumed 12 smokejumpers, the elite fire-fighting parachutists of the Forest Service, in less than 10 minutes. As I watched the animations laying out the tracks each skier took, and watched the helmet cam videos of Saugstad and others taken just before, and after, the mountain fell, I thought, “This is what Young Men and Fire would have looked like, had the smokejumpers had video on their helmets.”

If the Byliner version, which has only text and a few photos, were the only version, I'd be crowing over it. But having seen the beauty and skillfulness of the web version, I have to wonder why the New York Times did not release Snow Fall through The Atavist, which has made it their business to tell multimedia stories in ebook form. Perhaps there's a business question in play here. After all, the Atavist offers stripped-down Kindle versions of their stories, which sometimes climb up Amazon's best-seller charts. For now, there may just not be enough demand for elaborate programming for these long-form features. And since the Times has already built Snow Fall an online home--and, as of Friday morning, sold most of the advertising slots in it to Sotheby's--they may see the ebook simply as a way to skim a little more cream off what they've already done, without investing too much more work.

That's a bit of a pity. But at least we'll always have the Web.

 

Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

Cold Blooded: A Doping Investigation Primer

Cold Blooded by Jere Longman. $1.99 (Amazon Prime members can borrow the book for free.) Available as a Kindle single.

Guest review by Christie Aschwanden

In early October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released hundreds of documents implicating seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong in something the agency dubbed the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen. Jere Longman's Kindle Single Cold Blooded is essentially a Cliff Notes version of the USADA report.

In just 49 pages, Longman's ebook provides a cohesive synopsis of the case. Condensing the material was no easy feat. The USADA report contains 200-plus pages, including affidavits from more than 25 witnesses and hundreds of supporting documents, such as bank records and blood test results. Longman expertly turns this data dump into a readable summary that contains both the most important evidence (Armstrong's payments of more than one million dollars to Italian doctor Michele Ferrari) and the most amusing, such as Armstrong teammate David Zabriskie' parody of the Jimi Hendrix tune Purple Haze,

EPO all in my veins

Lately things just don't seem the same

Actin' funny, but I don't know why

'Scuse me while I pass this guy

The Zabriskie anecdote aside, Longman's writing is detached and uninspiring, no doubt because he pieced the story together from the USADA documents rather than first-hand reporting. The following passage is typical:

Shortly after the 2000 Tour de France ended, French authorities began an investigation into suspected doping by Armstrong and the Postal Service team. An anonymous letter had been sent to prosecutors in Paris. A television crew had spotted two men - Postal Service team personnel - tossing medical waste into a trash container.

For readers unfamiliar with cycling and the Armstrong case, Longman's book supplies a quick yet substantial overview. The work also stands as a convincing example of the ebook format's utility for condensing a bolus of evidence into a useful summary. I can imagine similar treatments for the next celebrity scandal or even the latest IPCC report.

Those familiar with the Armstrong case will find nothing new in Longman's ebook. If you're looking for character development or analysis, you're better off reading From Lance to Landis by David Walsh, or his forthcoming Seven Deadly Sins. Longman's colleague at the New York Times, Juliet Macur, also has a book in the works, and the USADA case report itself makes fascinating reading. Some of the affidavits weave narratives as compelling as you'll find in any novel.

The Lance Armstrong that emerges from the USADA report is a narcissistic bully who becomes increasingly vindictive toward those who dare to question him. He slaps lawsuits at his accusers and at one point, he sends a threatening text to the wife of a teammate who's set to testify against him. The evidence outlined in Cold Blooded leaves little doubt that Armstrong was a leader in what USADA CEO Travis Tygart calls a conspiracy "professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices." As ESPN sports writer Bonnie Ford wrote following the report's release, "anyone who remains unconvinced [of Armstrong's guilt] simply doesn't want to know."

There's been a lot of deliberate not knowing over the years, and Armstrong was not the first to exploit it. Doping has been a part of cycling since nearly the beginning. The sport did not originate in the Olympic tradition but as a competition to get from here to there as fast as possible on your own steam. In the cycling's early days, racers often took cognac or amphetamines in hopes of boosting their performance. Back then, such practices weren't considered cheating. Drugs were eventually banned to protect rider health, not as a result of ethical qualms.

When U.S. team doctors and coaches blood doped members of the 1984 Olympic cycling team, they broke no official rules. Some of the team's riders refused to participate in the doping scheme, but they came to that decision via their own moral standards. Rules against doping received very little enforcement until the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its U.S. affiliate USADA in 1999, and even then, cycling's governing body remained more interested in protecting its sport's reputation and its rainmakers than in any notions of fair play. In Cold Blooded, Longman describes how Armstrong paid the UCI to cover up a positive test at the Tour of Switzerland in 1999 and the New York Daily News has reported that Nike, a long-time sponsor of Armstrong and his cancer foundation, helped pay for the bribe. 

Armstrong didn't invent doping, he just did it better than anyone else before him. He understood from the beginning that fans wanted something bigger than life to believe in, and he was more than willing to oblige. His triumph over cancer gave hope to countless patients around the world, and cancer became his shield to deflect criticism. Hope was a product he could sell to his sponsors and the public. He built an empire around a false story. As I've written elsewhere, even his comeback from cancer was not as remarkable as it seems. His fraud succeeded with the complicity of accomplices and bystanders who stood to gain from his success.

Some of these co-conspirators, such as team director Johan Bruyneel and doping doctor Michele Ferrari also face sanctioning in the USADA case. Other participants in the doping culture, like Bjarne Riis and Jonathan Vaughters, remain leaders in the sport to this day.

Cycling was dirty when Armstrong arrived at the sport. The question that remains is, will it remain dirty now that he's gone?

 

Christie Aschwanden is a contributing writer for Bicycling Magazine. She has written about doping for NPR, New Scientist, The Washington Post, BBC Future, and Smithsonian. She blogs about science at Last Word On Nothing.