Would also be beneficial for people without lyme disease just looking for a general health guide. A lot of the focus is on gluten free etc.

This book focusses mainly on the herbal treatments, but also gives a great general overview. It takes a dual strategy of aiming for two target audiences at once, patients, and experts. His aim was for patients to skip over the technical bits. I’m not sure if he pulled this off too well, it might have been confusing for a non-expert, but most of the technical stuff was okay for me anyway since it was in my area. But yeah, a must read on the whole for chronic lyme patients.

A great life story of Vietnam war refugee come comedian Anh Do. this was a very easy read, on the lighter side but still informative about what it was like on the individual and family scale.

I couldn’t help but think how different this story would be for somebody who arrived in this country now, the way we treat ‘boat people’.

I heard that a review in the papers said something about him being a ‘professional refugee’ in an accusatory way and I thought, what utter crap! is that a refugee allowed to tell their story? And aren’t they allowed to also be a professional? Would you prefer it if they were living on the streets? in any case, he really doesn’t focus much on the refugee side, most of it is just about basic family life.

This book started beautifully, then got a little bit slow, but it was really worth persevering to the end. The author holds the answers back patiently and strings you along cleverly in this tranquil setting till the very end.

I really enjoyed this book.

This book was written by a friend of mine, but had this not been the case, I would have recommended it anyway.

I read an advanced copy, but look out for it published through Ebookstoria, available for Kindle through Amazon. Her other story, written in the clouds, has already been published by them and is available through Amazon now.

her description from her fiction press account:

Judge’s Pick (and runner up public pick) Most Inspirational Character (Tam) La Campanella Awards 2010. The story of a girl finding her path in an authoritarian state. She grew up in a psych ward with no memories ( or so she thinks), so you discover her world as she does. Her passive existence inside the ward broken, she must come to grips with the relative merits of Freedom and Order, Right and Wrong, Obeying and Commanding, Power and Poverty, Past and Future.

The book deals well with the complexity of the different positions people on different sides of a conflict are placed in. it does not resort to simplistic moralism, and leave you questioning what you would do in the same situation.

In a brief history of Time, Hawking was attempting to explain complex physics to a general audience. He purposely left out mathematical equations and tried to skip ahead to explain complex ideas without the several years of background that a physics student would be given before trying to understand these concepts. considering how difficulthis aim was, he did a remarkable job, capturing the exclamation with jokes and metaphors which helped along the way. I could not help but think sometimes though, that it just isn’t possible to really understand this stuff without learning it properly. Although it has done a great job of cultivating an interest in theoretical physics which might then inspire people to go on and study it.

I studied evolution some time ago in my early university years, but it took me till now to go to the source and read the evolution Bible(I say with tongue firmly planted in cheek).

The first thing that struck me was just how much of the theory still stands, and just how little evolutionary theory has progressed since Darwin. There aren’t many areas of science where you can read a book published in the mid 19th century with so much still to offer to contemporary science.

The next thing that struck me was the immaculate precision, depth, and breadth of his evidence and logical arguments. It is a rare thing to see such perfectionist scientific methodology. He does not rest at simply finding one or two examples to prove something, but gives 20 or 30 and then says that he has more up his sleeve that won’t fit in the book. He then takes on board all the criticism directed at his theory, and actually turns it into evidence for why evolution by natural selection must be the case.

I was also struck by the humbleness of his achievements, and efforts to recognise other scientists in his field and other fields. If only Watson and Crick had given Franklin the same courtesy!

Darwin was also sufficiently confident in his evidence to point to holes in our knowledge of related fields necessary to explain natural selection. Pretty much all of these have since been filled in to perfectly complement the theory, namely:

1. The mechanism of inheritance — firstly Mendelian genetics. Legend has it that Mendel’s manuscript actually somehow found its way to Darwin’s desk and it never been read. Regardless, it took some time before the modern synthesis accepted that Mendel’s theory perfectly complimented Darwin. Secondly, the discovery of DNA as the physical embodiment of genes.

2. The age of the Earth. Darwin suspected that the few hundred thousand years at the time proposed as the age of the Earth was not sufficient to explain the rates of evolution required to arrive at today’s species. Now the estimate of a few billion fits nicely.

3. Continental drift, and more specifically the Gondwanaland origin of the southern continents. Darwin wanted to know how there could be common origin of plants from southern Africa, South America and Australia. Gondwanaland is the answer.

4. The intermediate form of the eye stalks of the flatfish. Only recently discovered, explained here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__JFFHxkTY8

5. Better methods for estimating historic climate change and the age of fossils.

Darwin briefly mentions in his concluding chapter that he underestimated the variation which does not come from natural selection and appears to occur somewhat spontaneously. This has more recently been attributed to random effects including founder effects, bottlenecks etc, and in no way contradicts natural selection, but rather complements it.

Darwin stayed comfortably away from human ancestry, but mentioned it as a field for interesting future research. With the recent discovery of Homo floresiensis (the ‘hobbit’ people found in the island of Flores and Indonesia), this is clearly still an incomplete picture.

Another area that has since been filled in a bit is the mechanism of sexual selection, although this is still up for grabs with a number of competing hypotheses (the runaway hypothesis, the handicapped hypothesis etc).

He also saw extinction as a natural consequence of the ‘economy of nature’, whereas these days we think of it more in terms of unintended human impact on the world and the consequences of anthropogenic climate change.

I would say that if you want an update on evolutionary theory up to more recent times (for whatever level of previous understanding of evolutionary theory you have), check out Richard Dawkins’ the Blind watchmaker. there is definitely something special though, about reading historical scientific texts, especially seeing how they came to a conclusion without the benefit of the data available today, that still holds solid after all these years.

You also have to admire his tenacity for collecting so much data himself in difficult circumstances, fighting seasickness and years away from his family and familiar surroundings. Okay, yes, he got to travel the world, but without the benefit of in-flight movies and reclining seats.

Reading this book as an adult, I wonder whether this was really intended for adults and not children.

As a child, I certainly would not have understood the fantastic line: ‘“I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think —" (she was rather glad there was no one listening this time as it didn’t sound at all the right word) …’

I would not have known the word Antipodes, nor antipathy to understand the humour in the line.

I think travelling overseas has helped me to understand Alice’s predicament where she comes across creatures with a completely different way of seeing the world, system of manners, beliefs around what is rude and what is polite etc. This aspect of culture shock is quite disconcerting.

This book has a way of fantastically making sense of nonsense and playing with words. The characters are complex even when only briefly introduced. You feel along with them the sorrow of the Mock Turtle, the fear of the dormouse, the anguish of the pig baby, and Alice’s endless frustrations at being misunderstood in a foreign land.

Really worth a second read as a grown-up, and maybe a few more :-)

In some ways I felt that this book taught me more about 1949 (the year it was written) than 1984. Constant war, alliances switching from one side to the other and pretending as if it had always been that way, rations due to poverty caused by the war,a fear of the threat of communism, competing ideologies, socialist states which actually maintained the status quo of power/ class relations(replacing the aristocracy with the party as the ‘high’ people), dividing the world up into blocs, the recent memory of Nazi/fascist states, neighbours turning on neighbours, children turning on parents, bombs in the streets of London etc.

I found myself wishing I could go back in time and tells George Orwell about London in the 1980s — Thatcherism, the height of capitalist greed is good, there is no such thing as society, excess consumption of food and other products, and also the future — I wonder what he would think of Facebook!

But then I think that some of this stuff really does apply well — the constant war with no intention of either side winning and not much fighting going on might be a good description of the cold war, and perhaps now the Gulf war. His idea of war as a means of consuming resources without changing the social status quo through the equal proportion of luxury goods was quite interesting, although I would say that really we have managed to find a state of consuming excess resources without upsetting the class structure without needing to pour all our resources into war. I did wonder though, for example when I heard that if the resources that had gone into the Gulf War had been used for another purpose, they could have established the hydrogen fuel economy infrastructure across the entire US. War certainly does suck resources out of the country, even now, although it hardly compares to Europe after the first two world wars.

That part of his book that is scarily true relates more to how governments (although perhaps also other agencies) use surveillance, use euphemistic language to get away with atrocities (‘collateral damage’, ‘un-American’, ‘pre-emptive strike’) etc.I must say that in my work in government policy, it did feel a bit like what Winston Smith was doing, only that mine came in by e-mail instead of a mail chute.

I was sucked in from start to finish, this book has not lost its edge in the slightest.

Technologically, it was a bit odd to look at a book supposed to be set around 500 years into the future, and they still don’t have computers/Internet/mobile phones/genetic engineering/nanotechnology/cloning/GPS/antibiotics/IVF/(and as the author later admits) nuclear power … … I mean, of course they didn’t if the first edition was written in 1932, clearly not the author’s fault for missing these,after all, science fiction writers are not infallible soothsayers,but it takes quite an imagination for somebody who has grown up with these things to picture a future without them.

What was more interesting than the technology (although his concept of a form of conception and gestation that is something like a mix of cloning, IVF, and incubating chickens under a heat lamp was intriguing), were his social ideas, with the societies in his book playing the roles of experimental groups. as with the technological predictions, socially we also had to suspend disbelief …they haven’t had a sexual revolution, a civil rights movement, the global spread of AIDS, a fear of over population and China’s one child policy, an awareness of global warming. Interesting, though, that his ideas on uninhibited sexuality came to happen in the 1960s and 1970s.

I had trouble understanding sometimes which side he was on morally. In the foreword of later editions, he expresses remorse for the fact that he had been a proponent of eugenics which he later decried after the Holocaust and the Nazi eugenics research. I did seem to detect a theme that most of the higher caste people seem to be European, and there were an awful lot of Africans in the lower caste groups (and he seems to have something against redheads as well). It seems as if for the most part he was saying that he thought it was great if we could segregate society according to predetermined roles without any room for social mobility. The only people that suffered were the odd exceptions who didn’t quite fit the mould. Then at the end, the lines blurred a bit, but he’s still holding on to this idea that social engineering is perfectly reasonable and achievable.

And then we have the famous soma, which has permeated into popular culture and I have certainly heard of before reading this book. I knew that Huxley had read about the soma of the Vedas, the hallucinogenic substance used for spiritual sacrifices to gods in the ancient Indo-Aryan religious texts. I was expecting there to be more of a moral judgement against using drugs for mind control to make society compliant. I almost wondered whether perhaps he actually thought that it was a good idea? Again, there was only really one character out of the entire society who suffered from soma, and that was only after she had been completely ostracised from society and irreparably depressed. I wonder if perhaps it is damaging tto portray such a wide scale use of such a powerful drug as so benign. Surely there were other people who suffered? Not that he should have to point the finger and say ‘drugs R bad’, but surely there could be issues of tolerance, dependence, a black market to get larger quantities, etc.

Overall I did quite like this book, but I think I came to it with too many preconceived notions about its content.