COOKED by Michael Pollan

Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

--Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

In The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), science journalist Michael Pollan looked at how food is produced. In his next two books, In Defense of Food (2008)and Food Rules (2009), he told us what we should eat (see above). In his most recent book, Cooked (April 2013), he investigates the methods, biology, and philosophy of food preparation.

I loved Omnivore: it's one of those rare books that can get a person fascinated by a topic that previously held no interest whatsoever. The two Food books were thin but full of wise advice, such as Pollan's now-famous seven-word guide to good eating.

Cooked, at 480 pages, should have been thinner.

I enjoyed Pollan's introduction, which is essentially the speech I heard him give at a nearby college a couple of months ago. Cooking, he says, is what separates humans from all other species--or at least so wrote the Scottish biographer Boswell in the 18th century, the French gastronome Brillat-Savarin in the 19th, and the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss in the 20th. In fact, numerous writers suggest, cooking (rather than hunting and gathering) made civilization possible.

Unfortunately, Americans in the 21st century seem to be devolving: we now spend less time than people of any other nation preparing our meals, though we watch an incredible amount of cooking-related TV. "The premise of this book," Pollan writes, "is that cooking--defined broadly enough to take in the whole spectrum of techniques people have devised for transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things for us to eat and drink--is one of the most interesting and worthwhile things we human beings do."

Pollan explores four of these techniques in the book's four sections, "Fire" (grilling: barbecue), "Water" (braising: stews), "Air" (baking: bread), and "Earth" (fermenting: sauerkraut, cheese, wine, beer). In each section he observes and often works alongside masters of the particular craft, not only describing each process but also telling how to reproduce the ancient methods today, how they work biologically, what they offer nutritionally, and how the results taste.

Part of the fun of a book by Pollan is the way he interacts with his topic. My favorite story in Cooked is about the night he and his son, Isaac, decided to "cook" a meal using only convenience foods bought at Safeway. It's not exactly a spoiler to let you know the outcome: more time, more expense, and less family time at table than when they cooked meals from scratch. And besides, after the first three bites everything tasted alike.

Still, 480 pages turned out to be more than I wanted to know. I found myself skimming though many descriptive pages that needed to stop circling and come in for a landing. Pollan could have condensed his material into one fantastic magazine article, or maybe even four of them. His book-length treatment, however, seemed excessive.

Besides, I wondered, why was the guy who told us to eat "mostly plants" devoting maybe three-quarters of his book to meat and dairy?

If you haven't yet read a book by Pollan, don't start here: you are more likely to be entranced by The Omnivore's Dilemma. If you already love Pollan's writing (or his frequent commentaries on TV), go ahead and read Cooking. Skim if you need to: just as you're thinking, he does go on, doesn't he, you'll hit a trenchant observation that keeps you reading. Like this, for example, on the role of alcohol in religion:

Alcohol has served religion as a proof of gods' existence, a means of access to sacred realms, and a mode of observance, whether solemn (as in the Eucharist) or ecstatic (as in the worship of Dionysus or, in Judaism, the celebration of Purim). The decidedly peculiar belief that, behind or above or within the physical world available to our senses, there exists a second world of spirits, surely must owe at least a partial debt to the experience of intoxication. Even today, when we raise and clink glasses in a toast, what are we really doing if not invoking a supernatural power? That's why a glass of water or milk just doesn't do the trick.

I'll drink to that.

FLIGHT BEHAVIOR by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver's newest novel, Flight Behavior (November 2012), may be just the book you're looking for for your next book group meeting.

The main character, Dellarobia Turnbow, is a 27-year-old mother of two who for years has felt like flying from her nest. Just as she is about to do something definitive, she encounters about a million Monarch butterflies who, for reasons unknown, have flown from theirs. Complications ensue.

Here are some reasons Flight Behavior is so suitable for book groups:

• Dellarobia may be an Appalachian farm wife, but all kinds of readers will identify with her if they've ever married, raised children, or wondered what a completely different life would be like.
• You could spend hours talking about marriage as portrayed in this book: what makes it real, what constitutes infidelity, whether Dellarobia should stay in hers or leave.
• Or you might prefer to discuss climate change: what it's doing to the earth right now, whether the events in this book could actually happen, and how to  deal with it (deny? study? protest?).
• Even more interesting, to me anyway--you could look at the culture clash represented by Dellarobia's neighbors, on the one hand, and the various visitors to her neighborhood, on the other. Are Kingsolver's portrayals accurate? Do you know people like these? Are they doomed to misunderstand each other forever?
• Or you might try going beyond the story itself to predict what Dellarobia is going to do next, and to imagine how her actions are going to affect the other characters in the book. What should she do?

I enjoyed the story from start to finish. Kingsolver has a great sense of humor. She is gentle with all her characters: even the less lovable ones surprise us with good traits. She is a keen observer of people as well as of nature. It's not surprising to learn (from her website) that she lives in Southern Appalachia and raises sheep. As someone who identifies with conservationists more readily than with rednecks, I was especially delighted whenever she turned the tables on me and my prejudices and showed me just how wrong I can be.

The paperback isn't due until June, but the hardcover is inexpensive from Amazon right now. Or you could make this a summer selection.

NO EASY CHOICE by Ellen Painter Dollar

I bought a car recently, and the dealer just sent me an online survey. It asks a lot of detailed questions and asks for yes-or-no answers. Unfortunately, it's been several weeks since I was in the dealer's showroom, and I have no idea if the salesman offered me a drink, for example, or if he showed me how to work the sound system. So I tried to leave some questions unanswered, but the survey won't allow that. Either I say yes or no, or I don't take the survey at all.

How contemporary, I thought. And how destructive of attempts to tell the truth.

Ellen Painter Dollar does not say yes or no in No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Faith in an Age of Advanced Reproduction, but she tells the truth. In a book that is part memoir, part journalism, she recounts her lifelong struggle with osteogenesis imperfecta (OI)--her own and her daughter's.

OI, she writes, is "a genetic disorder better known as 'brittle-bone disease.' Frequent broken bones, often as the result of little or no trauma, are the hallmark of OI." People with OI will spend a lot of time in emergency rooms. They will have a great deal of pain. They may also have "muscle weakness, hearing loss, fatigue, joint laxity, curved bones, scoliosis, blue sclerae, dentinogenesis imperfecta (brittle teeth), and short stature," says the OI Foundation's website. They may look funny, especially to mean kids in middle school. Because of their frequently broken bones, their parents may be accused of child abuse. And half the kids born to people with OI are likely to have OI too.

Except that nowadays, reproductive technology offers potential parents a choice. For nearly 35 years, it has been possible to fertilize an egg in a test tube ("in-vitro fertilization," or IVF) and then implant it in a woman's womb. For more than 20 years, it has been possible to examine those fertilized eggs for genetic mutations and implant only the healthy ones. This is called "preimplantation genetic diagnosis," or PGD. If Dollar and her husband could come up with the money, they could use PGD to assure that, if they had a second child, it would be born free of the disease she and her daughter shared.

So, should the Dollars have looked for dollars and gone for an OI-free child? Yes or no?

Before saying "No brainer!" or "No way!" you'd do well to read No Easy Choice. If you like things cut and dried, it will drive you nuts. Dollar sees the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the wise and the foolish in just about every argument. She tells stories that show how solidly she identifies with everyone who's struggling with reproductive issues. But after you've sat down with her and examined dozens of arguments pro and con, and after you've joined her in wrestling with scores of intellectual and emotional questions regarding her own highly charged decisions, you'll have a much better idea of the possible implications of any choice you, or anyone else, might make.

This is a personal story, not a textbook on medical ethics. Dollar is an evangelical Christian, and her conservative faith is the ever-present background of her drama. Don't expect her book to sound like a sermon, however. It is compulsively readable, with a touch of suspense. When you have finished it, you will feel that you and Ellen are friends. You may be surprised by her eventual choices. You may disagree with other readers about whether she made the right decisions. You may, in fact, not be entirely sure about where she stands.

This openness, I think, is one of the strengths of No Easy Choice. Dollar knows that not all questions have yes-or-no answers, and she refuses to check those boxes when a decision requires more nuanced thinking. Instead, she faces the hard questions and their real-life implications, looking at the yeses and the noes and the maybes and the maybe nots. In the end, she does what we all must do, given our human fallibility--she leans on God's grace for wisdom, forgiveness, and courage.

I don't think it will be a spoiler if I quote the last sentences of her book:

The Christian narrative does not provide an obvious answer to whether it's ethically sound for believers to use IVF, PGD, or other assisted reproduction techniques. But it does provide a grounded, hopeful context in which to ponder essential questions about whether and how we will bear children as technology offers us ever-more-sophisticated techniques to do so. Infertility and family legacies of genetic disease inevitably cause substantial pain, but the Christian story invites us, even while we are mired in that pain, to believe in and cling to the extremity of love.

HEART 411 by Marc Gillinov and Steven Nissen

Many of our colleagues claim that there are two types of people in the world: people who have coronary heart disease and people who are going to get it.... Our goal is to create two new classifications of people: those who have been successfully treated for coronary heart disease, and those who have avoided it altogether. 

--Marc Gillinov and Steven Nissen in Heart 411 

I grabbed Heart 411 just as soon as I heard of it (it was published January 31). Less than six months ago, I had open heart surgery at Cleveland Clinic, America's top-ranked heart hospital, where Dr. Gillinov is a cardiac surgeon and Dr. Nissen is chair of the department of cardiovascular medicine. I'm doing well, thank you, but I still have lots of questions. I figured these doctors would be able to answer them.

It's a wonderful book, though as it turns out, Gillinov and Nissen didn't really write it just for me. They wrote it for people who have heart disease and don't know it (but could easily find out), and for people who are very likely to develop heart disease (but don't need to), and for people who have had surgery for heart disease at least once and will probably need to have it again ...  and again (but could put a stop to the pattern).

Perhaps as much as 90 percent of heart disease, they are convinced, is entirely preventable (the other 10 percent is hereditary or, like my problem, congenital: such problems can be fixed, but can't be prevented). Alas, they write,

we heart doctors tend to "fix" the plumbing problem of the moment and then move on rapidly to the next one. All too often, patients become "cases" ("Can you check on the 80 percent left main coronary artery obstruction in cath lab number 4?") rather than people in desperate need of advice and counseling.

Doctors Gillinov and Nissen want to fill the gap left when the last "kindly, unhurried, gray-haired gentleman with a white coat, a black bag, and a stethoscope" left our doorsteps and began practicing high-tech assembly-line medicine. They want to sit down and chat with us about our risk factors, our food and drink, how we exercise, our emotional life, the medicines we take, whether we need surgery or can avoid it ... and lots of other things (check out the table of contents by clicking here, then clicking "Search inside this book").

This could have been a dreary read, as serious as, well, a heart attack. Fortunately, it isn't. The book is designed for easy reading and reference, with lots of subheadings to help us find what we're looking for ("Questions to Ask Before You Have a Heart Test") and to interest us in information we might not have thought to ask about ("Good Vibrations: Do Positive Emotions Provide Cardiac Protection?"). Flipping pages, we'll find frequent sidebars with fascinating factoids ("Why We Put Salt in Our Food," "Three Simple Household Routines Help Prevent Obesity," "Cardiovascular Disease in Mummies").

Even better, the authors are good writers. I don't think they used a ghost; Gillinov mentions his love of writing, and the diction lacks the airy chirpiness that characterizes so much ghosted material. Their explanations are clear and simple, free of technical jargon so laypersons will not have to struggle to follow. They tell lots of stories, and tell them well. They even have a wry sense of humor. This book can be used for reference, of course, but it's so interesting that you might want to just sit down and read it straight through.

Ignore the subtitle. It isn't really The Only Guide to Heart Health You'll Ever Need (I'm sure the authors were surprised when the publishers came up with that one). As they write on page 196, "Medical researchers periodically uncover new evidence that results in profound changes in our approach to heart disease.... We must accept that today's wisdom may seem foolish tomorrow." That's why Chapter 9, "How to Tell Fact from Fiction: Sorting Through the Medical Evidence" is so important. If you're like me  (and 61 percent of other Americans), you go online to find answers to your medical questions. Unfortunately, a huge percentage of what we find there is purest junk, and even the reputable studies can be hard for a layperson to evaluate. A skeptic by nature, I thought I knew how to sift through internet information and come up with truth, or at least facts. I figured I didn't need this chapter, but I read it anyway - and I learned a lot that will come in handy even when this book is long out of date.

Throughout the book the authors do plenty of fact-checking themselves, advising us on which popular beliefs to keep and which to toss. Is fat bad? Not necessarily. Is wine good? Could be. Are generics and brand-name medications equally effective? Depends on the medication. Should you have a physical exam before beginning an exercise program? Maybe not: consider these factors.

I have just one bone to pick with the authors: their analysis of hormone replacement therapy is flawed. Yes, the Women's Health Initiative studies came up with damning evidence against Prempro, but Gillinov and Nissen use those studies to damn all long-term hormone replacement. What is true, however, of orally administered hormones made from equine estrogens is not necessarily true of transdermally administered hormones made from bioidentical plant sources. In fact, subsequent research reported in the British Medical Journal, a publication rated highly by Gillinov and Nissen, shows that there are indeed differences in HRT that need further exploration.

But bless Gillinov and Nissen, they never come across as know-it-all M.Deities. They know they are writing to intelligent, informed readers, and they treat us with respect - an amazing feat for people who spend most of their waking hours looking at people wearing hospital gowns.

REFUGE: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY OF FAMILY AND PLACE by Terry Tempest Williams

Twenty years ago, a woman in her mid-thirties wrote a book that would become an environmental classic. I finally read it last week.

Still in print and still selling briskly, Refuge defies classification. Check out the reviews posted on Terry Tempest Williams's website: Wallace Stegner evokes her poetic style; Barry Lopez mentions the story's emotional depth; the Kansas City Star calls the book an environmental essay, and Kirkus highlights its political implications.

Williams interweaves two stories: the rise of Utah's Great Salt Lake, and her mother's slow dying from cancer. "Most of the women in my family are dead," she writes in the Prologue. "Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family. The losses I encountered at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as Great Salt Lake was rising helped me to face the losses within my family."

I read more memoir than nature writing, and I found Williams's account both moving and satisfying. It is good to read about a strong family with supportive grandparents, aunts, cousins, siblings, and friends. The Tempest tribe has been Mormon for many generations, and their faith, shared history, and rituals clearly strengthen them. At the same time, Williams does not skirt difficult issues. Her father's grief sometimes turns into rage. Her grandmother and mother push well beyond Mormon boundaries to find beliefs that will sustain their difficult journeys. Williams grows weary of caregiving, even briefly considering giving her mother enough morphine to send her on her way.

I have cared for dying loved ones, and I have faced serious illness. I recognize the emotions she describes, both her own and her mother's.

I suspect that readers of nature writing find the book equally satisfying. Williams does not just use the natural world to illustrate her own emotions. "Currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah" (see her bio here), she writes as a scientist and a keen observer of nature. Her descriptions of birds, their habitat, and their interactions with their human neighbors stand on their own (she even includes a six-page appendix listing all the birds associated with the Great Salt Lake).

And although the book is by no means a political essay, she ends it with a stunning chapter, "The Clan of One-Breasted Women," that is simultaneously political, environmental, poetic, feminist, and urgent.

Thanks to my friend Molly H. for giving me this book. Twenty years ago I might not have understood it as well as I do today. Now I pass it on to you.

INSIDE OF A DOG by Alexandra Horowitz

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

- attributed to Groucho Marx

Alexandra Horowitz has both a personal and a professional interest in dogs. Besotted with her own dogs - the late lamented Pumpernickel and the current model, Finnegan - she is also an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College, where she studies animal cognition. According to Barnard's website, she "is currently testing anthropomorphisms made of the domestic dog, through experiments with dogs in natural settings."

Dogs, she points out, are not people. They perceive the world in an entirely different way from how we perceive it, and if we expect dogs to have human responses to our bumbling attempts to befriend and train them, we'll be disappointed. (So that's why my dogs never respond to my carefully reasoned explanations!) She labels the-world-as-perceived-by-dogs their umwelt, and much of the book is an explanation of how the world looks, sounds, feels, and especially smells to our canine friends.

On the other hand - and contrary to much popular opinion - she insists that dogs are not wolves. After at least ten thousand years of domestication, many of their physical, psychological, social, and developmental characteristics set them apart from their near relatives. "As the domestication process probably began with early canids scavenging around human groups - eating our table scraps," she writes, "it is a particularly silly stance to feed dogs only raw meat, on the theory that they are wolves at heart. Dogs are omnivores who for millennia have eaten what we eat."

Dogs, says Horowitz, are anthropologists. They study our behavior - our typical actions, and especially every minute variation of or departure from our usual theme. They know when we're thinking about going for a walk. They know how to persuade us to give them food. They may not actually feel guilt or shame (the jury is out on that one), but they know when they're likely to be punished.

And they know how to communicate. Not only with us (wag, lick, dance, growl) but also with other dogs: in one fascinating chapter, Horowitz describes how dogs invite each other to play, how they respond to another dog's invitation to play, how they play, and why they will play with some dogs and not others.

Are dogs, then, highly intelligent? Do they ponder philosophical questions? Most important, do they really, truly, love us? Read Horowitz and see what you think.

If you're only ever going to read one book on animal behavior, though, the book to read is Temple Grandin's highly original Animals in Translation. Once you've read that, you probably won't be able to keep from reading Grandin's follow-up book, Animals Make Us Human (my review is here). If those books whet your appetite - or if you want to skip the parrots and monkeys and cows and head straight for dogs - Inside of a Dog is a good choice. It's research based, well documented, aimed at a general audience, and seasoned with humor.

Your dogs will thank you for reading it - though if they had their druthers, you'd first take them for a walk.

HEALING HEARTS by Kathy E. Magliato

The January 2011 paperback
edition is retitled Heart Matters.

There are many good reasons to read Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon.

Maybe you're inspired by success-against-all-odds stories, especially when the author is a lively straight-shooter with a wry sense of humor.

Maybe you're a fan of House or Grey's Anatomy or other medical dramas, and you'd like to know what really goes on in a hospital. (Hint: it's not as sexy as you might think.)

Maybe you'd like to know more about what it's like to be a woman in a specialty where women are almost nonexistent:

Since 1948 the [American Board of Thoracic Surgery] has awarded approximately 7,400 certificates.... In 1961 the board certified its first woman.... From 1961 to 2008, ... only 180 [certificates] have been awarded to women.

(I just searched the "Find a Doctor" data base for Cleveland Clinic, for years the #1 ranking heart hospital in US News's annual rankings: no female heart surgeons on their Cleveland Campus. So I tried Mayo Clinic, hospital #2: zero in Rochester, MN. Johns Hopkins, #3: zero. Texas Heart Institute / St. Luke's Episcopal, #4: one! Note to my granddaughters: the field is wide open.)

Maybe you're curious about how Magliato - who sometimes works 24-hour days, frequently gives speeches, invented a device to assist heart patients, earned an MBA on the side, and, of course, wrote this book - manages to maintain a good relationship with her husband and their two young sons, as she claims she does:

Life is too short not to have it all.... If I can do it, anyone can.

Yeah, right.

On the other hand, you probably won't want to read Healing Hearts if
you crave sympathy for your own hectic days, or if you're looking for practical ways to balance work and family - unless you, like Magliato, have relentless ambition and energy to burn.

You probably won't want to read it if you have low tolerance for self-promotion: achievement is extremely important to Magliato, and she never neglects an opportunity to mention her accomplishments.

You certainly won't want to read it if you're facing open-chest surgery and need reassurance that nothing can possibly go wrong. Things often go wrong - more things than you might imagine, and Magliato is happy to tell you about them.

And if you're struggling to get by in America's foundering economy, parts of this book may raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels. In an astoundingly tone-deaf chapter, "Where Have All the Good Times Gone?" Magliato complains that her rates are less than her hairdresser's, notes that at age 45 she is still paying off student loans, expresses concern that new medicines and technologies are making surgery less necessary, and takes comfort in the fact that congestive heart failure is on the rise.

If I can't shed a tear for her plight, it's because a recent physician compensation survey shows cardiac and thoracic surgeons to be the fourth-highest-paid U.S. specialty out of the 69 listed. The average salary for a heart surgeon is $533,084; not as high as that of an orthopedic surgeon who does joint replacements ($605,953), but considerably higher than, say, that of a pediatric endocrinologist ($187,957) or a geriatrics specialist ($187,602). Magliato works hard and deserves adequate compensation, but she could have stated her case more tactfully.

Still, Magliato is a genuine pioneer, and pioneers are rarely soft-spoken and cuddly. She has had to summon the strength not only to put herself through decades of higher education, but also to stand up to sexism at every step along the way. She has had to work longer hours under more strenuous conditions than most of us will ever dream of, and at the same time she has had to fend off criticism about how she relates to her husband and children. You need a triple dose of chutzpah to do what she has done, and I applaud her for her success.

But please, Dr. Magliato, stop saying anyone can do it. You may think you're being modest, but really you're just making us normal people feel inadequate.

THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES by Siddhartha Mukherjee

When I posted on Facebook that my husband was reading a book about sewers while I was reading a book about cancer, a lot of our friends made wisecracks. Yes, we probably do need to get a life - but not because of these particular books. The mark of a really good nonfiction author is the ability to interest readers in a topic that normally bores or even repels them. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a really good author, and The Emperor of Maladies is a gripping read.

An oncologist who researches and teaches at Columbia University and a staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center, Mukherjee writes about science so clearly that even nonscientific liberal-arts people like me can follow. He's obviously a liberal-arts person himself, referring to Plato's Republic as well as Agatha Christie's St. Mary Mead; using the Red Queen's race in Through the Looking-Glass as a metaphor for contemporary cancer research and an ancient Persian queen's self-directed mastectomy as a metaphor for progress in cancer treatment; quoting Shakespeare, William Blake, Voltaire, and Kafka along with cancer researchers and patients and surgeons-general.

The incredibly erudite Dr. Mukherjee, who is still a young man, may be the one who needs to get a life, but I'm grateful that he's chosen to write this long, detailed, fascinating account of the history of cancer research instead.

The book begins with Carla:

On the morning of May 19, 2004, Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher from Ipswich, Massachusetts, a mother of three young children, woke up in bed with a headache. "Not just any headache," she would recall later, "but a sort of numbness in my head. The kind of numbness that instantly tells you that something is terribly wrong."

It ends with Germaine:

Her quest for a cure had taken her on a strange and limitless journey, through Internet blogs and teaching hospitals, chemotherapy and clinical trials halfway across the country, through a landscape more desolate, desperate, and disquieting than she had ever imagined. She had deployed every morsel of energy to the quest, mobilizing and remobilizing the last dregs of her courage, summoning her will and wit and imagination, until, that final evening, she had stared into the vault of her resourcefulness and resilience and found it empty. In that haunted last night, hanging on to her life by no more than a tenuous thread, summoning all her strength and dignity as she wheeled herself to the privacy of her bathroom, it was as if she had encapsulated the essence of a four-thousand-year-old war.

In the 470 pages between Carla and Germaine, Mukherjee gives us what he calls "a biography of cancer" - the story of a disease born before recorded time and first mentioned in an Egyptian manuscript from 2500 B.C., a disease that may never die but that is increasingly being contained and managed. Most of the book follows 19th- and 20th-century researchers as they seek to understand what cancer is and how to target it; surgeons as they try to contain it by removing tumors and, sometimes, unaffected body parts as well; politicians and lobbyists as they campaign for more money for cancer research; and geneticists as they discover which parts of which genes are responsible for cancer's mad proliferation.

We all have friends and family members who are living with - or have died from - cancer, and we all are familiar with procedures like radiation and chemotherapy. This book will help you understand what cancer is,  how it is being fought nowadays, why various approaches are used, and how typical treatments have changed over the last decade or two. It does not, however, recommend treatments. It does not tell you what to do or what to avoid in order to escape or recover from cancer - with one exception: Don't smoke. And if you smoke, quit.

In four fascinating chapters in Part Four, "Prevention Is the Cure," Mukherjee tells the story of America's love affair with cigarettes. In the early 20th century, four out of five American men, including doctors and cancer researchers, were smokers. It was hard to get physicians even to consider the possibility that smoking was related to lung cancer, even harder to get policymakers to try to protect the public, and just about impossible to get tobacco companies to speak honestly about their product. Not until the 1960s did a brave and savvy surgeon-general dare to confront Big Tobacco, and U.S. smoking rates started to fall. In response, the tobacco companies began targeting the developing world, where cancer rates are now predictably rising.

"It is difficult for me to convey the range and depth of devastation that I witnessed in the cancer wards that could be directly attributed to cigarette smoking," Mukherjee writes.

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.

Amazon listed The Emperor of All Maladies among its best books of November 2010. Publishers Weekly and Booklist gave it starred reviews. The New York Times called it one of the 10 best books of 2010. No, reading about cancer doesn't sound like an exciting way to spend an evening (well, in a book this big, several evenings), but be willing to surprise yourself.

Hey, even Oprah's reviewer loved it: "With a Dickensian command of character and an instinct for the drama of discovery," he wrote,  Mukherjee "makes science not merely intelligible but thrilling."

Coming next: David's review of the book about sewers.

WALKING GENTLY ON THE EARTH by Lisa Graham McMinn and Megan Anna Neff

A life dedicated to God's creation is a life dedicated to loving one's neighbor.

--Megan Anna Neff

Anyone who still thinks evangelicals are anti-environmentalists should read this book. So should evangelicals and other Christians who know that our overburdened earth needs all the help it can get - but who have no idea where to begin.

Lisa Graham McMinn is a professor of sociology, the author of several books,  and a backyard raiser of chickens. Her daughter Megan Anna Neff (no relation to me) has an M.Div. from Princeton, has lived in Africa, and works as a doula. Their new (August 2010) book, Walking Gently on the Earth, is as docile as its title - often personal, usually self-effacing, sometimes lyrical. The authors do not claim to be experts or perfect practitioners of sustainable living, but they refuse to shut their eyes to reality.

McMinn and Neff base their environmentalism on a theology of abundance. Creation is good. It is as important in God's plan as redemption. When we care for the earth, we care for one another.

By contrast, when we hurt the earth - its plants, its animals, its water and air - we hurt one another and our Creator God. And when we refuse to pay attention to what's happening all around us, we become like the bureaucrats in the Harry Potter series. The evil Lord Voldemort has returned, but

the Ministry of Magic thinks announcing the news would cast unnecessary fear into people and require a rather drastic change of focus, altering life as they were comfortably living it.

The Ministers choose to ignore the facts and attack the truth-tellers. Harry Potter knows this can't turn out well.

McMinn and Neff tell the truth, gently. Their eight chapters cover (take a deep breath) creation-care theology, factory farms, fair-trade practices, locally grown food, vegetarianism, consumerism, climate change, alternative energy sources, world hunger, overpopulation, home energy audits, and ... well, quite a bit else.

In just over 200 pages of text, of course, they can't treat any topic in depth. People already familiar with today's environmental issues won't find any new information here, though they may appreciate the authors' pervasive theological theme. On the other hand, people who aren't already environmentally oriented could be overwhelmed. Too much information! Too much to worry about!

Except that Lord Voldemort really is on the move, and hiding from him will not make him go away. The ecological crisis has already begun (see my review of Bill McKibben's Eaarth in the November issue of Christianity Today or online). As individuals, we can't do much to stop it - but together we can make a huge difference in the world. And together is the best way to read Walking Gently on the Earth.

This is a book for classrooms (though it is by no means academic and would need to be supplemented if used as a college text), or for church adult education programs, or for Christian book groups. It is not at its best when read at one sitting. If an hour is all you've got, read McMinn's excellent article in the fall/winter Conversations journal, "Food for the Soul," instead.

If possible, though, join with others to read and discuss this book one chapter at a time. Walking Gently on the Earth is a feast of information and ideas, and feasts should not be celebrated alone. Divide up the links provided at the end of each chapter and bring additional information back to the group. Brainstorm ways to begin practicing the kinds of creation care McMinn and Neff recommend. Together, celebrate God's bounty as you learn to care for the earth's needs.