Library

A few good folks promised to write book reports for me, but they are taking their sweet time. Meanwhile, here is a small list of thought-provoking books and some quotes for your pleasure. More will come . . . Helen

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies. You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins. You may miss your only love. You may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. --Merlin the Magician.

The Once and Future King. T.H. White

Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information Is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers. Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald. (The author is a distinguished Harvard biologist and her book is a must read).

Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent. Meredith F. Small

The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for Our Beleaguered Mom's and Dad's. Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West

Exploding the Gene Myth. "In 1991, the American Cancer Society publicized the statistics that, in the United States, a woman’s chance of getting brest cancer is one in nine. . . . Popular articles on breast cancer tend to emphasize the need for women to start watching for the signs of the disease in their thirties, so many young women think of the 1 in 9 figure as having an immediate relationship to their lives. However, breast cancer is by and large a disease of older women. The New York Times reports that “1 in 9 is the cumulative probability that any woman will develop breast cancer sometime between birth and age 110”.

“Cumulative” means that this is the probability over a woman’s whole life, not at any one time. In fact, the probability that a 35-year-old woman will get breast cancer by the time she is 55 is about 1 in 40, and the probability that shoe will die from it by 55 is only about 1 in 180*. Even for older women, the probabilities at any one time never get nearly as high as 1 in 9. . . . So, why is the ACS publicizing the one-in-nine figure? The Times quotes Joann Schellenback, a spokesperson for the society, as saying, “The 1-in-9 is meant to be a jolt. We use it to remind people that the problem hasn’t gone away.” Schellenback goes on to say that “many younger women look at nine of their friends and think ‘One of us is going to get cancer this year.’ The truth is that one of them will get cancer in her lifetime—but probably not until she’s over 65.”*. . .

The ACS is using the one-in-nine figure to “jolt” women into getting regular breast examinations and mammograms. The problem is that such scare tactics may frighten women into undergoing mammograms too early in life or at too frequent intervals, . . . this itself may increase the risk of developing cancer for some women. (The University North Carolina study suggested found that 1 percent of Euro-Americans inherit a susceptibility to radiation that puts them at risk from even the relatively low dose of x-ray delivered by mammograms.) There is another problem. A study of records of consultations for breast disorders at Ottawa Civic Hospital, published in Lancet in 1989, found that 93 percent of mammograms that showed “signs/symptoms of breast cancer” proved to be false alarms.”

The Unconscious Civilization. Equilibrium, in the Western experience, is dependent not just on criticism, but on non-conformism in the public place. The road away from the illusion of ideology towards reality is passable only if that anti-conformism makes full use of our quolities and strengths in order to maintain the tension of uncertainty. The examined life makes a virtue of uncertainnty. It celebrates doubt.