Blurb Scan. Books of life, and more

Human body has been an object of desire for writers of all hues. Doctors, patients, scientists, sculptors, painters — the list is just as long as an unspooled cluster of intestines. And these works include the basic, macro investigations such as Henry Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body to the more nuanced, complex and micro journeyed like the The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Human body and its complex workings and how it responds to medicines form the central plot of three books that reached our desk this week. Two of them — Superhuman by Rowan Hooper and Shapeshifters: On Medicine & Human Change by Gavin Francis — are first editions, while Doctor You: Revealing the Science of Self-healing by Jeremy Howick is a fresh second edition paperback.

Title: Superhuman

Author: Rowan Hooper

Publisher: Hachette India

Price: ₹599

Rowan Hooper is the managing editor of New Scientist magazine, and a PhD in evolutionary biology. The book’s subtitle explains itself — Life at the Extremes of Mental and Physical Ability. Hooper has divided the book into three interesting parts: Thinking, Doing and Being, and has divided them further into smaller segments to talk about people and their superhuman abilities. In ‘Thinking’, for instance, he looks at intelligence, memory, language and focus. The segment on language starts by quoting, quite surprisingly, Karl Marx. Hooper quotes from Marx’s The German Ideology : “Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse, with others”. In sum, the book is a summary of some of the best among us and how they have become what they have become, and what we can learn from these trains and how to harness them and use it for greater common good. I’m hooked. Are you?

Title: Shapeshifters: On Medicine & Human Change

Author: Gavin Francis

Publisher: Hachette India/Profile

Price: ₹599

Shapeshifters comes embedded with big-ticket reccos: Henry Marsh, author of, most recently, Do No Harm: Stories of Life Death and Brain Surgery (2016) calls the book a wonderful series of meditations on patients and their illnesses. Siddhartha Mukherjee says it is provocative and important and novelist Hilary Mantel — who has written extensively about people with diseases and her own tryst with the little understood endometriosis and human health and death in general — terms Shapeshifters stylish and exhilarating. Author Gavin Francis has dedicated the book “For life’s optimists, who see hope in human change”. He touches upon curious compartments of body ‘performance’ — from sleep to tattooing to hallucination to prosthetics and, of course, death. He ends the book rather philosophically, as expected, and that’s my favourite line in the book in the first glance: “But no one is immortal, nothing is eternal, everything is in a flux — even the stars”. I am rightly reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality (2001) here.

Title: Doctor You: Revealing the Science of Self-healing

Author: Jeremy Howick

Publisher: Hachette India

Price: ₹499

The story of killer pills is a much discussed one. Howick — whose website says he is doctor and Director of the Oxford Empathy Programme at the University of Oxford and was recently awarded the British Medical Association Dawkins and Strutt award to pursue research on the health benefits of empathic care — believes unnecessary medicine is killing us and the answer is to understand the power of self healing, so you take less medicines and stay healthier. Sounds good. But how far is it possible? Howick’s suggestions seem rather obvious and platitudinal to me. The book is well-written and a breezy read, and can be appealing to the Yoga buffs and wellness gurus and sishyas. To be fair, Howick is no alternative-way-of-living, heal-thyself fanatic. He advises you to go for a surgery when, only when, you need one.

COMMENT NOW