2015 Review Round-Up: Nonfiction: Too Much of a Good Thing, Lee Goldman

Too Much of a Good Thing: How Four Key Survival Traits are Now Killing Us
Lee Goldman, MD
ISBN: 9780316236812
Interesting study of big systemic medical problems, and how they're actually ancient survival traits.
Read December 2015

Here's the four, because I know you're curious.
1) Obesity: fat craving and hoarding.  We used to need all those calories to survive, now they're making us fat and diabetic

2) High Blood Pressure: salt craving and dehydration.  We are able to store and retrieve water for a very long time compared to other mammals, but the tradeoff is liver damage and high blood pressure.

3) Anxiety/Depression: fear/aversion mechanisms.  They used to keep us alive when a rustling branch could have been a tiger, or a sign of an incoming hailstorm.  Now they force people to relive trauma and to be overly anxious or beaten down.

4) Strokes/Heart Attacks: clotting mechanisms.  Once upon a time, we were surrounded by a world that made us bleed pretty often.  Especially childbirth, which without overactive clotting, would have doomed the species.  Now we're often within hailing distance of a hospital, and the clots themselves are killing us.

The first three quarters of the book, where he dissects these four sets of biological phenomena, is really fascinating, and I wish he would have stopped there, but I imagine the publisher or his editor demanded that he provide a solution (there isn't one) which he attempts in a sort of half-hearted coda about altering genetics or behaviors or both.  I get why it's there (the book is a bit of a downer, to be completely honest - so scientifically interesting, but a downer) but it really throws the book off stride and makes the finish a lot weaker than it could have otherwise been.

The Land that Time Forgot, Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Land that Time Forgot, Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Nelson Doubleday, 1946

(no ISBN; hardcover book-club edition, movie tie-in trilogy compilation.)

Individual titles of the series: The Land that Time Forgot, The People that Time Forgot, Out of Time's Abyss.  Originally published in 1918.

I love the Barsoom books, and Tarzan is just fun, but somehow I never got around to these, so when I saw this absolutely awesome yellow and red hc published to promote the film (which I also want to see now, because I like hurting myself) I just had to have it.   (again, props to the Greenville Really Big Book Sale!)

Somewhere near Antarctica, there's a giant cliff-walled island.  Inside that undiscovered country is the freakiest weird-ass version of evolution I've ever seen in science fiction.  I won't spoil it, but it's seriously weird, and really impressive as a world-building conceit.  I have to give the guy props for going there in 1918 - I have neighbors in South Carolina in 2013 who can't deal with the concept, so it's a little dizzy-making to think about how ahead of the curve Burroughs was. 

Usual quibbles apply - the men are heroes, the women are victims (but at least once in each book they save themselves temporarily, or serve more of a function than looking pretty or delicate) and the villains are villainous.  The one scene with the cowboy "taming" a wild horse made me flashback to Jean Auel and my eyes near about rolled out of my head, but otherwise it was fun, fast, and seriously weird.  

The writing and plotting is about on the same level as the Barsoom series, but a little more manageable due to the length differences.  This is like a nice evening meal, that is more like an enormous southern Thanksgiving.  Either way, you're going to be eating good for a while.