Summary:

Review:
I picked this up during a kindle sale for incredibly cheap purely for the author.  I’d read three other Vonnegut works previously: Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five (read before my book blog), and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (review).  I enjoyed the first two and felt meh about the last, so I was fairly confident I’d enjoy another Vonnegut book.  So when one night my partner and I decided we wanted to read a book together (out loud to each other), we looked on my kindle, both glommed on to the name Vonnegut, and chose this as our first read together.  So my reading experience was a mix of listening and reading out loud myself, which I am grateful for, because I honestly think Galapagos sounds even more absurdist aloud.

There is an incredibly unique writing style to this particular scifi book.  So much so that my boyfriend and I wound up researching to find out if, perhaps, Vonnegut wrote this toward the end of his life when he was perchance senile.  (It was not, although it was published in the 80s, unlike my three prior Vonnegut reads, which were published in the 60s).  Then we wondered if maybe Vonnegut had Asperger’s, although we didn’t bother checking up on that.  Why these wonderings?  Well, Galapagos is a very odd book.  The premise isn’t that odd for scifi — a projected future evolution of humans and telling how we got there.  But the ultimate future is kind of hilariously odd (penguin-like humans).  Mostly, though, the way the tale is told is odd and unique in a way that took time to grow on me.

Beyond the whole odd scenario, there’s the fact that if a character will be dead by the end of the chapter, an asterisk appears next to their name.  And the names appear a lot.  Vonnegut is incredibly fond of naming everyone and everything by their full name every time they appear.  He also loves lists.  (This is the part that had us wondering about Asperger’s).  At first this is grating on the nerves, but with time it comes to feel like the vibe of the world you’re visiting when you open the book.

Similar to the lists and constant naming, there are philosophical asides.  Some of these are worked smoothly into the story thanks to a handheld computer device (similar to a smartphone) that pulls up relevant quotes to read to the survivors.  Other times, though, they are truly random asides that go so far off the path of the story you’re left wandering around in a cave in the woods instead of on the nice paved road.  But then everything comes right back around to the story, and you can’t really be upset about spending some time listening to an old ghost ramble.  For example:

What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain. That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions on so many different subjects all at once, and switch from one opinion or subject to another one so quickly, that a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up like a fight between blindfolded people wearing roller skates. (page 67)

Off-topic? Yes. Quirky? Absolutely.  Interesting and fun nonetheless? Totally.

The plot, in spite of being deeply meandering, does develop and actually tell a story.  We learn how overpopulation caused disaster and then how a few humans managed to survive on the Galapagos Islands and evolve into the futuristic penguin-like folk.  Along the way we have some fun side-trips like an Argentinian military man appearing on a talk show and trying to explain that Argentina really does have submarines, it’s just that once they go underwater they never show up again.

Although I did ultimately appreciate the absurdity and the quirkiness, I must admit that I think it was perhaps a bit overdone.  At the very beginning of the book when the list-making and other elements like that were much more prevalent, I was more annoyed and might have stopped reading the book if it wasn’t for the fact that my boyfriend and I wanted to finish the first book we started reading together.  It took until about 60% of the way in for the list-making to ease off a bit and the style of the book to really start to work for me.  I could easily see a reader being totally lost by some of the more annoying elements of the book, and I wonder what the effect would be if the order was reversed.  If the quirks built throughout the book instead of starting that way.  Or even if they were just dialed back a bit.  I think just that tiny bit of editing would have made me love the book.

Overall, this is a fun piece of absurdist scifi that examines evolution from an over-the-top hypothetical situation.  Potential readers should be aware that this book is even more absurdist than Slaughterhouse-Five, so you must be willing to do some more intense suspending of disbelief and be willing to do some meandering and read some lists.  If absurdist fiction is something you enjoy and meandering and lists won’t bother you, then this humorous examination of overpopulation, end-of-the-world, and future evolution might be right up your alley.

4 out of 5 stars

Source: Amazon

Buy It

Summary:

Review:
I picked this up when I saw it on sale at a local brick and mortar bookstore for two reasons.  I’d never read an Ursula K. Le Guin book, which felt like sacrilege as a young feminist scifi author myself, so she was already on my radar.  But why this book?  Honestly, I liked the cover.  It’s such a pretty cover!  So many scifi/fantasy books seem to be set on a hot planet, but this is set on an icy one, and I really liked that.  So when I picked it up, I had no idea that it’s considered to be a gender theory scifi.  It’s presented as a book about a planet totally lacking in gender.  You’ll notice that in my own summary that is not how I present it.  Why not?  Frankly, a gender-free society is not what I found in this book, which was a big disappointment.

The Gethenians really are not a gender free society, and Le Guin also doesn’t present them that way.  It is definitely an intersex society, but it’s intersex people who predominantly present as male/masculine.  Now, in case you’ve never had it explained, gender is a construct and sex is your body parts.  So you could have an intersex gendered female society or an intersex gender neutral society or an intersex gender male society.  The last one is what we have in this book.  At first it seems that this might just be Genly Ai’s misperception (the off-world ethnologist).  He mentions that he can’t help seeing the Gethenians as male, although sometimes he sees more “feminine features” in them.  Perhaps.  But when the narration changes from Genly’s viewpoint to a Gethenian one, we get the exact same presentation of everyone as a gendered he.  There is no gender neutral pronoun used.  There is no perception by the Gethenians of being free of gender.  Indeed, instead of seeing themselves as gender-neutral or gender-queer, they see themselves as male until their mating cycle when some of them turn into women for a bit.  (They also stay female long enough to be pregnant).  Genly points out after a couple of years on this planet that he’s forgotten what it’s like to be around women.  Not what it’s like to be around gender constructs.  What it’s like to be around women.  This is, thus, not a gender neutral society.  It’s a society of male-identifying intersex persons who are free of sex-drive most of the time, and who sometimes grow vaginas/breasts for the purpose of reproduction but for nothing else. It is definitely interesting to see an exploration of this type of society, but it’s decidedly not an exploration of a gender-neutral society or really much gender theory at all.  It is much more an exploration of the sex drive and a world without female-identifying persons. Now I’m not saying this isn’t a valid exploration or that it’s not well-done.  I am saying that the presentation and marketing of this book gets it all wrong, which makes me wonder did Le Guin think she was exploring a gender neutral society and accidentally make an intersex male gendered one instead?  Or did the publishers completely misunderstand everything about gender and sexuality and mismarket her book as something it is not?  I have no idea, but the potential reader should know that they are not getting an exploration of gender and queerness from a famous scifi/fantasy author when they pick up this book.

Moving beyond the queer theory and mismarketing of it, how is the rest of the book?  Well, the imagining of the world is stunning and clearly presented.  The idea that planets were all settled by common ancestors and then forgotten about only to be rediscovered later (very Stargate SG1) is subtly introduced into the plot without an info-dump.  The world of Winter contains multiple cultures and peoples (something often left out in scifi).  The planet even has its own way to mark the passing of time and has evolved to handle the coldness of the planet without Le Guin just copying an Earth culture from a cold area, like the Inuit.  No, this is all a unique way of approaching the demands of the climate.  It’s also interesting to note that different skin colors are present on Winter, showing that a mixed-race group originally colonized the planet, although their bone structure and height has changed with time and evolution.  The world building is so complex that I’m having difficulty explaining just how awesomely complex it is to you, so that should say something I suppose.

The plot is very political.  Genly is here on Winter to get the planet as a whole to unify enough to become part of the Ekumen.  Thus there is typical political intrigue across a couple of nations and various amounts of striving for power.  There’s nothing incredibly unique about this element of the book but it is clearly done and is not completely predictable.

There is an interesting character development where Genly has a friendship that could take a turn for the romantic.  How that line is walked could be endlessly analyzed.  I will just say to keep it spoiler free that I appreciated what Le Guin did with the relationship, and it was a unique one to see in literature.

Overall, this is a richly imagined scifi world where the setting is much more the focus of the book than the more typical political intrigue/first contact plot.  Do not be misled by the marketing to think that this is a book exploring a world free of gender.  Rather it is a male-gendered intersex world.  Thus, it is a book that will appeal to scifi lovers who prefer world-building over plot but don’t go into it expecting a scifi exploration of gender theory.

4 out of 5 stars

Source: Harvard Books

Buy It

Summary:

Review:
I just need to take a moment to point out two things.  1) The last time I read/reviewed a Sookie Stackhouse book was in October of 2010.  This is why I started the Bottom of TBR Pile Challenge for myself.  Books (even series books!) were getting lost in the pile!  2) Every time I look at that cover I think for a brief moment that Eric is bald.  Something is just off in that painting.  Now, on to the book.

Even though I read it almost three years ago (seriously, holy shit), I still clearly remember really enjoying the ninth book of the series.  It was action-packed with lots of development of both plot and character.  It reinvigorated the series for me so much so that even this much later, I was excited to pick up the next book.  I should have known it would fizzle some after the action of the last book.  It’s not easy to keep that much tension and action going, and it’s not like there weren’t any lulls earlier in the series.  What I can mostly say about this book is that nothing much happens.  Seriously.  It’s longer than some of the books but less happens.  I suppose technically things do happen.  Eric’s maker shows up with a new vampire-brother for Eric, the hemophiliac Romanov brother, who is just not quite right in the head.  This leads to some interesting development of Eric’s background, but not a ton.  And it just isn’t all that intriguing.  Similarly, even though logically it should be very interesting that Claude shows up at Sookie’s and the weres sniff out two fairies around, but it just isn’t.  They sound interesting on the surface, but when you’re reading the book it mostly feels like you’re hanging out at Sookie’s house eating a cookie and wondering if the calories are worth it to listen to her yammer on.

I think the crux of the problem might be that neither Sookie nor Harris is comfortable with Sookie being with Eric, in spite of the reader liking Sookie being with Eric.  If it’s not within the character for her to be with Eric, then a break-up needs to happen, regardless of what the readers like seeing.  It’s important to keep characters acting within character.  Interestingly, Sookie has started to notice that she is aging and thinking about what it will be like to slowly grow old and die.  She seems to be seriously considering her vampire options.  But we all know Sookie doesn’t want to be a vampire.  Sookie wants children. If she gives that up to be a vampire, it will make the series take an incredibly dark turn.  The next book will be an important one.  It’s basically a shit or get off the pot moment for character development, and in spite of the ho hum nature of this entry in the series, I am interested to see if things pick up in the next book in this regard.  They tend not to slump for long in Sookie Stackhouse-land.

There’s not too terribly much else to say about the book.  Weaknesses that are there earlier in the series are still there.  Sookie isn’t very smart and is kind of annoying.  The sex scenes continue to be cringe-inducing.  But the world is complex and fun to visit, even when not much is happening there.  Sookie does need to start taking some agency soon though, or being stuck with her first person narration may become a bit too much to handle.  Readers of the series will be disappointed by this dull entry, although it won’t come as a surprise since lulls happen earlier in the series.  Enough happens to keep some interest up to keep going with it though.

3 out of 5 stars

Source: PaperBackSwap

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Previous Books in Series:
Dead Until Dark, review
Living Dead in Dallas, review
Club Dead, review
Dead To The World, review
Dead as a Doornail, review
Definitely Dead, review
All Together Dead, review
From Dead to Worse, review
Dead And Gone, review

Laurie Garrett giving her presentation.

The final plenary, and indeed, the final non-CE class or tour event of MLA13 Boston, was on my list of events to blog for the official conference blog.  I summed up the entire presentation.  As stated previously, I can’t reproduce those posts here on my personal blog, so please go over and take a look at that summary before reading my responses to and thoughts on the presentation.

Got it? Good!

Ok, so, what was my reaction to this lecture?  Well, first, honestly I had a bit of a panic.  I felt frightened, unsafe, and like the world is doomed.  At first I thought that was just my anxious-prone self over-reacting to the presentation, but after discussing it with friends and colleagues who were also there, I realized that Garrett seems to have actually sought to pull out this fear in people.

Why?

In a presentation that ends with pleas for us to fight fear and panic, why did she spend so much time investing in frightening us and very little (if any) spent in reassuring us?  Why focus so much on pandemics just a single mistake away, germ warfare close at hand (although, not really since 3D printing of germs isn’t happening yet).  I don’t know.  I don’t know what would make Garrett think making people feel this way is a good thing.  Maybe she’s fallen prey to the idea that the only way to get people to pay attention to your cause is to frighten them.  I know people in various movements who use that tactic.  It’s not one I’m a fan of.  Maybe she didn’t intend to gloom and doom the people present.  But I think she did.  Given that her own speech pointed out the dangers of panic and unwarranted fear, I find it odd that this was her intent.  And yet there you have it.  A room full of frightened librarians.  Think I’m exaggerating?  Check out just a few of the tweets from during her presentation:

Everyone has their own style, and I certainly learned a lot from the presentation and wasn’t bored.  But.  I’m not a fan of nonfiction presentations (aka not horror plays or movies) inciting fear and panic in the audience.  I think it’s counter-productive when talking to a room full of intelligent, educated individuals.  Librarians aren’t 5 year olds who need to be told about icky germs in order to get us to wash our hands.  I’m sure there could have been a way to give this presentation with truths and realities that could be frightening without actually inciting this level of anxiety.  Even just a little positivity and more hope for the future would have been nice.  You don’t want a populace that is exerting all their energy preparing for Armageddon.

I should also mention that I stood up to ask a question of Garrett at the end.  With all the talk of synthetic biology, I wanted to know what her opinion was on GMOs.  I admit, this is not an issue I am yet clear-cut on myself.  I generally prefer organic, but I also understand the value of say rice that has been modified to have more vitamins in it for an at-risk population.  But on the other hand I get the concern of manipulating something at a genetic level and what that might do to our own bodies when we ingest it.  It’s something that just doesn’t have enough long-term studies yet to really show if it’s truly safe or not, and it concerns me that it’s mostly the poor, at-risk populations who are being used as guinea pigs eating it.

In any case, I asked Garrett at the public microphone about her stance on GMO foods and the movement to label them.  Given all of her doom and gloom talk about synthetic viruses, I was shocked at her answer.  She believes that GMO foods are necessary because as more of the world becomes middle class, more of the world is eating meat, and meat eating just cannot be sustained on the land we currently have available, so we must turn to eating synthetic foods.

Um, EXCUSE ME?!?!

So the lady who just spent over an hour and a half talking about how dangerous synthetic biology could turn out to be turns right around and says that meat eating isn’t sustainable to feed the entire globe (which it isn’t, see this article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) turns right around and says that well we have to eat GMOs to feed everyone because people won’t just give up meat.  Right, ok, if someone is so concerned about the possible bad consequences of synthetic biology don’t you think she might possibly take this opportunity to espouse a vegetarian, vegan, or even just more plant-based diet to combat the global food crisis instead of relying exclusively on GMOs?  Apparently not.  Apparently it’s really great to fear-monger about pandemics and international relations but when it comes to what we eat, the basis of much of our health, that’s too controversial.

Well, at least it was an interesting final couple of hours of MLA13, although I can’t say I really feel that it was very useful to librarians or working to promote true global health.

Slide from presentation showing What users want out of ILL. What ILL librarians think are issues with ILL currently. What a perfect world future of ILL would look like.

This year I got to go to the annual presentation by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at MLA.  NLM is an important medical library resource, as it provides many free, trustworthy health, medicine, and science research resources to the public.  The NLM Update provides information on any important changes by NLM in the last year, as well as just any information/resources they would like to highlight.

• clinicaltrials.gov
  • have data available of national origin of studies
  • you can build your own specialized view if you’d like to
  • a unique source of summary results for many trials
  • NN/LMx training for librarians coming soon
• standardization makes information more usable
• SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT)
• Genetic Testing Registry
  • 3,005 tests registered by 290 labs in 37 countries
  • useful inks for EHRs (Electronic Health Records)
  • international standard for location of genetic variations
• PubMed Health
  • more digitized guidelines
  • specifically focused on flu site
  • working on global microbial identifier for food-borne pathogens
• FY 2013 budget
  • lost 5.5% annum ($19.2 million less)
  • people are the most important NLM resource.  Call them “brain-ware.”
• Index Cat
  • XML data available for 3.7million citations
  • index journals we trust cover-to-cover to keep up
• NLM exhibits
  • “Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness” is current exhibit.
  • There is an app of the interviews portion of the exhibit available on iTunes
  • The NLM traveling exhibition program has been booked by 457 institution in 48 states.
  • The Harry Potter exhibit grew out of last-minute attempt to make science interesting to middle schoolers.
  • Traveling exhibits consist of 6 banners that can be rolled into mailing tubes for quick shipment.
  • You must do local programming to borrow an exhibit
• NLM Associate Fellowship Program
• MedPrint
  • a program to get libraries to commit to keep print runs of journals
  • check page to see what’s been saved already
• Environmental Health and Toxicology
• Disaster Information Management Research Center
• Inter-Library Loan (ILL)
  • requests down almost 50% in last 10 years in Docline
  • investigating this
  • conference call with focus groups representing:
    • hospitals
    • large academic libraries
    • special libraries
  • not planning to take Docline away
  • national survey in March 2013
    • 60% hospitals
    • agreed journals are electronic now
    • disagreement on if licenses are easy to understand
• MedlinePlus
  • 15 years old in English, 10 years old in Spanish
  • multiple language link –> follows US medical practices, also available in English translation
  • US is 37% of users
  • very active twitter account
  • mobile site
    • going through usability study
    • More Spanish speaking males use than females.  More English speaking females use than males.
    • most of us want the full site not the mobile site
• MedlinePlus Connect
  • allows EHR to send a code and get back patient-specific health information
• 5 day posting of jobs is a requirement of the government to speed up hirings.  It is not a sign that they already know who to hire.

After the NLM Update, I attended the poster sessions.  This is not something one tends to take notes at, so I don’t have very much to say about them, except that I am proud of my medical librarian friend who had a poster in the session. Go Katie!

Up next, the final plenary session! Phew!

I thus will post what notes I was able to acquire, but bare in mind I actually got more out of these sections that my notes reveal.

International Congress on Medical Librarianship 2: Trustworthy and Authoritative Publicly Available Information Section

“Trustworthiness and Authoritativeness of YouTube Videos on Smokeless Tobacco” by Donghua Tao, Prajakta Adsul, Ricardo Wray, Keri Jupka, Carolyn Semar, and Kathryn Goggins

• Use online media as a tool to educate health care users
• a future study could use a survey of real YouTube users and test their hypothesis
• Methodology of published papers doesn’t discuss how they searched YouTube
• See how videos connect to each other (videos referencing other videos)
• 3,603 unique videos brought up, randomly sampled 433, of which 278 were used based on inclusion criteria

“Twenty Years of the Cochrane Collaboration: A Legacy of Trustworthy and Authoritative Publicly Available Information and Plans for the Future” by Carol Lefebvre, Julie Glanville, Jessie McGowan AHIP, Alison Weightman, and Bernadette Coles

• 2013 is Cochrane’s 20th anniversary, and they have a special anniversary website.
• Cochrane Collaboration crates the Cochrane Library
• plain long summaries, free, multiple languages
• 4 million downloads in 2010
• 6 million downloads in 2012
• New publishing agreement with Wiley
  • February 1, 2013 to the end of 2018
  • gold open access –> author pays a publication fee then article is available immediately
  • green open access –> no author payment but there is a 1 year embargo
• impact of Cochrane Reviews
• We’re not here to decide if we publish clinical data but how
• 20 years ago:
  • only 20,000 RCTs indexed in medline
  • no RCT filter in medline
• Now:
  • new MeSH term for quasi-RCT: Controlled Clinical Trial
  • 1996 Central launched
  • medline’s retagging project supports Central
  • proliferation of search filters
  • Cochrane Handbook has grown
• Future:
  • registration of clinical trials
  • move toward single portals
  • increased access to clinical study reports
  • PubReMiner will increase use
  • text mining increase
  • strengthen relationship with other organizations
  • challenge will still lie in discoverability

Federal Libraries Section: The Role of Librarians in Evidence-Based Medicine: Part One

“Telling the Research Story: A Role for Librarians in Analyzing Research Impact Based on Evidence” by Terrie Wheeler and Cathy C. Sarli AHIP

• Genesis project (Not really sure what this is.  Had trouble seeing the slides and hearing).
• citation analysis
• “It is no longer enough to measure what we can–we need to measure what matters.”
• Found a lot of gray literature using Google
• use clean data –> clear linkage
• explanation of the h-index
• explanation of the g-index
• explanation of the tapered h-index
• all index factors have one limitation or another
• can we produce future science with publication data? Maybe.

That’s all of my notes I managed to get.  I’ll have to figure out how to better juggle notebooks/pens next year.  Or maybe MLA can get us more seating.  Up next, the National Library of Medicine’s Update.

As with any lecture, though, I was still able to glean some useful or interesting information from it.  I’ve listed them out below.

• David Sackett founded Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), and his textbook Evidence-Based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM, 2e is considered crucial in the field.
• Sackett defines EBM as, “The conscientious, explicit, judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients.”
• Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) is influenced by three factors:
  • Best research
  • Clinical expertise
  • Patient values and preferences
• The old indexing (in PubMed etc…) didn’t used to include type or level of evidence in the terminology.
• Evidence-Based Librarianship (EBL) is advocated for by McKibbon and Eldredge.  You may see a free PMC article summing that up here.
• Steps of EBL:
  • formulate answerable question
  • search for evidence
  • critically appraise evidence
• The research section of MLA has a free journal, Hypothesis, that is recommended.
• MLA has a research imperative that you may read here.
• “Randomized Control Trials, contrary to popular belief, are not the only way to control variables.”
• Booth and Brice are named as big names in EBL.  Their book is Evidence-Based Practice for Information Professionals: A Handbook.
• There is a journal on EBL called Evidence Based Library and Information Practice.  It is free, but you must register to comment or receive email notifications of new issues.
• Recommends the book Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rodgers to help with where we are going in EBL.  Take the model presented and adapt it and truly make it work for us.
• Research must be balanced and paired with professional knowledge.

While the information I garnered is good, for a one hour lecture, it’s not very much. I left off the lists of names of previous Janet Doe lecturers, for instance.  I believe that if Marshall had focused much more in on the topic of EBL and its connection to EBM, which is an interesting topic, that it would have been a much better lecture.  Instead this received only a portion of the time so that we could be subjected to the names of previous Janet Doe lecturers and of course lists of people to thank. I am pleased to have found two new open access journals to read for my profession, but I do wish the lecture had gone further.

Up next is section programming.

Dr. Richard Besser speaking at MLA13 One Health

After the first plenary and a short break came the second plenary, the McGovern Lecture.  I was surprised to see on twitter (the hashtag for the conference was #mlanet13 if anyone is interested) that many librarians didn’t see the value of having a plenary lecture by a non-librarian talking about non-library things.  I responded to this criticism in one of my official MLA13 blog posts The Value of the Non-Librarian Perspective: Thoughts on Plenary 2.  Please do take a moment to check that out.

And now back to the plenary.  Dr. Richard Besser is the medical correspondent for ABC, but more interestingly to me, he also was the acting director of the CDC during the H1N1 epidemic.  Epidemics ultimately were a theme of the conference, which makes sense since the overarching theme was One Health.  One health meaning the global health of all living creatures and how we are all interconnected.  Below are my notes from Dr. Besser’s lecture.

Introduction

• Describes himself as an accidental journalist
• If you change your life, then the terrorists win.
• The reason Israelis are so well-prepared is because they face it every day.

Starting at the CDC and Advice on Being the New Person

• Recommends the leadership book Good to Great
• 1st ask your new boss what they think of their organization and ask them if they think it needs: big change, small change, or stabilization

How to Respond to a Pandemic

• If you can spread out a pandemic so hospitals aren’t flooded, you’ll save lives.
• You use different words to get different responses.
• With a new emerging infection, you only get one shot to get ahead of it.
• Be transparent with the public.
• Base actions on fact.
• Apply rapid learning –> guide will change based on new knowledge
• If you lose the trust of the public, you’ve failed.
• Three key aspects of communication:
  • Be first
  • Be right
  • Be credible
• Homeland Security is in charge during a declared national emergency
• Dr. Besser was featured on The Daily Show during the H1N1 epidemic
• When he met with the cabinet, Obama said, “I want our responses based on science.”  An excellent support of evidence-based medicine.
• Don’t use jargon with a non-science expert.  (For that matter, don’t use your specialty’s jargon with someone who is not also a specialist).  Just because someone is intelligent doesn’t mean they know the jargon.
• Translate science into clear, spoken English.
• Flu can spread for 12 days after infection.
• How do you tell a good study from a bad one?  Which are reportable?

Q and A

• Once someone is obese, it’s very very hard to lose that weight. Prevention is much easier.
• So many diseases emerge from eating meat.
• up-to-date is “an aggregator site” be sure to check primary sources
• “A lot of people practice based on what they learned in residency.”
• Check out his weekly twitter chat which he has complete control over at handle @abcdrbchat on Tuesdays at 1pm EST.

Check out Dr. Besser’s biography at ABC news, his twitter, and his book Tell Me the Truth, Doctor: Easy-to-Understand Answers to Your Most Confusing and Critical Health Questions.

Up next will be the third plenary, the Janet Doe lecture by Joanne Gard Marshall.

Library-themed buttons acquired from the vendor booths during opening night.

Hello all!

Most of my readers know that, in addition to being a book blogger and indie author, I also have a day job as a librarian for the academic library that serves a Boston-area medical school and and teaching hospital.  Since this is my day job, I’m a member of the Medial Library Association (MLA) and every year we have a conference that my institution graciously sends me to.  Last year it was in Seattle.  This year it was in my home city of Boston.  Last year I blogged quite a bit of the conference information here both to share it and to help me remember what I learned.  You can see the series of posts starting with this one in May of 2012.  This year since I had a year of conferencing under my belt, I applied to be an official conference blogger, and I got the position. Yay!  I was assigned to write 2 to 3 posts about the plenary sessions.  So this year I will still be posting some information from the conference here on my own blog, but I will also be linking out to the official conference blog, as I am not supposed to reproduce my posts for that blog on my own personal blog.  I also will be providing additional commentary on those plenaries on my own blog, though, so they will also be discussed here.

The first event I went to was the grand opening of the exhibit halls on Saturday night after I got off of work.  I only was there for around 45 minutes, due to my work schedule, so I didn’t get to see even half of the exhibits.  Ah well!  It was still a fun start to the conference.

The next morning was when the ball really got rolling with the first plenary session.  The first plenary introduces the theme of the conference and features the address by the current MLA president.  You can see my summary of it on the official blog here.

While  was excite about the international aspect of MLA this year (the meeting was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Medical Librarianship (ICML), the International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists (ICAHIS), and the International Clinical Librarian Conference (ICLC) ), I was disappointed by the lack of content in the presidential address.  I’m not a big fan of “think positive” as a general message to begin with, but it also felt that Blumenthal really didn’t offer much practical advice from her extensive real world library experience to the rest of us.  I missed the enthusiasm of 2011/12 president Jerry Perry’s speech.

Stay tuned for notes from the 2nd plenary by Dr. Richard Besser, medical correspondent for ABC and one-time acting director of the CDC.

Summary:

Review:
This made it onto my tbr pile thanks to a visit to Harvard Books’ used books and remainders cellar.  This was in the remainders pile, and three things drew me to it.  1) It was under $5, 2) The cover has a cat drunk on whiskey on it, 3) I had just read Love Among the Chickens (review) by Wodehouse, which was my first encounter with him, and found him hilarious.  Given this trifecta, I couldn’t resist.  I’m glad I didn’t, as this short story collection didn’t disappoint.

Don’t worry about this being the third in a series.  The only connection among the short stories is the main characters are all a Mulliner (or married to one).  It was completely unnecessary to have read the first two books in the series to get into this collection, although I intend now to read all of the Mulliner books.  I really appreciated how Wodehouse sets up a structure to hold his short story collection together in one unit.  Although they are all self-contained tales, their being together in one collection actually makes sense.  They have more in common than just the author.  They are literally a family of stories.  This helped it hold my interest in a way that many short story collections can’t.

This collection consists of 9 short stories, most of which have some sort of love element.  One person wants to be with (or marry) another and must overcome some sort of obstacle (usually caused by British upper-class culture) in order to be with them.  Hilarity ensues.  My favorite of these was “The Story of Webster,” the cover’s drunk cat.  In this a freewheeling artist has his religious uncle drop his cat off with him while he goes on assignment to Africa.  The judgmental, sullen cat soon starts to reign in the young artist, much to his and his girlfriend’s chagrin.  Everything about this, from the early 20th century fashion and dialogue to the witty commentary on cats and culture works perfectly, particularly for this cat-lover.  The story that I thought worked least-well, and unfortunately wraps up the book, is “Gala Night.”  A pastor Mulliner accidentally helps a young couple who enjoys dancing to acquire the young woman’s parents’ approval of their union.  I didn’t like the religious Mulliner.  He just wasn’t funny to me.  Similarly the catalyst of a mysterious mood enhancing drink just lacked the creativity found in the other stories.  Fortunately, most of the stories fell much closer to the hilarity of the whiskey drinking cat.  However, a couple did fall a bit flat for me, which is why while I greatly enjoyed the book, I wouldn’t say I was totally in love with it.

Overall, this is a wonderfully witty collection of short stories held together by an elderly Mulliner who enjoys telling (possibly tall) tales about his family over a pint in the local pub.  If you enjoy a dry wit and slapstick humor to top off a cute love story, this collection is for you.

4 out of 5 stars

Source: Harvard Books

Buy It

Previous Books in Series:
Meet Mr. Mulliner
Mr. Mulliner Speaking