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akujunkan...TWIB-IV: The Backlog.
1) 食品リスク―BSEとモダニティ - 神里達博
Food Risk: BSE and Modernity - Kamisato Tatsuhiro
The first 26 pages of Food Risk are comprised of a conversation, printed in pseudo-handwritten font, in which woodland creatures ask big wise Mr. Owl why so much of what humans eat makes them so sick. No joke.
As one may imagine, I was thus pretty damn skeptical about there being anything in the next 350-odd pages worth reading. Luckily, the rest of Food Risk came as a pleasant surprise. Taking the 2001 Hokkaido outbreak of BSE as his jumping-off point, Kamisato (an essayist by profession) has written an interesting and accessible popular history of both naturally-occurring and human-created prion diseases and the various scientists who, over the past several centuries, have struggled to understand the mechanisms behind the origins and spread of said illnesses. His narrative strikes a rare balance between being accessible to lay readers and not dumbing down the science underlying the subject. (Incidentally, I was able to pick up on most of the specialised terminology through context; non-native speakers of Japanese don't need to worry about having a medical dictionary at hand before picking up the book.)
The quality does drop a bit in the final chapters, where Kamisato attempts to link the BSE epidemic to other contemporary Japanese food safety scandals, perhaps in an attempt to make the topic more germane to his audience. He would have done better to focus more on linking his thesis (that policy determines science as much as science guides policy) to the earlier chapters of his work instead, but this is a minor complaint. Overall, Food Risk is a highly readable popular science volume that I recommend to anyone who's enjoyed similar volumes in the past.
That will be all.
1) 食品リスク―BSEとモダニティ - 神里達博
Food Risk: BSE and Modernity - Kamisato Tatsuhiro
The first 26 pages of Food Risk are comprised of a conversation, printed in pseudo-handwritten font, in which woodland creatures ask big wise Mr. Owl why so much of what humans eat makes them so sick. No joke.
As one may imagine, I was thus pretty damn skeptical about there being anything in the next 350-odd pages worth reading. Luckily, the rest of Food Risk came as a pleasant surprise. Taking the 2001 Hokkaido outbreak of BSE as his jumping-off point, Kamisato (an essayist by profession) has written an interesting and accessible popular history of both naturally-occurring and human-created prion diseases and the various scientists who, over the past several centuries, have struggled to understand the mechanisms behind the origins and spread of said illnesses. His narrative strikes a rare balance between being accessible to lay readers and not dumbing down the science underlying the subject. (Incidentally, I was able to pick up on most of the specialised terminology through context; non-native speakers of Japanese don't need to worry about having a medical dictionary at hand before picking up the book.)
The quality does drop a bit in the final chapters, where Kamisato attempts to link the BSE epidemic to other contemporary Japanese food safety scandals, perhaps in an attempt to make the topic more germane to his audience. He would have done better to focus more on linking his thesis (that policy determines science as much as science guides policy) to the earlier chapters of his work instead, but this is a minor complaint. Overall, Food Risk is a highly readable popular science volume that I recommend to anyone who's enjoyed similar volumes in the past.
That will be all.