Book Reviews

Book review: The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable–and How We Can Get There, by Vincent T. DeVita, and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn.

In my last review of a medical book, I was disappointed about the lack of explanation as to why medical advances get deployed much too slowly, particularly cancer treatments.

By some strange coincidence, the next medical book I read, published a decade earlier, provides some valuable insights into those problems.

This is a memoir of both luck and skill. DeVita is uniquely qualified to describe the origins of the war on cancer, due to a career that included diagnosing patients, running clinical trials, and serving as director of the National Cancer Institute.

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Super Agers

Book review: Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity, by Eric Topol.

I was somewhat disappointed, partly because the title misled me.

The book is broad and shallow, as if he’s trying to show off how many topics he’s familiar with. Too much of the book consists of long lists of research that Topol finds interesting, but for which I see little connection with aging. He usually doesn’t say enough about the research for me to figure out why I should consider it promising.

He mostly seems to be saying that the number of new research ideas ought to impress us. I care more about the quality of the most promising research than about the quantity of research.

The book is mostly correct and up-to-date, but I’m unclear what kind of reader would get much out of it.

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Book review: The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime, by Dale E. Bredesen.

As expected, The Ageless Brain repeats a good deal of information from Bredesen’s prior groundbreaking books about Alzheimer’s. Maybe 10% of the book seemed like ideas that I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

This time, he’s focused a bit more on cognitive decline in people who are young enough to not be at much risk yet for full-fledged Alzheimer’s. But that doesn’t create much of a difference in his advice for brain health.

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Book review: Uncontrollable: The Threat of Artificial Superintelligence and the Race to Save the World, by Darren McKee.

This is by far the best introduction to AI risk for people who know little about AI. It’s appropriate for a broader class of readers than most laymen-oriented books.

It was published 14 months ago. In this rapidly changing field, most AI books say something that gets discredited by the time they’re that old. I found no clear example of such obsolescence in Uncontrollable (but read on for a set of controversial examples).

Nearly everything in the book was familiar to me, yet the book prompted me to reflect better, thereby changing my mind modestly – mostly re-examining issues that I’ve been neglecting for the past few years, in light of new evidence.

The rest of this review will focus on complaints, mostly about McKee’s overconfidence. The features that I complain about reduce the value of book by maybe 10% compared to the value of an ideal book. But that ideal book doesn’t exist, and I’m not wise enough to write it.

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Book review: Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Craig Mundie.

Genesis lends a bit of authority to concerns about AI.

It is a frustrating book. It took more effort for me read than it should have taken. The difficulty stems not from complex subject matter (although the topics are complex), but from a peculiarly alien writing style that transcends mere linguistic differences – though Kissinger’s German intellectual heritage may play a role.

The book’s opening meanders through historical vignettes whose relevance remains opaque, testing my patience before finally addressing AI.

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Book review: Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber.

Hobart and Huber (HH) claim that bubbles are good.

I conclude that this claim is somewhat true. That’s partly because they redefine the concept of a bubble in ways that help make it true.

Boom is densely packed with relevant information. Alas, it’s not full of connections between the various pieces of information and any important conclusions. Nor does it excel at convincing me that its claims are true.

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Book review: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, by Nate Silver.

Nate Silver’s latest work straddles the line between journalistic inquiry and subject matter expertise.

“On the Edge” offers a valuable lens through which to understand analytical risk-takers.

The River versus The Village

Silver divides the interesting parts of the world into two tribes.

On his side, we have “The River” – a collection of eccentrics typified by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and professional gamblers, who tend to be analytical, abstract, decoupling, competitive, critical, independent-minded (contrarian), and risk-tolerant.

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Book review: The Cancer Resolution?: Cancer reinterpreted through another lens, by Mark Lintern.

In the grand tradition of outsiders overturning scientific paradigms, this book proposes a bold new theory: cancer isn’t a cellular malfunction, but a fungal invasion.

Lintern spends too many pages railing against the medical establishment, which feels more like ax-grinding than science. I mostly agreed with his conclusions here, but mostly for somewhat different reasons than the ones he provides.

If you can push through this preamble, you’ll find a treasure trove of scientific intrigue.

Lintern’s central claim is that fungal infections, not genetic mutations, are the primary cause of cancer. He dubs this the “Cell Suppression theory,” painting a picture of fungi as cellular puppet masters, manipulating our cells for their own nefarious ends. This part sounds much more like classical science, backed by hundreds of quotes from peer-reviewed literature.

Those quotes provide extensive evidence that Lintern’s theory predicts dozens of cancer features better than do the established theories.

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