A Merry Heart

This was SO good (and the audio is read by the author, which was absolutely wonderful). Macfarlane’s style is lovely and evocative. His descriptions are full of heart and color and his personal narratives wind through the book gently making his arguments. Highly effective and entertaining.

What was interesting to me was how this book made January’s stinker relevant. While Macfarlane is trying to convince us that the bodies of water surging and sloshing all across the planet are alive and sovereign, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much of the human body is water and how essential to human health clean waterways are. Pathogenesis detailed the many, many times in history that contaminated and misused waterways had immediate and devastating effects on the health of the human population. Aside from that, my head has been filling itself with water metaphors. Not only are our bodies mostly water, but we’re almost born from it. A pregnant woman’s blood volume will have almost doubled by the time they deliver. In moments of great sadness, joy or stress, our bodies cry tears, returning a little of our water. Life was born in and, as far as earth goes, cannot exist without water. There are more bacteria and virus within a human body than their own cells. An echo of the life teaming in and on every river on earth?

This mf book. I am still mad. It was recommended SO highly by several people whose opinions usually don’t do me wrong, but lemme tell you. There has been wrongdoing.

The bait and switch Kennedy pulled is objectionable. The intro is fantastic! Wonderful, breakneck pacing and so chock full of facts to hold up his thesis that i began to take notes immediately. I was so excited to dive in. Should have stayed skeptical, because this dude drug me through seven chapters of unsupported claims, increasingly euro- and Anglo-centric focus and language, and, perhaps most damningly, a lack of science. It appears to be very well researched, however, i am confused by his focus. It is true that there’s not a lot of fossil evidence for illness in prehistory, and many illnesses don’t leave legible calling cards in our DNA, however, i was not persuaded by his theory. Additionally, as the book moved into the recent past, I was more and more disgusted by the language the author used to describe the courses and effects of colonialism, capitalism and chattel slavery. It seems to me that a professor of sociology would have a better grasp of the connotations of the words he chose and greater sensitivity to the tone those words set. My marginalia by the end of the book was just unhinged exclamations.

He does bring it home reasonably well in the end, making an almost conciliatory conclusion, sketching out a hopeful path for humanity to navigate the latest challenges of disease that is informed by our past, but by that point, i was so done with him that i had only hate-read to the end because january was almost over and this was my chosen NF for the month. eugh.