The discerning reader’s essential read
© 2010 FiveBooks, an intelligent general reader
FiveBooks Interviews
The author and father says there is a lot to be learned about authenticity from hanging out with an autistic person. They are almost born enlightened – it is healing to be with them. They show us it is possible to be another way. He chooses five books that have helped him understand autism.
The Princeton physics professor says the trouble with heavy ion collisions is that they are complicated affairs. They’re like an enormous car crash where everything breaks, there’s tremendous confusion, and then you try to sort out afterwards what happened. He chooses five books on string theory.
The head of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University says the quality of your attachment to your parents can predict not just short-term outcomes, like how well you do at school and your social popularity, but also long-term outcomes like your risk of divorce and your risk of developing personality disorders in adulthood.
The quantum information theory professor says there is nothing distinctly novel that was brought to philosophy by quantum mechanics. The key tenet is this randomness that is at the core of our interaction with the world: there is an element that you can never make more deterministic. And, of course, randomness as a way of looking at the world has existed for a long time. He chooses books on quantifying the universe.
The renowned expert in planetary atmospheric evolution at Penn State University is actively involved in the search by NASA for habitable planets outside our solar system. He says before you start looking for intelligent life you should try to figure out if life itself is common and, despite what the pessimists say, he thinks that it could be – with the right tools to find it.
The psychologist, trustee of Alzheimer’s charity SPECAL and bestselling author chooses FiveBooks on the mad world we live in and says British and American women today are five times more likely to be mentally ill than women in the 1950s. Thatcherism and Reaganomics smashed the family to pieces.
A dream prompts a mother to remove her baby from his crib an hour before a chandelier falls and smashes it. More than a dozen people are no shows for choir practice for the first time ever at the moment their church explodes. Are these coincidences, or is something happening that we need to pay attention to? Physician and author Larry Dossey says consciousness operates outside the physical body and outside the present time – we can all predict the future.
Cardiologist Tato Grasso is a fellow of the International Association for Cannabis as Medicine and he advocates the use of medicinal cannabis as a treatment for the nausea following chemotherapy as well as producing increased appetite in patients with HIV and for some types of chronic pain. He says Sativex, a drug derived from cannabis, should be available in Europe in 2010.
Mark Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Public Affairs. He teaches courses on methods of policy analysis and on drug abuse and crime control policy and edits the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. He blogs at The Reality-Based Community [www.samefacts.org]. He chooses five books on drug abuse and control, including one on LSD as potential spiritual enlightenment.
Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and an expert in autism, Uta Frith says the study of brain and mind will be the big science of the 21st century and help human beings to understand themselves. The mind is not just one hopelessly entangled mass, but can be divided into surprisingly neat compartments, as if we were looking at a house with many rooms. Many people shrink in horror at this idea. ‘They are the lumpers, while I am more of a splitter,’ she says.