Hi all,

Please click http://www.meetup.com/Undeniably-Non-Fiction-Book-Club/polls/768802/ to take the poll to decide the book choice for May 5th (note that I have pulled this to the 1st Sunday in May due to Mother's Day).  I will close the poll at the end of the day this coming Sunday. Please take the poll even if you don't like either of these options or can't attend, there are voting options for both those situations.

Thanks to those who attended the discussion of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman.  There were 10 people who attending and the average rating that the book got on our 5 point scale was 3.5, which put it in 8th place among the 14 books we have rated.  The ratings fell in a fairly narrow range with no one really disliking the book, but no one also rated it very highly.  Several people commented that the book was a repetition of many of the same social science experiments that have been reported in other books, but that it still provided a very complete overview of the area.  We had the most discussion around the topic of free will and the legal system and to what degree people really "consciously choose" their actions.  There was also a fair amount of comparison of this book with our selection from last March of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

The results of our vote on the books at the meeting are posted online. Here are the finalists for the May meeting:

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon
Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2012: Anyone who’s ever said (or heard or thought) the adage “chip off the old block” might burrow into Andrew Solomon’s tome about the ways in which children are different from their parents--and what such differences do to our conventional ideas about family. Ruminative, personal, and reportorial all at once, Solomon--who won a National Book Award for his treatise on depression, The Noonday Demon--begins by describing his own experience as the gay son of heterosexual parents, then goes on to investigate the worlds of deaf children of hearing parents, dwarves born into “normal” families, and so on. His observations and conclusions are complex and not easily summarized, with one exception: The chapter on children of law-abiding parents who become criminals. Solomon rightly points out that this is a very different situation indeed: “to be or produce a schizophrenic...is generally deemed a misfortune,” he writes. “To...produce a criminal is often deemed a failure.” Still, parents must cope with or not, accept or not, the deeds or behaviors or syndromes of their offspring. How they do or do not do that makes for fascinating and disturbing reading.

The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear by Seth Mnookin
Over the last three decades, the incidence of autism spectrum disorder, better known simply as autism, has risen dramatically in the U.S., from approximately 1 in 1,000 children to 1 in 110, arousing widespread concern among parents and psychiatrists alike. A few of the many potential possible culprits scientists have targeted are faulty genes and thimerosal, a mercury-laced preservative in vaccines. Former Newsweek senior journalist Mnookin focuses his masterful investigative skills primarily on the latter, highly controversial possibility, illustrating how the current, misguided anti-vaccine movement can be blamed almost equally on panic-driven parents, sensation-hungry media, and PR-challenged health authorities. In making his case, Mnookin covers a wide swathe of medical history, from polio outbreaks to the scare tactics of fringe British researcher Andrew Wakefield, who first forged the dubious vaccine-autism link. While Mnookin dismantles this link convincingly, his argument that multivaccine cocktails have been proven safe is ultimately less persuasive. Still, he’s an able, engaging wordsmith, and this cautionary tale about misinformed medical alarmism is thoroughly compelling.