Last year I read some really cool books that are somehow related to my work. I also read books that were so annoying, I didn’t even finish them. I wanted to share some of my thoughts here.
Jim Ottaviani, Maris Wicks: Primates
Lovely comic book about three women researchers who study primates (Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas). Great gift idea! Link to book
Steven Strogatz, The joy of X.
Highly recommended! Great book with essays about fun math. Made me want to learn more. Link to book.
Jennine Capó Crucet: Make Your Home Among Strangers
I very much enjoyed this novel about a young cuban woman who is the first of her family to go to college. It’s an easy read, but it has some insights that may be useful for those of us who teach. Link to book.
Vanessa Woods: Bonobo handshake
Well written memoire by traveler, writer and bonobo researcher Woods, with a lot of background on Congo and neighboring countries. The descriptions of awful violence during the wars in Congo may be upsetting to some. Link to book.
Bill Nye: Undeniable
The topic of this book, evolution, is dear to my heart, but I didn’t manage to finish it. It is simply not well written / edited. Link to book
Frank Ryan: Virolution
This book was definitely worse than Bill Nye’s book! It is not well written and it is full of nonsense about evolution. Disappointing, because it would have been nice to have a good popular book on viruses and evolution. Here Carl Zimmer explains why the book is not recommended: link to book review.
I love reading non-fiction books. Here are the books I most enjoyed reading before and after the birth of our baby
Month -2:Ina May on natural child birth
This book helped me be confident that I could deliver a baby naturally.
I am not a hard core natural child birth proponent, but I was worried that giving birth in an American hospital would give me very high chances of a C-section even if that wasn’t medically necessary. A good friend sent me a wonderful book by midwife Ina May about natural childbirth. I mainly read the part of the book that consists of birth stories written by new mothers. It was inspiring and interesting, and it made me much more confident that I could deliver a baby. It also convinced me that biking and walking was good for me throughout my pregnancy.
This book made taking care of our newborn less scary and less tiring.
The happy baby book (a gift from my cousin and her partner who are both psychologists) was extremely useful and really helped us to know how to soothe our baby. If you are too busy or tired to read, here is a synopsis: a baby likes to be in a swaddle (even if they may resist being swaddled), a baby likes to be held on their side or stomach, a baby likes sound (white noise, shushing), a baby likes to suck on something (finger, nipple, pacifier), and a baby likes little movements. Do all of those and likely the baby will calm down quickly. It definitely worked for our baby!
This book brought support and advice when I went back to work and needed to pump milk.
When I went back to work, I was still breastfeeding my baby. This meant that I needed to pump breast milk at home and at work. We initially rented a pump from the hospital and then bought one (tip: call your insurance first, they usually pay if you buy through them).
Pumping milk is no fun, but a book I found in a second hand bookstore gave me a lot of information and motivation to keep doing it. The book is the story of a group of women who worked at IBM and who shared a room where they could go to pump during work hours. The women kept a notebook in this room, so that they could write to each other during their pumping sessions. They simply shared stories, frustrations, questions they had and helped each other with advice and support. Later, two of them wrote a book based on the notebook. The women in the book were so real and it almost gave me the feeling that I had friends who were going through the same thing as I was. I always kept the book with the pump and enjoyed reading a few pages during each pumping session.
This book convinced us to start learning sign language.
Intuitively, it makes a lot of sense to me that signing with babies is a good idea, but nothing is more convincing to a researcher like me than a randomized trial!
I enjoyed reading a book by Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn, two researchers who pioneered baby sign language. Acredolo and Goodwyn did a randomized controlled trial to find out whether baby sign language had an effect on children’s development. They found that the kids who were taught to sign learned to speak earlier and used more complex sentences (Goodwyn et al 2000). Also they had a higher IQ at age 8 (12 pts difference, going from the 53rd to the 75th percentile, link). I don’t work in the field of child development, but my impression is that a 12 point gain (or 22 percentile points) in IQ is huge. As far as I know, the study has never been replicated, so maybe the real gain is not as big.
However, more important for my daily life is that I love learning sign language & signing with our baby! I have always been intrigued by sign language but I didn’t think I would ever learn a sign language. Now, our baby, who is 12 months old, can sign dog, daddy, flower, monkey, penguin, light, bird and car.
If you are curious, here is a nice video with a baby signing:
Being A Better Scientist 