WHAT DID YOU READ RECENTLY? INTERVIEWS WITH FACULTY MEMBERS

Winter Reading Adventures

Historian Daniel J. Boorstein once observed that one of the many ways in which a book surpasses a computer screen is that that you can take it to bed with you. Whether they curl up with a paper volume or an e-book on a PDA, many CSUDH staff and faculty take advantage of winter holidays to read titles they might not otherwise have time to read.

John Calhoun, Head of Library Collection Development / Acquisitions, reports that Paul Ewald’s Plague Time and Carl Zimmer’s Parasite Rex occupied his spare time. These two recent books suggest the importance of Bill Hamilton’s contributions to what is now known as the Red Queen Theory in Environmental Biology (a reference to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, which holds that sexual difference is a strategy to outwit constantly mutating internal predators).  Ewald, a professor of biology at Amherst College, argues that many diseases are caused not by genes but by germs, and that these chronic infections are actually predators that may not produce symptoms for decades. Zimmer, a frequent contributor to Nature and Science, suggests that a human being itself, not unlike Sacculina carcini (which eats everything of a crab but what it needs to put food in its mouth), is a parasite that preys on the entire world.  Hamilton, a professor of biology at Oxford and the University of Michigan, was the much-admired, absent-minded professor who inspired both authors. Plague Time and Parasite Rex are both available at the University Library.