Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her most recent article was about a family that practices yoga together.
Book I'm reading now:
I'm reading some weird and some not so weird books right now. Not weird: "The Round House," by Louise Erdrich. Good, dark. I have a mixed history with Erdrich. Some of her books I love, and some I don't, but I'm hooked on this one.
And because I was doing some research into the history of hormones, one thing led to another, and now I'm reading two totally esoteric books. One is "The Brown Dog Affair: The Story of a Monument That Divided a Nation," by Peter Mason. It's about a statue erected in London in 1906 of a dog that had been vivisected — that is, it had undergone surgery while alive in front of an audience of medical students for educational (and some would say, entertainment) purposes. The doctor who opened the brown terrier's neck and jolted its nerves with electrodes was William Bayliss, whose research on dogs contributed to the discovery of hormones. Unfortunately for Bayliss, some anti-vivisection activists were in the lecture hall that day and claimed the dog was not properly anesthetized. Enraged, they put up the brown-dog statue as a memorial. Some medical students who found this preposterous vandalized the statue with crowbars and sledgehammers. The arrest of those medical students led to riots in London: 1,000 future doctors marching, some of them barking like dogs. (The statue came down in 1910. A new statue of a different brown dog went up in 1985. People have found a way to find this statue offensive too.)
Another, far stranger, book that I'm reading is "The 'Elixir of Life': Dr. Brown-Séguard's Own Account of His Famous Alleged Remedy for Debility and Old Age." It's Brown-Séguard's story, published in 1889, of injecting himself at age 72 with a slurry of filtered and diluted dog and guinea pig testicles. His is the first documented testosterone doping. He loved it: "The day after the first subcutaneous injections and still more after the two succeeding ones a radical change took place in me. . . . I regained at least all the strength I possessed a good many years ago."
Last book I loved:
"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," by Rebecca Skloot. I am ashamed to say: I just read this. The book felt so looming and huge to me, and I was so envious. But of course, it's amazing. A central feature of my reading life is that I have a tortured relationship with nonfiction books. As a magazine writer, I think a lot of them are too long. (I'm a huge fan of the Kindle Singles format.) But Skloot hooked me from the beginning and kept me enthralled — great writing, deep reporting, strong narrative, important ideas. When I was halfway through, I lost my copy in the Frankfurt airport. Right after I landed in San Francisco, when I was waiting for my family to pick me up at the airport curb, I ordered another.
Unread book on my bedside table that gnaws at my conscience:
"The Emigrants," by W. G. Sebald. That trip on which I lost "Henrietta Lacks" was my first trip to Germany. In Leipzig I spent a lot of time in some very old buildings that made W.W. II seem like yesterday. I wanted to try to understand contemporary Germany, how it's dealing with its own history, so I bought the Sebald. "Austerlitz" and "The Emigrants" sit there staring at me while I read "The Round House."
Three books in my field that I highly recommend:
"The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative," by Vivian Gornick. Not a thrilling title but such smart, consolidated writing advice. If you're short on time just read the first four pages. A woman stands up and gives a brilliant eulogy. Why is it brilliant? She knew exactly what part of herself was speaking — in this case, the ambitious young medical student being mentored by the formidable doctor. This relationship, Gornick writes, "had acted as an organizing principle that determined the structure of her remarks. Structure had imposed order. Order made the sentences more shapely. Shapeliness increased the expressiveness of the language."
"Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread From the Data," by Charles Wheelan. Statistics 101 (which you didn't take or have forgotten) delivered to your living room couch by a highly entertaining virtuoso professor.
"Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm," by Orville Schell. Schell wrote this book in 1984, when he was riding herd over 300 Angus cattle on a 1,000-acre ranch in California. How much have we all read about this issue by now? A lot. But this book is still fantastic because Schell dug deep and made his reporting come alive.
One book I would recommend to anyone:
"Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence," by Geoff Dyer. You don't think you want to a read dissolute Brit's account of his failure to write a monograph about D.H. Lawrence? Of course you don't. But trust me. Dyer's is the funniest, most humane and delicious book you'll read in a very long time.
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