What I Just Read

There is a lot to learn from this 1969-era autobiography of a once-beautiful actress who Hollywood created, chewed up, and then spit out. Veronica Lake was manufactured into a star during 1940s-era Hollywood, to the point that books written 30 years later would still remember her, not for her acting, but for her world-famous "peek-a-boo" haircut . She went from a forgettable middle-class life in Brooklyn, to riches, and then to rags. She couldn't find work. She drank. And she aged, badly. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] You'd think the author would harbor a lot of anger--toward herself, toward her ill fortune, or toward the movie industry star system that created her. But interestingly, she's sanguine about...

Author Jacques Monod was a co-winner of the 1965 Nobel prize for describing the replication mechanism of genetic material and how cells synthesize protein. The thoughts in this book, based on a series of lectures the author gave in 1969, strikes the reader as the molecular biologist's "narrow version" of Edmond O. Wilson's book Consilience . Where Wilson sought unifying ideas across all sciences, Monod discusses unifying ideas across each of the various levels of biology, starting at the genetic level (with protein formation and replication), moving to the microscopic level (interactions inside the cell) and then to the macroscopic level (the structure and order of biological beings). Along the way, the reader gets a brief tour of the history of biological science, as the author reviews various biological theories of life over the last few centuries. We learn the "vitalism" theories of Henri Bergson, Hans Driesch and others; the "animism" theories...