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Book review – How Animals Grieve

8-minute read
keywords: ethology

Death, and its attendant grief, is on that infamous shortlist of two things that are sure in life. But are humans alone in understanding death? To prepare for reviewing Susana Monsó’s new book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, I reach back in time to 2013 to a highly relevant book that has been sitting on my shelf unread for too long. In How Animals Grieve, anthropologist Barbara J. King mines a compelling vein of anecdotes that strongly suggest this emotion is not uniquely human. This, then, is the first of a two-part review exploring how our evolutionary next of kin experience and understand death.

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Book review – What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design

10-minute read

Advances in medical research mean we have come to grips with numerous diseases and health conditions over the decades. But, like a game of whack-a-mole, you solve one set of problems to only have other, often more complex problems take their place. There is valid criticism to be had of medicine and its reductionist approach and What Is Health? sees neurobiologist Peter Sterling offer a critique grounded in physiology.

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Book review – The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread – and Why They Stop

6-minute read

With the world in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, the questions posed by the subtitle of this book are on everyone’s mind. Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Adam Kucharski here takes the reader through the inner workings of contagion. From violence and idea to financial crises and, of course, disease – some universal rules cut right across disciplines. So, is this the most topical book of the year? Well, yes and no.

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