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In “A Molecule Away From Madness,” neurologist Sara Manning Peskin writes about the errant molecular activity that underlies many serious mental illnesses. Reminiscent of the work of Oliver Sacks, Peskin’s book conveys its scientific information through stories.
“I wanted to capture how this unfolds in real time,” she says in this week’s podcast. “For many of us, we go to doctors and you get a diagnosis and it’s like that diagnosis has always been there. But in fact, the diagnosis was invented by someone who discovered something. And the history behind these diseases is often lost.”
J. Kenji López-Alt visits the podcast to discuss his latest book “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques”. López-Alt comes from a family of scientists and is known for his science-based approach to home cooking.
“I’ve been cooking in restaurants for a number of years and all the while I had a lot of questions,” he says. “For me it’s normal to ask why we do something, why does it work the way it works? And in restaurants, because of the nature of how a restaurant works and the goal of a restaurant, which is more speed and consistency, you don’t have a lot of time to really focus on those kinds of questions or experiment with them. † So I had a backlog of questions in my head that I eventually started exploring.”
Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We Read”:
We’d love to hear what you think about this episode, and about the Book Review podcast in general. You can send them to books.†