Book Reviews - Signs of Life

As an author and teacher, I sometimes come across a book I want to recommend to family, friends, students, and whoever might end up on my web page. My thought is to update this page occasionally with a new book or author that has impressed me as worth the candle. Here are some that I want to pass along:

Yesterday, I received and read Underestimated: An Autism Miracle by J.B. and Jamison Handley 2021, Skyhorse Publishing. For the sake of his own son, Jamison, J.B. has probably done more single-handedly for the individuals and families dealing with what Dr. Stephen Oller and I, back in 2010, to the shock and consternation of a lot of folks who were hellbent on denying it, called the “undeniable autism epidemic”. Our title was Autism: The Diagnosis, Treatment, and Etiology of the Undeniable Epidemic. I went back and checked the references to J.B. and Lisa Handley in it just now — there are quite a few explicit ones and many more implicit references to the work of this truly generous man and his family. Our book about autism, confirming some of the most “controversial” aspects of Underestimated: An Autism Miracle, was originally published by Jones & Bartlett but is now available for free with the written permission of the publisher, here in toto, all 456 pages of it, on ResearchGate. I mention this because J.B., though supported by the “autism community” and by many researchers, has already heard plenty from the naysayers who are still singing from the same sheet of music: it’s a genetic mystery that we will never understand much less be able to treat effectively. But they are wrong. Underestimated is a breakthrough of an amazing kind. J.B., Lisa, Jamison, Quinny, and Sam, like the millions impacted by the still growing epidemic, were drafted. They didn’t volunteer for the fight that has enabled Jamison’s escape from something very like the prison that holds captive the victims of locked-in syndrome (see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). Like a war from which there is no furlough, no discharge, and no evident escape, the diagnosis of autism came unbidden to them, and to their son Jamison. The breakthrough chronicled in the narrative that unfolds in Underestimated confirms the hunch that the injuries leading to “real autism” (the kind that Kanner first diagnosed in 1943) impact the neurological connections between cognitive understanding and intentions and the highly articulated motor functions (indexical signs) that are crucial to speech, signing, and writing. Thank God that J.B. and Lisa persisted in their writings, Freedom of Information Act requests, organizations they formed, and in their unyielding search for a way through, or now, because of Jamison’s Autism Miracle, out of autism. Classical “real” autism, until now with this breakthrough, has been the quintessential and least tractable non-communicable chronic disorder (NCD) at the front and center of them all (see the current issue of the IJVTPR). As one of my friends likes to say at a juncture like this one: “You must go get a copy and read it.” Then, after a brief pause, he adds, “Immediately.”

I am finally getting around to writing the review here that I should have written almost a decade ago when this book first appeared in print. This 2013 book published by Simon and Schuster, and co-authored by my friends and colleagues Dr. Steven Collins and Dr. LaTayne Scott Discovering the City of Sodom, was sent to me with autographs by both of the authors. There is a small portion in the chapter titled “Evidence is Evidence” where they point out that the Bible is a true narrative representation beginning in eternity with the book of Genesis, a story that was fully told and put in motion before there was a universe and that goes on into the eternal realm that will be after the present universe is rolled up like a scroll and is rewritten as a wholly new creation as we are told in the book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ that comes at the end of the biblical true narrative. Back at the turn of the millennium (that sounds important!), in the year 2000, Dr. Collins and I published a couple of papers (one titled “The Logic of True Narrative Representations” (TNRs) and the other, “Is the Bible a True Narrative Representation?”). They were both grounded in the unique logicomathematical properties of TNRs. In the book about finding the remains of biblical Sodom, shrouded in about a meter’s thickness of ash buried deep beneath the surface of Tall-el-Hammam, the record of Sodom’s demise is written in dirt, stones, and bones — the evidence of a flash of light and heat that sent smoke billowing into the air like a nuclear bomb was witnessed by Abraham about three millennia ago from another place excavated by Dr. Collins and colleagues at the site of biblical Ai near Bethel. The intense fire left glazed bits of shattered pottery with a “trinitite”-like surface that can only be produced by incredible sudden and short-lived heat of something comparable to the nuclear blast at White Sands Missile Range that took place when I was not quite two years old. Up in Las Vegas, New Mexico and a couple of hundred miles north of the explosion people were talking about the flash of light at breakfast the following day. By contrast with the magnitude of the discovery of the remains of the biblical destruction of Sodom, by Dr. Collins and others, the role played by the theory of TNRs (a mathematically grounded series of indefeasible proofs) hardly makes the news. It would not be preferred over a good movie or an Eagle’s concert. But, TNR-theory was credited in the discovery of biblical Ai by Dr. Peter Briggs in his PhD dissertation, and, according to Dr. Collins and his many collaborators, it played a small part in the Sodom dig. By itself TNR-theory is not so exciting as a nuclear blast, but combined with the smoke Abraham witnessed rising about the remains of Sodom, it has some relevance in today’s world. It explains, among other things, why it is that injuries, diseases, and the events connected with COVID 19 trend toward the catastrophic kind of biological failure that doctors today euphemize as “morbidity”, otherwise more bluntly known as death. Does the statement about “the wages of sin” come to mind? Given all that, in a time such as now, the good news reported by faithful witnesses like Dr. Collins, Dr. Scott, Dr. Briggs, and the ingenious English major from Yale, that would be Eric Metaxas, needs to be shouted from the rooftops! You may want to read my next review and the book that it is about.

The new Metaxas book, Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life, is the sort of discovery that surprises, delights, and amazes. Have I ever read an autobiography that was as engaging as this one? I don’t think so. It will make you laugh and occasionally stop to wipe away tears. For me, it is the kind of story I don’t want to end… that’s why I stopped reading it to write this review…something I don’t ever remember doing before. Getting into Eric’s story is a little like the afternoon when all seemed perfect, a world of love and peace, and you wanted to hold on to the light, to stop the clock, to just stay there and never have to move on. It is reminiscent of the idyllic memories of early childhood when all seemed to be in order and full of blessing and sunshine. It reminds you (me anyway) of the days before the storms and the dark clouds came, before the tears and the pleading in the dark night after all else was quiet and the pleas remained unanswered, alone, by themselves. I am actually writing this review, if it can be called that, before finishing the book, though I know more or less how it ends from at least four occasions where I heard Eric Metaxas tell his story in person. On two of those, I stood through the line, and he signed one of his books for me. That’s us, upper right. I have just mentioned Eric’s recent comments on the 2013 book by Collins and Scott, Discovering the City of Sodom (reviewed just above here). It’s about an archaeological dig in Jordan. Metaxas was the “big draw” speaker in an internet fund-raiser for the continuation of that project. He said that it is possibly the most important discovery of modern times in biblical archaeology. His saying that made me get the autographed book down from the shelf to read it carefully. When Eric Metaxas says a book is “well-wrritten” and “intriguing” that he “couldn’t put it down” and words to that effect, not to mention that he endorsed the scientific importance of the archaeology revealed in that unfolding narrative, it made me go back to read the former book with care. I also mentioned to Eric in our brief conversation that he might take an interest in the theory of true narrative representations mentioned by Collins and Scott in the last chapter of that former book as the theoretical basis for doing the dig there in the first place. Actually, it is the evidence that the Bible is a true narrative representation from Genesis to Revelation that has provided the basis for the greater discovery, that we have come to realize, there is meaning in life, but it can only be appreciated and experienced through the person that Eric also met at the end of his personal true narrative.

Dispatches from the Vaccine Wars by Christopher A. Shaw is slated to appear from Skyhorse Publishing by about June 2021 (the image here is my own creation as Skyhorse has not yet produced one). This is probably the most readable and interesting work yet written on the controversies bound up in the real science and actual research behind vaccines — their history, promises, successes, failures (yes there have been some), and the intense controversies they have engendered. From the start the author distinguishes in fact and principle between propaganda about unquestionable “safety and effectiveness” coming from the only area of all the sciences where “the absolute truth” has been proclaimed once and for all by people like Paul Offit who has declared the science “settled” once and for all and the first empirical proof ever obtained of a null hypothesis assured by a stack of reports of failed searches for any link between vaccines or their ingredients and neuropathies. This book is about the deeper story behind the politics, the sales, the manufacturing, the huge human experiments, and the almost incalculable riches that have attended the most controversial medicines in history. By contrast with the cost of most university grants for research weighing in at a few hundred thousands or perhaps a few million dollars to study some phenomenon or other, the experimental production of vaccines for the still on-going COVID-19 pandemic is estimated in the trillions with multiple billions of dollars going to the competitors who are still rushing to bring one or more experimental mRNA vaccines to market. This book deals with all of that in considerable detail. Interestingly, many of the people doing the most intensive study of vaccine science began with some particular pathogen such as the morbilliviruses (including measles), or some toxicant such as the preservative Thimerosal (Merthiolate), or with something deliberately added to a vaccine to enhance its immunogenicity such as some variant of aluminum salts. Dr. Shaw began as a neuroscientist studying toxicants and other factors suspected of being involved in the causation of Parkinson-like conditions, Alzheimer’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which eventually led to the broader range of poisons believed to be involved to one degree or another in such diagnoses such as ADHD and the autism spectrum. You won’t want to miss this one. It’s a terrific read.

How to End the Autism Epidemic by J. B. Handley is endorsed by people from law, medicine, politics, movies, toxicology, and academics. This Stanford graduate managed $1.5 billion in private capital equity for two decades and is the principal dynamo behind Generation Rescue, Age of Autism, and the documentary, Autism Yesterday. All who are impacted by the exponential growth since the 1970s in “largely preventable non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs) in the U.S.” — the most costly but the least studied according to the National Institutes of Health — owe Handley a debt of gratitude. Historians of the future may be surprised that a businessman, with a vaccine injured child, was among the first researchers to unravel crucial details in the causation of the central epidemic of the 21st century. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the World Health Organization (WHO), the pharmaceutical giants, and the government-protected medical-pharmaceutical industry, all say the autism epidemic is an illusion. They argue that the skyrocketing increase in autism, asthma, auto-immune disorders, childhood multiple sclerosis, diabetes, etc., is because of better informed doctors, more accurate diagnosis, and so on. They say the autism epidemic does not exist and, besides even though that elephant is sitting at the table in front of them it is not there because of vaccines. Meanwhile, the US government has paid out $3.69 billion in taxpayer money since 1988 to a tiny fraction of those injured or killed by “safe and effective” vaccinations promoted by the CDC, FDA, WHO, and the medical-pharmaceutical-government complex that protects them. Taxpayers may suppose the CDC and FDA are safe-guarding them from the giant medical-pharmaceutical-government complex, but the Public Health Service sub-agencies are protecting the giants from individual citizens. What is wrong with this picture? As J. B. Handley notes, based on the 2007-2010 Harvard Pilgrim Health Care study by paid for and then ignored by the CDC, if, for example, 38,894 injuries were reported in 2017, but 99 percent were not reported the actual number of injuries in 2017 should be estimated at something more than 3,850,506. Vaccine injuries are evidently nearer 1 in 38 than 1 in a million. The research Handley reports is thoroughly documented and demolishes many of the myths of today’s government-protected medical-pharmaceutical industry along with the “safe and effective” mantra. This book is a must-read.

Rising from the Dead by Dr. Suzanne Humphries, MD, suggests its contents in the words and pictures on the front cover. However, as someone wise once said, “We shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”, or as someone wiser still said, “We should not judge a book by its cover alone.” I think it was Abraham Lincoln credited with observing that a person the age of one of his surly compatriots was “responsible for the look on his face”. That said, the cover and the face of the person in this story say plenty about an extraordinary, absolutely unique human being. In this case, the cover does a good job of suggesting, or at least hinting at, the gripping narrative on the inside. You have to read the book to find out why the face of the author, more than anyone could possibly know by a casual glance, reflects an amazing restoration of life and hope that can be seen in the light behind this doctor’s eyes. This one of a kind book tells a true story that won’t let you put it down. So, don’t start it in the middle of the night. It seems to grab you by both hands, and by your heart and mind too. As I read through it, the pages practically turned themselves. The seconds became minutes, then hours, until the night had turned to day. It reminded me of conversations, not so long ago, when my dad and I lost track of time until the night was gone and a new day had arrived. The story is written in comprehensible colorful language with a level of intensity, compassion, intelligence, and integrity that comes through on every page and between the lines even in things not said. I’m willing to bet that no reader can possibly anticipate a single one of the many of the twists and turns, the unexpected adventures, that await them in this book about a personal stream of experience that defies all the odds. The story is about events involving people like us. It’s about choices with surprising consequences, and paths that lead where no one else has either dared to go, or where Dr. Humphries seems accidentally, or providentially, to have arrived. The pages will blur not just with the speed of turning them, but the smoke of memories that cloud the eyes. This physics-major turned nephrologist is embarked from the beginning on an unlikely journey into places that her sensible readers might not have chosen on their own, but will be glad, I think, to visit with this remarkable human rising from a grave of medical mythology mistaken for truth ….

Recently, I reviewed Christopher A. Shaw, Neural Dynamics of Neurological Disease, 2017 published by Wiley. This book is a potential game-changer for the neurological sciences. Shaw shows why the “atomization” of neurological disorders/diseases is an uncompletable agenda. “Because of the complexity and interconnectedness of the CNS, damage at any level must necessarily cascade to other levels (e.g., cell to circuit, circuit to a particular region, etc.). So-called ‘cascading failures’ will, at some point, trigger a total system collapse” (p. xix). After that point, “no effective therapy will be possible. For this reason, therapies designed to target late stages of disease, namely most at the ‘clinical’ diagnosis stage, will inevitably fail and may simply exacerbate rather than relieve underlying pathological processes” (p. 231). He explains that instead of “atomizing”, it is necessary to examine neurological diseases from autism to Alzheimer’s “across their respective spectrums of presentation. In this view, the goal will be to come up with a means of addressing multiple risk and causality factors, numerous interactions between genes and toxins, and multiple ‘other’ biochemical and physiological variations across the human population . . . . [I]n place of atomizing neurological diseases and thereby treating them as simple entities in health and illness, treatments will have to acknowledge their overall complexity and thus deal with the reality that complex systems are prone to complex dysfunctional states” (p. 65). He notes that “while controversy still remains about the efficacy of various prophylactic approaches in medicine, few would dispute the key notion that it is better to prevent any of these diseases than to try to deal with the consequences after they have arisen. Such is not, of course, what is done in clinical attempts to treat neurological diseases. And, . . . , it is virtually impossible to prevent something when one does not know what causes it” (p. 231). In spite of all the complexities pointed to by Shaw, he observes that it should nonetheless be possible to “diminish the current trend toward increased prevalence” of neurological disorders such as autism, parkinsonism, and Alzheimer’s. He argues that given access to necessary scientific understanding people “could choose, for example, to limit the bioavailability of chemicals such as aluminum compounds salts and various toxic agricultural chemicals, not to mention a host of other likely neurotoxic culprits” (p. 287). In the end, he supposes the volitional choices that might be made now may soon become the least desirable forced outcome.

World War II and Pearl Harbor Attack A book I read recently is the story titled Wounded Tiger by T. Martin Bennett published December 6, 2016. I wrote a review at Amazon.com on this one but it seems not to have been published on that web site, yet. In any case, it is easily the best researched narrative about WWII that I have ever read, no exceptions. What I like about it, besides the backdrop of the history of the Pearl Harbor attack were all the details about the narrative threads that invariably come together as the story unfolds. Although T. Martin Bennett deserves credit for the writing and research, the only author who could account for the way the streams of experience flowed together in real life is the Lord God Almighty. You have to read it to see this for yourself. It may whet your appetite to consider that the principal protagnonist, who is also the main antagonist, is Mitsuo Fuchida who led the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It was an event that occurred about two years before I was born in an obscure little place in New Mexico overshadowed by the Manhattan Project up in the mountains of Los Alamos. That project would result in the explosion of the world’s first nuclear weapon at the Trinity site in White Sands, New Mexico. That secondary event occurred a few months before my second birthday producing a flash that some reported could be seen in my little town 240 miles from the blast. It was discussed by my grandparents at the breakfast table and long afterward into my childhood and adult years. At my first university posting at UCLA, my first PhD student was a man named Jiro Igarashi from Hiroshima, Japan. As noted in my essay on “what it takes to be a great teacher” I have told about my wrestling coach, Hans Wiedenhoefer who was in Honolulu to play football for San Jose State College on that fateful day in December 1941. Later, my friend Jiro would become the equivalent of the Provost/Academic Vice President of Hiroshima University. Bennett could have benefited from the next book I want to recommend for some of the early conversations that Bennett had to construct as he tried to breathe reality into some of the characters of his story. The later dialogs in the several narratives that flow together become entirely believable as the tension rachets upward even when we think we know the outcome at least in broad strokes. The historical basis of the story is overwhelmingly established and the characters are real. It’s gotta be true.

Michael Connelly and Lee Child read this guy and recommend him Another book to recommend is Steven James, Story Trumps Structure. This is easily the best one in the category that I have read. What caught my attention was the title and the notion that surface form is always subordinated to content. Even Dr. Noam Chomsky, who started out promoting the notion that grammar is ultimately dependent on “autonomous syntax” (nothing but structure), was eventually compelled to make a distinction between “surface structure” and “deep structure” by virtue of which he came to admit that one is a great deal more potent than the other. By my lights he didn’t go quite far enough. But Steven James gets all the way home. It’s the meanings in the story that make it work, or not. However, that’s a small part, though a hugely important part, of the amazing lessons this little book contains, illustrates, employs, and reveals in a deeply layered presentation that will boggle the minds of thinking readers. It’s a book where virtually every lesson contains multiple illustrations of the key points within itself that are brought to the reader in surprising and entertaining ways. One example: deeply into the text Steven James reminds us that events have causes and that our readers need to be able to make the connections in a certain order. Cause first, then, effect. He has also just explained why it’s often useful to overcome resistance in the mind of a reader by getting some underling, child, or powerless individual to make a point that no one would accept on the authority of the smartest person in the world. Now, at the beginning of his chapter on the power of what my dad and I in our writings have called “meaningful sequence”, Steven James uses the power of a nobody to make his point. He tells about giving out the pearl of wisdom that sequence matters while a student at one of his workshops turns to his pal and says something like this: “This is amazing! Are you getting this down? The events of our stories are supposed to fall into a cause-effect order. They’re not random!” Well, that’s my clumsy paraphrase. I already sent the copy of the book to my daughter and Barnes & Noble hasn’t yet replaced the copy I just bought and finished reading in the wee hours of the morning. There are so many extraordinary surprises and kept promises in James’s book that you will just have to commit to buying yourself a copy. I already ordered a replacement for mine.

A while back, published in 2010, was Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas. It concerns events leading up to WWII. More particularly it is about the history preceding the Nazi phenomenon. Perhaps the underlying question that intrigued me the most was how so many people could be swept into the vortex of the downward spiral leading deeper and deeper into the inevitable hell hole that Adolf Hitler and his cronies represented as a bright and promising future for Germany and the whole world. I learned about Bonhoeffer in graduate school but had no idea about the depth of the man until Metaxis took on the task of writing this thick tome. When I first got into it and felt not only the physical depth of the pages but the intensity of the background detailed by Metaxis, I wondered if anyone would be as willing as I was to wade through it all. Yet I found it impossible to put the story down and found my pen underlining as if I were sitting in Dr. Just’s philosophy class at Fresno City College once again. Over and over I marked quotations that I wanted to memorize and to be able to call up in conversations. No one could have made up the characters in the story, nor could any author, other than God Himself, elicit the lines that came from Bonhoeffer’s pen and mouth. In this book and in the Wounded Tiger story, I believe readers who take the trouble to read all three of these works, will see the message that comes through to me. It is absolutely true that we human beings are made in the image of God and that we have the awesome God-given power to create universes in our imaginations that rival, as Chomsky has correctly intuited even in his profound error of equating the real world with fictional ones, the real world that only God could create. My main beef with Chomsky, therefore, must be stepped back a bit. The real world is the only basis, I think, for our having the slightest chance of building fictional worlds in our imaginations, but Chomsky is correct (you can hear a version of his 0wn argument in his own words at the link just marked), I now believe, in supposing that human languages, once acquired, are somewhat indifferent to which is which. In any case, Bonhoeffer’s story, together with that of Fuchida, Hitler and Hirohito, shows that there is an Author that outranks the rest and what He writes down is what is. The real world still outranks fictional ones.