Dr. Judy Melinek described her experience as a medical examiner performing autopsy on nearly 300 bodies in New York. She shared some personal experience as a daughter to a psychiatrist father, who committed suicide when she was only 13 years old. You can learn from her a few ways how a person dies and what happens afterward. Of course, you get to learn the forensic science on how to determine how a person dies and how to attribute to the root cause. As a person who’s always curious about deaths (one of my favorite HBO TV series is “Six Feet Under”), it’s a very fascinating read if you’re interested in that sort of things.
– The main reason Dr. Melinek decided to switch from being a surgeon to a forensic pathologist or medical examiner was to leave the 130-hr work week, which may result in hurting her patients. She couldn’t do it any more.
– “Decomps” or decomposition of human bodies when a person dies – the blow up of skin due to bacteria, the maggots, and etc., challenges a medical examiner in finding the cause of death.
– Dr. Melinek examined many suicide cases. Having experienced her father’s suicide, it gets very personal for her but she was willing to talk about it and confronting it, which is in a way therapeutic for her. I agreed that the committing suicide is a coward act but I sympathize without those suffering through depression and the family members who had to see the self destruction of their loved one.
– She distinguished the differences among the causes of death: “undetermined,” “homicide,” “accident,” “therapeutic altercation” and “natural cause.” The responsibility lies with the examiner in determining the cause correctly.
– A medical examiner doesn’t get to follow through the cases that came to their tables. When ruled as “homicide,” a detective must investigate. The frustrating one is one that she couldn’t find the cause – “undetermined.”
– Strange cases like headless man washed out on a river bank who turned out be a handicap with a serious gambling habit. Nonhuman parts like animal penis showed up for ID. There was a body without much blood – retracted back to the bone?! A bullet got flushed into the circulatory system and ended up far away from the entry point. An alcoholic woman fell off the stair and died – killed by her estranged husband? A hot-watered burned baby? A strange TRALI case, anti-body reaction to blood transfusion, was mistaken to be a drug junkie case.

– Working through the disaster of the World Trade Center collapses during September 11, 2001, Melinek had the first-hand knowledge of that human tragedy and the experience working through identifying the body parts for the living who remains. The gruesome scenes that she describes make a deep impression on me – the charred, decomposed body parts that they had to identify for almost 1,400 people out of the nearly 3,000 casualties. What a sad, sad tragedy! In addition, they had to contend with the threat of anthrax, the subsequent crash of AA 587 in Queens, NY within 2 months of the 911 and other rumors that made their work more difficult.
– I like this last quote of hers, “To confront death every day (she did more than 2,000 since), to see it for yourself, you have to love the living.” How true!

I’m not much of a fan of “The Who” rock band until I read this book. It’s a book about Pete Townshend’s journey from a child of non-traditional upbringing to becoming a famous rock star.

– Interesting creative process of writing songs: locking himself up in non-stop marathon creative session. Rock opera like “Tommy” was a stroke of genius though I still couldn’t put rock and opera in the same sentence or think of them in similar veins. His dedication to the craft of playing and create music is certainly admirable.

– Being born with talents to a musical-talented parents (father was a musician and mother was a good band singer) equipped him with some advantages, though it comes with some downsides of unstable family environment (mother’s on-and-off relationship with his father).

– The Who has many good hits including the theme songs used in CSI, New York. It’s a walk down the memory lanes when I replayed some of their songs and videos on Youtube.

– Pete’s relationship with Eric Clapton and helping Eric’s struggle with his and his wife’s drug addiction. He probably save them from their own self destruction, by Pete’s account.

– Like the Rolling Stones band, the Who band was also involved in lots of drugs, and alcohol. For Pete, he used alcohol more than any other drugs, according to the book. He drank and drove often and got his driver’s license revoked, fortunately, so no one else got hurt.

– Smashing guitar became his signature act because of his performances in his earlier career. Also Pete turned the feedback and level saturation into an art form.

– Lacking spiritual direction, Pete Townshend became fascinated with the teaching of Baba Meher, who claimed to be an Avatar of God. Must be the side effect of too much drug or alcohol abuses.

Overall, it’s a good book if you are a “The Who” fan. Since I’m not, it didn’t do much for me but it did bring back lots of memory when I checked back all the The Who hits like “Who Are You,” “Baba O’riley,” and other good songs on youtube. The book reminded me of Keith Richards’ autobiography “Life.” See review here. The Who has left its mark in the musical history. Pete Townshend certainly contributed a great deal to it, as documented in the book.

A French blind girl without her loving dad and an electronic wizard orphan boy without his supportive sister came together from two different background and met in one place in Saint Malo, France in the middle of World War II. For just a brief day, they met and shared a can of peaches, then they went their separate way never to see each other again. Until the last few chapter, two separate stories are being told of each character. Somehow, the readers know they will meet someday but I didn’t know it would take this long.

It’s a really long book and difficult to read in the beginning because of mix of French and German languages and the story took place so long ago during 1940’s. It takes a little while to get into the story but it’s all worthy it at the end.

Switching between the two stories of Werner and Marie-loure is an excellent technique to keep the readers interested like having two cameras back and forth between the two central characters.

The World War II did a lot of damage to the people of France and Germany, especially those of disadvantaged: the blind and orphans. People are crude to one another fighting for survival, when the best and the worst of human drama happened.

The Sea of Flame diamond and the myths surrounding it make the story rather interesting. And there are the supporting characters:
– the locksmith with skill in woodworking, turning an entire neighborhood into a a small model to get her blind daughter familiarized with neighborhood
– the great uncle, Etienne, with a phobia of public places but a renowned science broadcaster, turned out to be the link between the blind girl and the boy – who listened to his broadcast in Germany as a child.
– a friend, Frederic, with a passion for birds, turned into a brain-damaged boy because of the hatred and bullying of the military school classmates.
– At the end, the two girls of significance to the boy met long after the end of the war, when the boy (Werner) was declared dead, though I kept hoping that he would turn out alive. That would be truly good ending.
– Like a good novel, there were lots ironies. The most unfortunate ones and least likely to survive in a war turn out alive like the blind girl, Marie-Loure, Jutta, and Frederic.

The book is beautifully written and words so well crafted that it’s no surprise it won the Pulitzer price. Highly recommended if you have some curiosity in the war-torn France and believe, just so slightly, if the myths are being tested.

This is the second time I read this book, first time being more than 20 years ago. This time I am motivated by the movie, “Martian.” The underlying thesis of the book appears to be still valid, although it’s now in its 10th anniversary edition from its original 1988 edition. Many of the theories are still difficult to understand for me even with my years of engineering/physics study. Some of the topics are a refresh for me like Uncertainty Principle.

My key takeaways are:

1. The universe is still expanding.
2. No absolute time and space.
3. Grand unified theory is very difficult to prove (takes as much energy as the solar system).
4. Black holes are not so black.
5. No single theory on how the universe began.

This is quite an interesting book for those with some background in physics and curious about the universe and how it all started.

A summary:

1. Our Picture of the Universe: Some history of how humans come to the understanding of the universe since the Aristotle time and the two theories that describe them: Newton’s Gravity (large scale) and Quantum Mechanics (small scale).

2. Space and Time: Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light if the source is traveling – can’t add to the speed of the source. Unfortunately, Newton’s gravity theory goes against the idea because the gravitational effects is instantaneous or infinite speed. General Theory of Relativity gets rid of absolute time and Newton’s Laws of Motion puts an end to the absolute position. Everyone carries on his/her own clock measuring time depends on where he is and how he’s moving.

3. The Expanding Universe: By looking at the stars’ spectra (red-shifted due to the Doppler Effect), astronomers can tell the stars from other galaxies are mostly moving away from us. Otherwise, the gravity would cause the universe to collapse. This may explain why the universe looks similar in all directions or receives the same amount of radiation from all directions. This leads to the possibility of a singularity or the Big Bang as the origin of time, when general relativity breaks down.

4. The Uncertainty Principle: Heisenbger’s theory that the more accurately you try to measure the position of a particle, the less accurate you can measure its speed, the product of the two are the Plank’s constant. The quantum state is a combination of position and velocity. Electrons orbiting around the nucleus like a wave, with a wavelength that depended on its velocity number.

5. Elementary Particles and the Forces of Nature: Four categories of force: 1) gravitational, 2) electromagnetic, 3) weak nuclear force (responsible for radioactivity), 4) strong nuclear force, which holds the quarks together in the proton and neutron. Lots of discussion about anti-matter or anti-quarks.

6. Black Holes: Lights have a duality of particles (bent by gravity) and waves of quantum mechanics. When a star loses its energy, it starts to cool off. But the Pauli exclusion principles keep particles away from one another, maintaining at a constant radius. If it’s less than Chandrasekhar limit, it would turn into a neutron star. If more, it may explode or break up to under the limit. Moving objects send out gravitational “waves” that eventually reaches a steady state as it loses energy like Earth around Sun and crushing into Sun in 10^27 years. Black holes can be deduced by observing a star orbit around on its own – most likely orbiting around a black hole.

7. Black Holes Ain’t So Black: Black holes can emit radiation because of conservation of energy. What goes in as particle mass due to gravitational force must come out as radiation or anti-particles.

8. The Origin and Fate of the Universe: The universe started out in a big bang and very hot. As it expanded, it cools. Lots of discussion about anthropic principle (we can explain it because we exist); it’s hard to explain why the universe is the way it is. The total energy of the universe is a big zero. Classic theory of gravity, the universe may have existed for an infinite time or begins in a singularity. By quantum mechanics, there may not be a boundary condition nor edge.

9. The Arrow of Time: The increase of disorder or entropy with time gives the direction of time – thermodynamic sense of time, different from cosmological sense of time (universe expanding) and psychological sense (we feels time passes).

10. Wormholes and Time Travel: Cosmic strings are discussed. Wormholes may be the way to warp space time to travel back in time. Lots of discussion about time traveling forward and backward using various theories. No conclusion.

11. The Unification of Physics: String theory can be used to unify the physics theories. Even we could find one, we may not be able to prove it.

Conclusion:
The days after we discover the unify theory, we may be able to discuss why we and the universe exist – a true triumph to the human race.