Book Review: ‘Double Helix’ (six volume omnibus) Star Trek – The Next Generation

Double Helix Omnibus by Peter David

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I’ve given these 6 books 5 stars not because they are brilliantly-written, thought-provoking literature but simply because they do what’s expected – provide an escape and, frankly, a stress-buster, for these pestilential and war-riven (here in Europe) times.
In Book 1 (‘Infection’) we are given to wonder who – or what – would rather two species (one of them us humans) be at each other’s throats than living happily together as they do on planet Archaria III. The same shadowy outfit is again at it, on another planet this time, in Book 2…
Only in Book 6 (‘The First Virtue’) do we find out how it all started, and how it ends.
Or does it?
In the meantime we get all the classic Star Trek items: the good Captain Picard attempting peacemaking on behalf of the Federation; his faithful crew running the ship ‘like clockwork’; a rather clumsily-described but still heartwarming development of a friendship between a hot-headed human and a Vulcan workmate… And for sci-fi cliche afficionados, we get the seductive blue/green slave girl (every tale should have one and yes, for some reason she has to be blue or green).
What I like about it most is the way, even though written more than twenty years ago, it has something to say for us today. The ‘Purity League’ could be any of today’s far-right organisations, and their reaction to the arrival of the plague is depressingly realistic. So is the attribution of blame, in a later book, by one side in a war to their opponents, when it turns out the atrocity in question was committed by a scheming third party.
I have to admit now that I cheated: I didn’t read these tales as an Omnibus, but bought the books separately. And I was delighted to find, in the back pages of each one, an invitation to take part in a Star Trek TNG story competition – an invitation for which I’m sure I’d need a far more detailed knowledge of TNG characters than I presently possess, as well as a USA passport and, with the deadline having passed in 1999, a time machine.



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Book review: ‘The Great Cholesterol Con’ by Malcolm Kendrick

The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It by Malcolm Kendrick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“The Japanese eat less fatty food than the English, and have fewer heart attacks.
The French eat more fatty food than the English, and have fewer heart attacks.
The Chinese drink less beer than the Americans, and have fewer heart attacks.
The Germans drink more beer than the Americans, and have fewer heart attacks.
Conclusion: eat and drink what you like: it’s speaking English that kills you!”

It’s a joke, right?

I mean everybody knows that eating more fatty food gives you high cholesterol, and makes it more likely you’ll be felled by a heart attack. Or indeed by a host of other ills. It’s ‘a truth universally acknowledged’…

Well, it’s bunk.

And our lad from Scotland, home of the Deep-Fried Mars Bar no less, has the figures to prove it.

After taking the reader through a detailed but user-friendly tour of heart attacks, cholesterol types (and how they’re measured), how Statins – today’s drug of choice for addressing the ‘problem’ – come in, and how the theory behind them (“Fatty foods increase cholesterol level, which in turn increases the chance of heart attacks”) came into being, Kendrick poses an alternative theory for the cause of changes in heart attack rates in populations all over the world.

Why, for example, did the healthy and clean-living Finns suddenly succumb to heart attacks in large numbers in the ’60s? Why did Glasgow’s heart attack numbers surge a decade later, when their diet had hardly changed? And what about the high casualty rate among Australian Aborigines – not exactly notorious for tucking into bacon butties and chips?

Spoiler – it isn’t speaking English.

What I really love about this book is that Kendrick doesn’t mince his words. One minute he’ll be analysing the best and most thorough medical statistics (with references from peer-reviewed studies), the next he’ll cheerfully round off the expert debunking of a well-loved bit of ‘truth universally acknowledged’ with phrases like “Hello? Cause and effect?” Or when he teases out one of the many contradictions in the present theories it’ll be: “Freedom is slavery – George Orwell to the rescue.”

I might add that the scientific skullduggery on page 67 is something to behold. It’s the sort of thing that turns up in Ben Goldacre’s ‘Bad Science’ (which I also recommend, by the way).

Let me close with the reason why I, personally, reckon we should all think twice about Statins, cholesterol, and hearts – and why this book is so important:

I am your canary in the coal mine: an ‘Extreme’ heart patient. By that I mean I had life-saving heart surgery back in the days when the chances of its giving a child even just a few extra years of life were less than 50-50, and the lucky patient had to be chilled down so far that the external blood circulation was done using an adapted ice-cream machine (I kid you not: it was made in Croydon, and it’s now in the Science Museum).

Every year since then, I’ve attended check-ups where careful measurements are taken to make sure that nothing’s putting my heart in danger. Teams from all over the country have done this as I’ve moved about following my career. Dozens of top cardiologists and surgeons.

And of all these people none – not one – has even so much as mentioned cholesterol, or statins.



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