Alice Stewart was a doctor and a scientist who was one of the first practioners of a new post-war discipline, epidemiology. For what became the Oxford Study of Childhood Cancer, she drew up questionnaires, recruited volunteer interviewers, and assembled by hand enormous amounts of data about thousands of children. Her methods were unorthodox. She started the questions from conception, not birth. She tracked forward, from a healthy population, not backwards, from the sick. She did what none of the lofty, eminent men of her day had thought to do: “I asked the mums.”

She asked the mums. She gathered data, a beginner’s mind, and one brilliant statistician. With little funding, and sometimes active hostility in place of support, she and George Kneale coaxed stories from her facts and figures. Fifty years later, that data is still talking.

The most famous of her many discoveries was the link between x-rays and cancer, though it took decades for her findings to be accepted and for shoestores to stop x-raying for fit. Her later work on radiation and cancer was systematically squashed by the nuclear industry. Epidemiology, with its thirty-year studies, is a science for the long-lived. Alice was working right into her nineties, fighting suppression by powerful lobbies. As consolation for the Nobel Prize she may have deserved, she won the Right Livelihood Award, the “Alternative Nobel” awarded in Sweden. The British Embassy in Stockholm did not even take her out to lunch.

Her theories on leukemia epidemics were grounded in her background as a working doctor, not an academic. She realised, for example, that antibiotics had unmasked the true incidence of leukemia. It was the healthiest children who succumbed to leukemia, early doctors often noted. Leukemia dramatically compromises the immune system, so long before the disease visibly manifests, these children used to die of minor infections. When these infections were cured by antibiotics, they lived through long enough to develop cancers of the blood.

Her childhood cancer data also turned up a peculiar finding: twice as many children who died of leukemia under six months old were born between January and June than between July and December. Yet these periods are climatically the same in Britain—both half summer, half winter. The difference, she noted, was whether a month-old child was surviving into warmer or colder weather.

Alice, true to her name, looked the mirror image of this information and thought about SIDS deaths, which occur more often in winter.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) kills between 6,000 and 7,000 babies a year in the United States alone, or between 2 and 3 cases per 1,000 live births. Nobody knows what SIDS is, or why it’s on the rise. What is known is that it happens more often in winter than summer and that it occurs mainly between four and six months of age.

Bob Cringely’s account of his son Chase’s death from SIDS two years ago is hard to forget. As a parent he desperately wants answers:

Well, here is the theory of an extraordinary scientist who doggedly proved herself right so many times while she was alive. It seems to me, as laywoman as they come, to show all Alice Stewart’s practicality, intuition, and good science. Why is nobody testing this? For her memory, and for Chase’s, I’d like to think that someday someone will dig out those journals and try.

Reference: All Alice Stewart excerpts are taken from Chapter 15 of The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation by Gayle Greene. (Many thanks to Alice’s granddaughter, Elly, for lending me her copy. )
See also “Our Brilliant Careers”, a 1996 documentary on Alice Stewart produced by Channel 4.

Well, sorry, but bear with me. From Andie in Capetown comes a link to great interview with Samantha Power. Her book, A Problem From Hell, deserves readers, but according to this isn’t getting them in spite of all its awards. Her description of her own political awakening goes towards explaining why:
“The easy thing—which I have done for most of my life—is to block the facts out. Once you are in a position where you have to process the facts, you are stuck.”

From Birnbaum’s introduction:

The United States has never in its history intervened to stop genocide and has in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.”
—Samantha Power, “A Problem From Hell”

At college, my best friend Caitríona studied History and Politics. I got Hob-Nob crumbs on the western canon, and wondered how she crawled through those dull books. She went to Bosnia after we graduated, and wore white Levi’s as her UN observer uniform. Afterwards, in Boston, she won a Fulbright scholarship to study Balkan conflict resolution, which I rarely asked her about for fear she would tell me. She went back to Bosnia. This time she lived in Tuzla, near where General Mladic had executed more than 7,000 men in a UN “safe area”. She worked for a group called Physicians for Human Rights. They gathered forensic evidence from the Srebrenica massacre so that each case could be prosecuted as a murder. She spoke daily with the widows and families, trying to reunite them with the bodies of their missing, murdered men. She drew media attention to the work they were doing, and needed to do. Later, she was called as an expert witness at the first war crimes tribunal held at the International Court in The Hague.

I spent those years caught up in the New York internet culture. I read The Economist, but often as not I skipped the depressing International news section. Why bother? I worked long hours, made more money than I needed, and puffed up on the importance of the startup company that grew out of my living room. The word “revolution” appeared in the business plan and nobody laughed. We used to call late-night code “hero check-ins”. CEOs studied The Art of War. When bad things happened to go projects, I would say “Babies won’t die, kids.”

Twice I went to visit Caitríona in The Hague, after she broke her back when knocked off her bike on the way to her first week at the tribunal. I met her friends: human rights lawyers, activists, and war reporters. Their intensity reminded me of the geeky evangelists in my world, only more so. They were animated as they tried to explain what had happened, who had stood aside, who was evil, why this mattered. All night I couldn’t get the Bowie song out of my head: “This ain’t rock and roll. This is…GENOCIDE.” I concentrated on getting the names of the generals right, and failed. These old Yugoslavia hands struck me as institutionalised, addicted to the intensity of a war zone, unable to let go. They drank too much. They acted like this was life and death.

I had never visited Cait in Bosnia, though she was there for three years. I was afraid. I wanted to spend my few holidays in comfort. I didn’t want to know about this unpleasant world, and I didn’t want to feel guilty for doing nothing to improve it. She came to me instead, in busy, glitzy, boomtown New York. I showed her my new toys and lectured her on the wireless revolution. I worried that she didn’t earn enough, that she lived in horrible conditions, that she dealt with decomposing bodies and desperate widows every day. She has always had an uncanny ability to interest influential people, and I thought she should use that to her own advantage, for once.

I was booted out of that New York life just as I turned thirty. I could only afford to travel in cheap countries, so I started to go to the kinds of places that Caitríona had studied and lived in. I wept in the War Crimes Museum in Saigon. Why, I wondered, had Cambodia turned out like this? What was wrong with Bolivia? With Burma? Politics, which I had seen as a dull, corrupt abstraction, began to seem real at last. In Laos, a sixteen-year-old monk said, “Why did America bomb my village?” I didn’t know how to explain the Domino Theory to a kid from the Plain of Jars.

I gave up most novels and scrounged books to puzzle it out. I read The Quiet American. William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. Robert McNamara’s confession. Air America. The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War. Norman Lewis’s Indochina books. Aung San Suu Kyi’s Letters from Burma. War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges.

They told me, over and over, that bloodbaths and famines are rarely unexpected or inevitable; that wars are usually caused by a very tiny number of influential people; that genocide can often be prevented by a very tiny number of influential people, but rarely is; that the law of unintended consequences leads to catastrophe in geopolitics. It was fresh news.

Duh.

As a Christmas present this year, Caitríona gave me “A Problem from Hell” : America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power. Power is a friend of hers from their Bosnia days, and she is Irish too, though she moved to the US when she was nine. She is 33; fabulously young to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book award, but this book deserves all its praise. I couldn’t wish for a more patient teacher to sew together the scraps of an education I picked up in the last few years. In one chapter, for example, she sets out how the United States directly created the conditions for the Khmer Rouge to come to power, and then looked away as Pol Pot killed almost a third of his own countrymen in under three years. It was left to Vietnam, still reeling itself, to invade and overthrow Pol Pot—but since they were on the “wrong” side in the Cold War, the US and the UN continued to recognise the Khmer Rouge for many years after the Killing Fields had been dug up for the west. Her charges are clear and devastating.

She believes that much of the misery of the last century was predicted in advance and could have been averted. Failure to stop it was due not to ignorance but to considered decisions not to intervene. Referring to the many instances of genocide in the last hundred years, she says that “No US president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.”

Several heroic figures did work to oppose and expose ethnic cleansing as it took place, but the quiet majority of American politicians chose always to do nothing, as did the American public.

I am ashamed to be a silent voice in that majority.

Caitríona lives in Iran now, with her American husband Dan, who writes for the Guardian and The Economist. She and I just spent a few days together here in Limerick, catching up after too long apart, as usual. She had come back from a Christmas trip to the US and Dublin, and felt down. People couldn’t understand why she and Dan were still caught up in their little human rights kick. In New York, friends who “made a window” barely asked about Iran; they were busy telling her about the ups and downs of their own careers. In California, their family wanted to know when they were going to come back to America and start living like proper, middle-class adults.

Iran is not easy. She tells me about the men who scream obscenities and sexual come-ons in the street, no matter how modest her hejab, and about the rich Tehran women who talk of little but cosmetic surgery and clothes. Her phone is bugged. She caught typhoid. Still, she presses on, and will continue to, like Mary Robinson before her. As well as reporting for the Irish media, she volunteers helping victims of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons attacks; the Iranian women and children who were unlucky enough to be on the side not supported by the Americans. Sixteen years later, they have been long forgotten by all but the few like Caitríona.

From The Writer’s Almanac, a daily newsletter from Minnesota Public Radio:

The Observer has brought out a list of the 100 Greatest Novels of all time. Oh, how the Brits love their lists: the queue in written form.

Canadians, too, love lists and literary awards. They stage literary awards every week, like school plays. It’s what people who don’t care for hockey do for fun here. They also fret recreationally about their place in world literature, at least on the CBC, which was rocked by the discovery that not a single Canadian made the Observer list. (“But they did say that Robertson Davies was almost included…”) Michael Enright—a wonderful interviewer—devoted an hour-long panel discussion to the book that topped the charts, Don Quijote.

   “But would you say it’s the best novel of all time?” he asked a guest anxiously. Since she has just finished a newly-published translation, naturally she said yes.

The CBC, still tugging the forelock to the British Lit’ry establishment, apparently didn’t notice that the list was chronological. Even the Observer at its most Nick Hornbyish doesn’t presume to rank a hundred books by quality.

I’m dorky enough to count the number of books on the list that I’d read. 49 out a hundred. This is because it’s exactly the kind of list that English departments in Britain and Ireland taught as the canon in the last twenty years, topped up by the middlebrow Picador paperbacks we stack on our bedside tables when we escape with our BAs. The kind of books that the kind of people who read and write for the Observer would like to have read, and occasionally may actually have ploughed through. It doesn’t claim to be much more, and there’s no harm in that.

I wouldn’t stick to novels if I edited a list like this. I’m not a genre racist; I’d throw architecture in there, and memoir, and essays, and travel writing, and ecology and what have you. I’d use Christopher Alexander’s criterion for artistic beauty: does it make you feel more alive? It would be idiosyncratic and joyously unscientific. I’d proclaim solemn Dervala Awards, and vain idiots like me would vy for them.

My own novel-reading has fallen off a lot in the last two years. I used to be a publisher’s dream, regularly harvesting armfuls of paperbacks from the “What’s New” tables inside the bookshop doors. (Hardbacks always strike me as being for people who like the idea of reading.) I was almost entirely driven by cover design, an underrated art form. These days I’m too skint for new books, and I rely on borrowed or second-hand—which I still pick up by the armful, though I feel guilty about the poor unpaid authors. I’ve been trying new things this past while—travelling, digging wells—and I prepare the only way I know how, gobbling books whole. Novels now seem to me as frivolous a past-time as they did to Mr. Casubon in Middlemarch, though I lack his discipline in resisting the odd fictional treat. But I mostly stick to what time has edited. Life is too short to waste on the v. hot, darling.

When I was ten, I read Tiger, the boy’s adventure comic, after I’d outgrown Bunty’s serials on evil Victorian girls who pretended to be sugar-sweet and wheelchair-bound in order to torture the plain sister. In Tiger’s black-and-white panels, “Death Wish Man” rode a bike through a burning bush. Johnny Cougar, the “Indian” wrestler, half-nelsoned his opponents every week. Mighty Mouse, the Glaswegian footballer, kicked ass and headed butt whenever he needed to. It was a kinder, gentler world than the endless headfuckery of the girls’ comics, where every drawn-out plot depended on deception and mental cruelty.

I kept the taste for men’s magazines. I grew out of Cosmopolitan at fourteen, but Kathryn Flett’s sharply-edited Arena made me want to be a magazine writer when I was in college. Arena put Bowie and Johnny Depp on the cover, not some perky nobody in a pink sweater (or a pink bikini). Arena hired good writers and great photographers. So did GQ and Esquire, though I was less taken by their Master-of-the-Universe tone. I hoovered up the scant how-to stuff they printed. I already knew how to be a female, more or less, and it was much more interesting to learn how to be a male, from french cuffs to mixology to wrangling women.

I couldn’t understand why the women’s magazines were so dumb compared to say, Playboy. Real bimbos witter on about nothing other than Botox and Bridezillas, surely. I read Marie-Claire for a few years after it launched in the late 1980s, but the formula of sex tips, mid-range fashion, a health scare, and the single article on the plight of women in some third-world country grew thin. Women’s magazines limited themselves to women’s issues. Men’s ranged freely, and I wanted to, too.

But somewhere along the line men’s magazines lost me. That’s fine by them; I’m not their stuff-buying demographic anyway. Maxim and Loaded changed the game with unabashed babe spreads and birds-booze-and-toys editorial. A friend of a friend is a touch-up artist at American Maxim; we laughed at her two-day project of airbrushing flesh onto Lara Flynn Boyle’s bones. Her job is much more important than the writers’.

The lad rags are still funny, and I’ll always read them before a Vogue or Cosmo in a waiting room. What I do find creepy are the insecurity industry magazines—the ones with straplines about abs and trans-fatty acids and 25 ways to please a woman in bed. There’s something so…unmanly about fretting about your pecs and worrying about how to beat chocolate cravings. “Train your dog to guard the fridge”, says the latest Mens’ Health, and they appear to be serious. 176 glossy, ad-filled pages on aging, crunching, balding, pumping, dieting, impotence, Botox-shopping, and how to make women call you. Ugh. Who wants a bubble-armed narcissist?

I liked men better before they got neurotic about this stuff. Here’s my prescription to add to those 176 pages: Read books. Chop wood. Run. Self-deprecate. Spell well. Tip well. Cook like you mean it. Adore us. Forget the rest, and never, EVER mention fat grams or protein diets.

During the American War, the Viet Cong spent years in warrens like the Cu Chi caves. These tunnel networks were dug in the rich soil of the Mekong Delta when Agent Orange and other defoliants dropped by the Americans made jungle cover impossible.

Last year I crawled through these tunnels, cradling a broken hand for authenticity. The mud walls pressed tight, and the smell of the stale air and damp, packed earth was heavy. We had the luxury of occasional lightbulbs; the original tenants crawled in blackness.

Long bamboo pipes funnelled smoke from the underground kitchens away to outlets under distant bushes. The underground hospital was stocked with sticks to bite away screams. There was a small factory for turning out hideous booby-traps. Silent villagers sharpened stakes, brushed on poison, made pipe bombs. Their designs were modelled now by large Caucasian dummies, and our stomachs flipped at the sight. There were bouncing betties; forget-me-nots—foot traps you could take home with you; concealed drums that spun above a stake-lined pit; staked boards that would swing down from the trees and impale a soldier at chest level.

Americans threw grenades down the tunnels when they found them, so the Viet Cong developed a system of blind alleys and sharp turns where explosives were marooned. Cave-ins were a constant danger. Sometimes Americans invaded the tunnels, but so many were killed on these missions that they began to refuse to go down. They sent dogs instead. The Vietnamese began to wash with American soap and eat C-rations to confuse the dogs’ senses. Sometimes the tunnels were so extraordinarily well-concealed that they were simply never found. The day I visited, the bigger westerners had trouble wedging their protein-fed bodies through the hidden trapdoors, but the Viet Cong had managed to stay so inconspicuous here that the Americans had once built a camp right on top of a network of caves. They couldn’t figure out why they kept getting shelled.

Mr. Hai, my tunnel guide, was a handsome, charismatic man in his mid-fifties.
   “The question I want you to answer me when we leave,” he announced just before we crawled into the tunnels, “is where did they shit? Think carefully! Where did the people who lived in these tunnels take the shit?”

Mr. Hai had been an officer in the South Vietnamese Army. He worked as a translator for the Americans. Tank Division. Years later he still got a kick out of the memory of those American boys. “Hai,” they would say, “Is hot. Is damn hot!” He laughed, delighted at his command of idiom. The short words sounded good from Mr. Hai.

The boys Mr. Hai fought with went home suddenly in 1975. Mr. Hai was sent to a reeducation camp for three years. His uncle, who was far more senior, was cruelly “reeducated” outside Hanoi for seven years. When he got out, he refused to go back to his job as a surgeon. He would not work for the communists; he would sweep the streets instead. Eventually he got out on a boat and became a heart specialist in Ohio.

Mr. Hai did not hide his own dislike of the communists. “We give them name Viet Cong. They never call themselves Viet Cong. You know why? Because it mean “Dumb Vietnamese”, or “Stupid”. They do not like this. And when they won they took revenge on the South Vietnamese. Especially anyone who had helped the Americans. I did not speak English for twenty-five years. Pretend I never learn English. Only in last five years I can speak English again and work with tourists.”

He had never heard from any of the Americans he served with, though in the last few years he has met a few other servicemen. He could find them on the Internet, I told him. He smiled vaguely.

Tim O’Brien wrote an extraordinary short story about serving in Vietnam. It’s called “The Things They Carried“, the title story in his first collection. In it he lists with great care every item he and his fellow U.S. soldiers carried as they slogged through the jungles outside Saigon.

Pages and pages of stuff, he lists. The personal choices reveal the human beings in O’Brien’s soldiers, and the pounds of standard issue show them as grunts. The people they fought wore black pyjamas and carried a pouch of rice, perhaps a rifle and a few magazines.

We sat in the tiny kitchen, deep underground, and ate boiled taro root dipped in salt.
   “And now,” said Mr. Hai, “you will tell me, where did the Viet Cong living in these tunnels take the shit? Because remember, if the dogs smell, they are dead.”

They buried it in dead-end chambers, we guess. The women who sneaked in rice smuggled it out again in bags. They…burned it in the kitchen fires. They piped it out, like the smoke. Mr. Hai kept shaking his head.

Tim O’Brien had the answer.

They were defeated, these American boys, by the things they carried and by the things they dropped. They were bogged down in the swamps and the jungle on size twelve boots. They dropped C-rations and soap, and all kinds of materials that shored up tunnels. They dropped ammunition and knives that were turned into booby traps against them.

Meanwhile, under night cover, boys in black pyjamas combed the rice fields for metal ammo containers dropped from the choppers. Shockproof. Waterproof. Stinkproof.
   “You don’t know,” says Mr. Hai, laughing again. He waves an ammo case at us. “They take the shit in the ammo box, and carry it out at night. That is how they stay down here for all the years.”

Here at Kedey Island I am temporarily dependent on a car for the first time since I was seventeen. I don’t like to need, and dependendence on a dirty great hunk of metal that I can’t drive makes me particularly uneasy. The car is identified with freedom, but to me it is convenient bondage. The canoe that I use to get to the car, on the other hand, is just fine. Self-propulsion, that’s the key.

After I read this I listed my patterns on two Post-Its. The scale of my life is described by the circles I stir in my porridge.

What are your patterns? Do you live well?

I can’t think of a more unassuming, appealing genius than Darwin, who retreated from the world physically but engaged in vigorous correspondence. He was humble about his workhorse brain compared to the brilliance of friends like Robert Huxley, and forever anxious for approval, whether for his table manners or for The Origin of Species. His love for his children, his wife, and his friends glows from his letters and was evidently reciprocated. But it is Darwin the reader of whom I am fondest. “He read,” says his biographer Irvine in Apes, Angels, and Victorians, “not to be critical, but to be entertained, agreed with, stimulated to feeling.”

It’s comforting to share a weakness with a genius. I read widely, but find it difficult to articulate why a particular book is good or bad, despite a degree in literature. I drop books I don’t like rather than examining why, for example, novels by Cormac McCarthy or Margaret Atwood annoy me. Otherwise I’m willing to jump into whatever world the author creates. The books I read hold unexpected conversations with one another and I listen in with delight, but rarely debate. At college I struggled with literary theory, though I turned out dutiful drivel like “The Haemosexual Subtext in Dr Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde “ on demand. Intellectually, I grasped (at least at the time) structuralism, post-structuralism, feminist theory, New Historicism, and all the rest. Practically, they seemed (at best) like tools for writing essays, not tools for reading. I could never learn to read with critical distance, and the only tools I wanted were a good lamp, a notebook, and a glass of wine. And perhaps a footstool.