Thực Tiễn Áp Dụng Pháp Luật Hình Sự - Những Vấn Đề Lý Luận Và Thực Tiễn tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Batuhan Yardimci batuhanyrd5b31 — This series I could get hooked on. Loved the talking cat. Can't wait to hear more from him. (If my cat could talk, she could definitely portray the cat in the book with the attitude.) Have recommended it to many girls.

Valérie Bolduc valeriebolc366 — This book. I don’t know. There’s so much to love, but there’s also so much to hate, and, even worse, there’s so much to induce snickering at utterly inappropriate times. At least we know what the author was going for: in the acknowledgements, John M. Barry says that he started out to tell the tale of the 1918 global influenza pandemic – numerically, the deadliest outbreak of human infectious disease – with a focus on those studying and trying to control it. But then he realized the story of that pandemic was entwined with a philosophic transformation in science, so he widened his focus considerably. Fine. Great, even. Here, however, is what the author gives us: the Winchester Mystery House of books.* It is chock-full of topics at every scale, some, but by no means all, of which are: • The history of Western medical science and its transformation from being driven by un-probed, unifying theories (think, treatments based on bodily humors), to figuring out what’s going on using evidence and experimentation. • The early history of Johns Hopkins • The histories of many particular medical researchers, only a subset of whom participated in influenza research • Role of propaganda in WWI, with specific reference to influenza reporting • Where this swarm of influenza viruses came from, how they spread, why they were so deadly • Accounts of the 1918 pandemic, focused on a handful of cities in the eastern US His topics are all intriguing, and about 95% of what he includes is legitimately related to his project. I also respect the enormous difficulty of obtaining source material, what with WWI media censorship and the understandable lack of meticulous records from the outbreak’s height. But The Great Influenza just reads like Barry was larking about in research tangents and lost all sense of proportion about which, and how much of each, should end up in his book. When he finally gets to it, the actual description of the influenza outbreak comes off as oddly piecemeal. And why all the Paul Lewis? Why? Why?? Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Barry should have scaled his efforts back to fit his original plan. This intellectual switch from knowing everything because belief/logic to using the scientific method arrived gradually in various fields, and was an especially long time coming for medicine. By 1918, there were finally a couple of generations of trained medical researchers, so the Great Influenza is a perfect early case study for what the new scientists and scientific process could achieve. And actually, I wish more authors integrated a quick primer on what science is and isn’t in pop-science books, like Barry's: “Ultimately a scientist has nothing to believe in but the process of inquiry.” (view spoiler) However, Barry never manages to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. What we have here is a bunch of unruly parts with no whole. And, to borrow what may be the author’s most favoritist end-of-paragraph construction, it gets worse. It gets worse. For someone with an unusually Enlightened grasp of the philosophy of science, Barry sure makes some rookie mistakes. One of the biggies is how he frequently describes “science” (and other non-animate concepts) as doing stuff. Pretty soon, I started picturing “Science” as this furry, frowny, Alot-like creature lumbering around with a lab coat and a Petri dish. Plus, his prose is almost unreadably melodramatic, with a higher density of “greatest-,” “most powerful-,” “doomed-,” and “the fabric of society was ripping apart-” style superlatives than one of my 9th-grade essays. Yes, the greatest and most epic plague in the whole entire history of mankind ever of all time (or whatever this book’s freaking subtitle is) was awful. But readers don’t need constant verbal blunt-force trauma to get that. The ~50,000,000 dead kind of speak for themselves. As a quick demo of both the drama and personification failings, it didn’t take more than a quick page fan to locate this juicy little chapter opening: ”Nature chose to rage in 1918, and it chose the form of the influenza virus in which to do it. This means that nature first crept upon the world in familiar, almost comic, form. It came in masquerade. Then it pulled down its mask and showed its fleshless bone. “ Seriously? Snicker centrale. The only valuable contribution of those words is to give me a handy visual for Nature as it hangs with Science and Alot. Nature didn’t choose shit, as you yourself, Mr. Barry, attempted to explain pages ago with your discussion of influenza evolution. Now hyper-drama in a scientific discussion can be misleading (view spoiler), but constantly anthropomorphizing abstractions is not just a semantic mistake. It actually undermines scientific discussion. On the pettier side: for all his multitudinous research, some of his facts are wrong, and important topics are oversimplified or plumb missing. Like, on page 39 of my edition, Barry gets the publication date of The Origin of Species wrong by a decade. Where is One of Ours in his discussion of contemporary literary accounts of the influenza outbreak? Where’s the virulence theory in his discussion of why the 1918 viral swarm was so dangerous? To cap it all off, there’s an icky flavor to his treatment of gender and ethnicity. I cringed at “Negroes” and “natives” and his anachronistic use of “man” for all humans. The way he discussed female scientists was rather different in tone than his discussion of males. And Barry cites S. Weir Mitchell as an early physician who did “outstanding research,” which may be true, but is bound to raise the hackles of anyone who’s ever read The Yellow Wallpaper. Dr. Mitchell was hardly a paragon of evidence-based medicine. I was always trying to slip more science into my old narrative nonfiction book group, and I so wanted us to read this book. But, as it turns out, I can’t recommend The Great Influenza, and I’m glad we never chose it. I’m glad we never chose it. This book pairs well with One of Ours, because there WERE more contemporary fictional accounts of this pandemic, and with The Emperor of All Maladies, because it IS possible to weave historical, scientific, and anecdotal information into a compelling, coherent narrative of disease, and, what the hell, with A Journal of the Plague Year, because although composed of similar messy parts, Defoe made them a whole. In 1722. (And with The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, if you prefer your disease books to be parts without a whole.) _____________________________ * (I can’t resist belaboring this metaphor, so it’s totally fine to skip this part. My feelings won’t be hurt a bit.) See, the Winchester Mystery House is this crazy place that shares many attributes with a functional, albeit grandiose, house. However, it’s filled mysterious rooms nobody used, staircases that lead nowhere, blank walls where you expect a door, and doors where you expect a blank wall, among other peculiarities. Sarah Winchester clearly had a passion for the process of creating the house, but the product’s convoluted architecture is best attributed to her reliance on spirit guidance. The Great Influenza is like that, but a book.