The first chapter of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything repeats that subtitle -- "The Hidden Side of Everything." Maybe not everything is covered in this 230-page book, but certainly a large number of seemingly unrelated subjects are, and not ones you'd expect an economist to discuss. But that's why the book is so interesting. Just that first chapter talks about the effect of Roe v. Wade on crime rates in the early 1990s, the influence of realtors on individual house prices, and the effect of candidates' money on election results. And the connections often aren't what you'd expect, a situation that continues throughout the book. (Of course, situations that fit the conventional wisdom are unlikely to be included in such a book -- who'd bother to read about them?)

And it's not just economics -- ethics often comes up, because statistics can be used (if anyone bothers) to unmask teachers cheating on standardized tests, or sports players' records, or even a company's rate of payment at a self-service bagel stand. Even analysis of how descriptions in a real estate ad correlate to the price the house sells for reveals a sort of deception -- that some terms sound complimentary to the seller but mean something quite different to the prospective buyer. So even if economics and statistics sound like the most boring subjects on the planet, you are still likely to enjoy this book because it covers the results, not the part of the analysis process that makes non-statisticians fall asleep.

I live in Tampa, Florida, and I'd like to think I've spent enough time in places like Lettuce Lake Park to have some idea what Florida looked like before human interference. (Which is fooling myself, given the boardwalks and roads that even let me into the park.) And I read the papers enough to have some idea about the constant battles between development and environmental preservation south of me in the Everglades, but local concerns understandably get more press here.

W. Hodding Carter's Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades from its Friends, Foes, and Florida provides an overview much larger than any continued-on-page-8 article, explaining the history of human alteration of the Everglades and connected water systems (which total up to most of the southern half of the Florida peninsula) and attempts to reverse the alterations. The difficulty here is people -- Miami and other urban areas on the southern part of Florida's East Coast; sugar cane farmers; mining; and even vacation-home owners whose properties are in the way of planned expansions to the Everglades National Park protected area. And, of course, disagreements between scientists and planners about what steps would actually work to fix the pollution, the lack of water going into the aquifers that humans draw on, and the lack of water reaching the wild areas. It ain't simple. But Carter makes it at least comprehensible. He also shows what there is in the Everglades and natural Florida that's worth appreciating and saving. The one solution that would make everything as pristine as humanly possible would involve turning huge farms and thousands of people's homes into protected parks, and they just aren't going to want to go, but this book does a good job of persuading the reader that as much toward that goal should be done as can possibly be done.

To modern Americans, it's difficult to imagine bearing a child and then literally putting it out somewhere for someone else to find and raise. Indeed, we find it realistic but reprehensible for kittens and puppies to be abandoned to their fate in that way -- for human babies, it's unthinkable. This is what makes John Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance so mind-boggling. Despite encountering references from Oedipus Rex to the life of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to children being left on hillsides or the doorsteps of orphanages, it never sinks in how truly unexceptional it once was to abandon a child with no idea what would happen to them. These days, it's difficult enough for people to give children up for adoption knowing that their child is going directly to a family who specifically want a child and have jumped through all the hoops necessary to adopt one.

But a Roman could leave a child in the marketplace and have a reasonable expectation that someone would take them into their home -- perhaps as what we'd consider a foster child or perhaps as a slave, but the evidence Boswell produces makes it clear that very few of these abandoned children died. A more common worry was apparently the risk of unwittingly committing incest with an abandoned relative.

The medieval world with its more spread-out, rural population continued the practice in slightly different ways, leaving children to be brought up by monasteries in such numbers that rules had to be made about whether these "donated" children were required to be monks or nuns throughout their lives.

This isn't a quick read -- many pages have as much or more space taken up by footnotes as by the regular text. But it makes Boswell's case all the more convincing that there are so many references. Quite surprisingly, though, I didn't think the book felt difficult or overly academic -- just a fascinating look into what seemed to me to be among the most alien aspects of the past.

I read a lot about women, and sex, and women's health, and sexual health, and all kinds of related topics. But even after Our Bodies, Ourselves and Woman: An Intimate Geography, I learned new things about my body from Elizabeth Stewart and Paula Spencer's The V Book: A Doctor's Guide to Complete Vulvovaginal Health. (Plus "vulvovaginal" is just so much fun to say.) Some things about anatomy (could you point out a woman's "vestibule" on a diagram?), and lots more about things that can cause itching, redness, sores, discharges, pain, and any other genital problem a woman might have. Lots of fascinating historical tidbits about how things used to be dealt with. Quotations from real women about all related matters. And the voice of the gynecology specialist ("V doctor" as she might put it) is easily comprehensible. Definitely something to read before going to the gynecologist, so you don't have to try and remember what you wanted to know more while your feet are in the stirrups.

I recieved a copy of Robert W. Fuller's Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank from the Dignitarian Dialogues through their offer of a free copy on BookCrossing. This fascinating book argues that sexism, racism, ageism, and most other types of discrimination are subcategories of the main type of discrimination, "rankism," where people of higher rank, be that social, occupational, or financial, treat people they perceive as being lower-rank as nobodies, people undeserving of dignity. "The problem isn't that rank counts. When it signifies excellence, rank should count and it does. The trouble is that rank counts twice. No sooner is rank assigned than holders of higher rank can use their newfound power to aggrandize themselves at the expense of those of lower ranks." Whether this is the famous person who expects to get perks or the supervisor at work who orders everyone around, or even the lawyers or doctors who look down on the person at the party who teaches school, a lot of rankism exists and isn't usually thought of as discrimination. Fuller's book, though it gets a little repetitive toward the end, is a fascinating look at rank even in democratic societies such as the U.S., where the founders' intent was to avoid the aristocracies of older countries. One can hope that awareness of such discrimination will help people to avoid continuing to do it, but alas, the people who are willing to read such a book are probably not the worst offenders.

Gary Matsumoto's Vaccine A: The Covert Government Experiment That's Killing Our Soldiers and Why GI's Are Only The First Victims is scary. But scary in a way that outrages a person, because of the events in the stories it tells. Matsumoto asrgues for a connection between an experimental anthrax vaccine used on U.S. military (plus those of a few of our 1991 Gulf War allies) and many cases among the military of autoimmune diseases such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS). Those soldiers who chose to join the military were not given a choice about taking "Vaccine A" (as it was recorded in people medical records in the few cases where it was recorded at all), and they didn't have a choice about the medical consequences of this experimental vaccine. This group of autoimmune diseases affecting military personnel was labeled "Gulf War Syndrome" in the 1990s, even though it affected some who'd never left the U.S. But for years the U.S. government tried to blame it on Iraqi chemical or biological weapons -- denying that the U.S. itself, in an attempt to protect soldiers from biological warfare, had given a vaccine not licensed for use on people; denying that this vaccine they gave contained an ingredient called squalene that was intended to boost the vaccine's effectiveness; denying that squalene could affect the immune system negatively, making it turn on itself and causing these autoimmune diseases.

Evidence mounted throughout the 1990s, but some U.S. military were still being given the shots. Those who had heard about the risks from other sources sometimes chose to leave the military rather than recieve this mandatory vaccine with substances that might hurt or kill them. Government spokespeople have contradicted themselves and each other in trying to deny the unethical use of these experimental vaccine without the recipients' consent and the effect the vaccines have had on some. Their unwillingness to back down from the lie, be it for the sake of scientific theories unsupported by real-life facts, or refusal to suffer the consequences of using members of the American military as guinea pigs without asking them, is holding back the progress of medicine and undermining the U.S. government's reputation as much as any other issue. The book goes into great detail that non-medical people can understand, and additional information is available at vaccine-a.com.

Another two from the accumulated stack:

David Livingstone Smith's Why We Lie: the Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind is fascinating in that "I don't know if I believe it but it's interesting" way. I've read a lot of evolutionary psychology books, but Smith's explanation of why it would be useful for survival to be able to deceive both other people and one's own conscious mind is something none of the others dealt with. The stuff about conscious deception is not too hard to swallow, but the idea that the unconscious mind is churning out behavior that deceives the conscious mind about its own reasons for the behavior can sometimes be difficult to accept. In some situations it makes sense; it's easier to apply to the people you see on daytime talk shows whose behavior defies the viewer's logic than it is to apply to oneself. Definitely food for thought, though.

And a different sort of science of humanity is chronicled in Serita Stevens' Forensic Nurse: The New Role of the Nurse in Law Enforcement. Lots of people still think of nurses as ladies who deal with bedpans and bandages only, even though these days that role is more given to the nurse's assistant and the nurse is a medical figure nearly up to the level of the doctor in hospitals, nursing homes, and any other setting where the doctors are spread too thin to always be there. Stevens shows nurses whose training lets them provide a massively helpful liaison service between the medical and crime/law communities, examining victims of violence not just to heal their hurts but to find evidence to convict their injurers. Tracing the stories of rape victims, child abuse victims, domestic violence victims, the mentally ill, Alzheimer's and other dementia patients, and people too badly injured to tell what has happened to them requires medical, psychological, and criminal investigation training, and not enough people have all those different areas covered. Hence crimes can go uninvestigated, or things which look bad can mistakenly be attributed to crimes commited by others when they were not (such as the homeless man who appeared to have been assaulted, but who turned out to have been attempting suicide) -- unless someone has the training to put all the pieces together. Forensic nurses also save the time of those thinly-spread doctors by testifying in court and serving as legal consultants for lawyers and judges unfamiliar with medical situations. (Perhaps more of these forensic nurses could help in the malpractice cases so common throughout America and thus end up decreasing health care costs by decreasing doctors' insurance rates, a cost passed on to patients.) The popularity of TV shows like "CSI" makes it seem like this book would be of interest to a large audience, since it depicts the same kind of mysteries. I hope so, because the importance of nurses, even those with standard training, can't be overstated.