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Rating: 4/5 Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). This book is a history of both vaccination itself and its opponents. The take-away message is that the media is not the place to go for truly balanced and accurate information about science and health. They are far more interested in ratings...

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Rating: 3/5 Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010). When Pluto got demoted, I remember hearing about it, but I apparently didn’t care enough to do any reading about it. I had no idea how it happened or why. So when I saw this book sitting on the shelf, I felt a...

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Rating: 4/5 Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2010). I first saw Ben Goldacre on YouTube, where I saw his stand-up comedy routine in which he talks about the placebo effect. I decided to give his book a go. I liked it, but it came across overall as far...