Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday December 13, 2010
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ZAPPED: Why Your Cell Phone Shouldn't Be Your Alarm Clock and 1,268 Ways to Outsmart the Hazards of Electronic Pollution
ZAPPED: Why Your Cell Phone Shouldn't Be Your Alarm Clock and 1,268 Ways to Outsmart the Hazards of Electronic Pollution Ann Louise Gittleman
HarperOne
ISBN 978-0061864278
262 pages
$25.99
DISCONNECT: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family
Devra Davis
Dutton
ISBN 978-0525951940
274 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Juliet Eilperin
Like many Americans, I am never too far away from my BlackBerry. Though I turn it off when I go to bed, I check it for messages as soon as I wake up, and for the rest of the day it serves as my connection to colleagues, loved ones and total strangers across the globe.
It is also an endless source of fascination for my 1-and-a-half-year-old son, and I devote a considerable amount of energy to keeping it out of his tiny hands. I've seen enough scientific reports about the potential hazards associated with cell phones to make me concerned about his exposure but also enough contradictory studies to leave me confused. In October, for example, the European Journal of Oncology published a study that found a link between wireless radiation and heart irregularities.
Two new books -- Ann Louise Gittleman's "Zapped" and Devra Davis' "Disconnect" -- promise to settle the ongoing debate about whether mobile devices are bad for you.
They don't. But the two books raise significant questions about our constant exposure to the electronic radiation that flows from the devices into our homes, workplaces and public spaces -- questions serious enough to make me change my own behavior.
In "Zapped," Gittleman tries to make a blunt case for alarm. The book is littered with grim anecdotes about men and women who find themselves battling unexplained ailments, from brain tumors to intense headaches, circulatory problems and severe fatigue. In each case -- including her own, since five years ago Gittleman developed a benign tumor in one of her salivary glands -- the author connects these maladies to electronic radiation. She congratulates readers for picking up her book: In her eyes, "It means that you're already aware -- and perhaps even a little bit concerned -- that, despite all the reassurances you've heard, something is simply not right in our world today." Few things are more dangerous, she suggests, than the "electropollution" that permeates our lives. She offers such methods of warding off the effects as low-level laser therapy and the acai berry.
Gittleman provides some basic science, describing how electromagnetic fields can disrupt basic human cell processes. But her account of the research into electronic radiation is one-sided: She takes pains to cite every study that chronicles the potential dangers of cell phones -- altered genetic material, lowered sperm count, increased vulnerability among children -- but fails to mention the ones that cast doubt on these findings.
Even more disturbing, she quotes some questionable experts, without mentioning any of the facts that might undermine their credibility. For example, she cites George Carlo, an epidemiologist who was paid by the tobacco and chemical industries for research that supported their medical claims and who headed the $28-million Wireless Technology Research Initiative funded by the cell phone companies, an effort that didn't yield a single peer-reviewed scientific article. While Carlo later became a harsh critic of the wireless industry, which Gittleman details, she nonetheless fails to mention his other activities.
Carlo also makes an appearance in Davis' book. Davis, a Ph.D. scientist with a master's degree in public health, quotes Carlo's criticism of wireless firms but also shares his questionable history. Hers is a far more thoughtful and better-written account than Gittleman's. While Davis cannot resolve the fundamental questions about the potential dangers of extensive electronic radiation, she deftly navigates the history of the cell phone and the scientific studies surrounding its use.
She picks apart many of the assumptions that continue to guide cell phone regulations. Charting the advances of mobile technology from its earliest days, when Motorola was racing to beat AT&T to create a bricklike object that wealthy men and women could show off, Davis describes how current standards have failed to take into account the significantly higher levels of radiation emanating from ever more complex electronic devices.
The rules that were established in 1996 were based on a composite human being known as the Standard Anthropomorphic Man, which bears little resemblance to the current cell phone user. As Davis describes it, "SAM is not an ordinary guy. He ranked in size and mass at the top 10 percent of all military recruits in 1989, weighing more than two hundred pounds, with an eleven-pound head, and standing about six feet two inches tall. SAM was not especially talkative, as he was assumed to use a cell phone for no more than six minutes a day."
Davis makes a compelling case for U.S. authorities to update their exposure standards, especially in light of how much we now use our electronic devices, and the number of teens who use them. Even the National Cancer Institute, which says there is no consistent link between cell phones and cancer, notes that children may be at a greater risk because their nervous systems are developing at the time of exposure.
Still, scientists have a hard time keeping up with the rapid changes in the devices: A large international analysis known as the Interphone study, which involved 13 countries and released its findings in May, did not take third-generation technology into account even though that is what many customers across the globe now use. As Davis writes, "Because cell phone use has grown so fast and technologies change every year, it is as if we are trying to study the car in which we are driving."
Davis acknowledges it will take years to know the health impact of repeated cell phone use. The most definitive federal study on the matter won't issue its findings until 2014; brain cancer can take as long as four decades to develop. In the meantime, both Gittleman and Davis offer many of the same tips to readers: Use a head set, don't carry a cell phone on your body, limit the use of a phone when the signal is weak because the radiation increases as the device searches for a signal, don't leave an active device next to your bed overnight, text rather than engage in long conversations, and keep the devices away from children. While I haven't kicked my BlackBerry addiction, I now take every one of those precautions, doing everything possible to make sure the radiation emitting from that tiny device doesn't pose undo harm to me or my family.
With little fanfare, wireless companies have started giving their customers similar advice. As Davis notes, "As of spring 2010, the Motorola V195 includes a warning to keep the phone one inch from the user's body; the BlackBerry 8300, 0.98 of an inch; the Nokia 1100, one-fourth of an inch, and the iPhone, five-eighths of an inch."
Take it from them -- they ought to know.
Juliet Eilerpin is The Washington Post's national environmental reporter. Her book "Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks" will be published in June. She can be reached at eilperinj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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TRAVELS IN SIBERIA
Ian Frazier
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0374278724
529 pages
$30
Reviewed by Alan Cooperman
To the Soviets, size mattered. Stalin had a plan to put a statue taller than the Statue of Liberty on top of a skyscraper higher than the Empire State Building. This plan came to naught; in the end, the cathedral that Stalin demolished to make way for his fantasy was replaced by ... a public swimming pool. But it was an enormous pool, certainly among the largest in the world!
Even the Soviets mocked their own gigantism. "We have the world's reddest tomatoes -- and the biggest transistors," a Russian journalist told me, bitterly, in the waning days of the Soviet Union.
The lasting legacy of Bolshevik braggadocio is a natural skepticism toward claims that, whatever the rest of the world has got, Russia has more of it. But in "Travels in Siberia," Ian Frazier makes many such claims, and most of them convincingly, if only because his own powers -- particularly of observation and description -- are so oversized. Frazier, a staff writer at the New Yorker, took five trips to Siberia and five or six more to western Russia between 1993 and 2009, which he has combined into a rambling travelogue that is entertaining, illuminating and just slightly, charmingly off the deep end in its infatuation with everything about Russia, good and bad.
Take the trash, for example. On the roads leading out of Russian cities, Frazier tells us, there is no mere litter like what you might see along highways in other countries. No, a typical Russian roadside rest area consisted of "a ground layer of trash basically everywhere, except in a few places, where there was more. In the all-trash encirclement, trash items had piled themselves together here and there in heaps three and four feet tall, as if making common cause." Or the mosquitoes. "I have been in mosquito swarms in beaver meadows in northern Michigan, in wetlands in Canada, and near Alaska's Yukon River. Western Siberia has more," Frazier insists. After a night of their onslaught, oatmeal cooked over a camp stove has the added crunch of mosquito bodies, some full of blood.
Or the smell of Russia. Not smells, plural. Rather, a singular "Russia-smell" that remains constant from Moscow to the Bering Strait, 5,000 miles away: a mixture, Frazier says, of old tea bags, cucumber peels, wet cement, chilly air, currant jam and sour milk, all tied together by diesel exhaust.
Lest this begin to sound unpleasant, let us not forget -- how could we ever? -- the women. In Frazier's view, the Siberian city of Velikii Ustyug has "more beautiful women per capita than any other city in the world." Except possibly for Krasnoyarsk, which is like "the set of a science-fiction movie about a city inhabited only by beautiful women," who are possibly surpassed only by the ballet dancers and the women in the audience at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. The descriptions of these beauties might have been even more captivating if Frazier had actually spoken to any of them. To his credit, he was mindful that he had a wife back home. Plus, his spoken Russian was somewhat awkward, and he didn't drink alcohol, which is something of an impediment to socializing in Russia. So while his two main Russian traveling companions -- also married men, though they didn't seem to care -- were frequently off chasing women, he says, "I sometimes preferred to stay in camp and read a book."
Still, Frazier did speak to a fair assortment of Russians, including friends of Russian emigre friends and a number of scientists.
He also listened to guides at small museums in backwater towns describing the local flora, fauna, history and geology. These surprisingly touching museum encounters -- along with Frazier's perceptive eye as he crisscrossed the Eurasian landmass by car, van, train, plane and ferry -- flesh out two paradoxes about Siberia that, to my mind, make "Travels in Siberia" much more illuminating than just a perplexing case of what the author diagnoses as "the dread Russia-love."
The first is that Siberia is both remote and central. Some of its settlements on permafrost in Yakutia are mind-boggingly isolated; metaphorically, "Siberia" is used to describe the farthest away one can be, as in "social Siberia" or "restaurant table Siberia." Yet, as Frazier gradually explains, Siberia is central to Russia's history (the great shock absorber of invaders from the Mongols to Hitler), central to Russia's finances (source of oil, gas, gold and diamonds) and central to the planet's ecology (a giant forest that acts as one of the Earth's lungs).
The second paradox, which is perhaps harder for Americans to understand, is that Siberia is both a place of oppression and a place of freedom. It's been a site of forced exile for centuries; Frazier's visit to a former Soviet prison camp, now abandoned, with his attempt to imagine what life was like inside its hand-hewn walls, is the most haunting scene in the book. Yet, as he also notes, Siberia is the one part of Russia where serfdom never existed. Far away from Moscow and St. Petersburg, Siberians who were not imprisoned came to see themselves as living more freely than people in western Russia. To be a true Siberian man or woman became synonymous with deprivation, yes, but also with self-sufficiency and (relative) independence.
Frazier's traveling companions, and even the vehicles in which they traversed thousands of miles of tundra and taiga, exemplified this paradoxical spirit. The vehicles were constantly breaking down, but the Russians always managed to get them going again -- on more than one occasion, by picking through the roadside trash for necessary items. As one Russian told Frasier proudly after fixing a broken carburetor on a remote highway of ice over a frozen river, "the Russian car is the most reliable in the world, because it is possible under necessity to replace any part in it with a piece of wire or with a nail."
Alan Cooperman, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, was a Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press and U.S. News & World Report from 1990 to 1996.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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