If I Had Eyes

When Isaac grabbed this book off his shelf to distract me while he did some work, he preambled it by stating, "My father gave it to me." Recalling that his dad is a doctor, I took one look at The Secret Family: Twenty-Four Hours inside the Mysterious World of Our Minds and Bodies and inwardly sighed. I knew this was going to be one of those excruciatingly boring human science books, the kind only medical students entering residency or super-nerds with thick glasses and no social lives eagerly devour. And while I may arguably fall into the latter category, I've always been the type of dweeb more focused on Shakespeare's severing clouds laced with envious streaks (Romeo and Juliet) than Gray's Anatomy (the text, not the TV series, which I bought and tried to read and failed miserably).

Anyway, it shouldn't be surprising that I was absolutely wrong about this book. After a somewhat asinine intro, the book jumped straight into jaw-dropping, fascinating, "for real? I had no idea!" territory. I kept reading aloud compelling passages to Isaac (who hasn't read about, oh, 99% of his book collection), and screeching, "Did you know that!? Isnt that crazy?!" The very first fact I encountered that piqued my interest was about what happens when a father's eyes meet his baby's gaze: "the tiny muscles controlling the pupils in the dad's eyes suddenly tug wider. Males who don't have children rarely show this universal sign of interest." However, it happens to most women, mothers or not. Then that led to a whole section on how baby food is prepared, which sparked both disbelief and horror. If this were truly the case, why hasn't there been more of an uproar about this? The stuff he describes warrants a massive reform akin to the one incited by Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in the early 20th century.

What was also really impressive was the book's collection of photographs. I had never seen any of them before, and they're truly stunning pictures revealing normal objects in a mindblowing point of view. The back of a smooth CD zoomed in so you see the nooks (bet you didn't know it had nooks!). A close-up of sweat droplets on the back of a hairy hand. A bed mite in its magnified glory, creeping and crawling and waiting to eat your dead skin cells. Ok, I can't find any of these pictures online, but luckily dust mites are pretty fascinating for most people and some other good pictures exist out there:

Ewwwwwww. Seriously, this book is awesome. You won't be sorry if you pick it up. But you might end up learning a few things that will make it a little harder to rub your face lovingly against your favorite pillow at night.