When Science Goes Wrong: 12 Tales from the Dark Side of Discovery by Simon LeVay

2 Toots of the horn!

• 1 for having read a book covered on the Daily Show
• 2nd for having fought my way through this book

Pluses:

• Lots of science. Learn the lingo; talk the talk!
• Some interesting anecdotes: the volcanologists who walked into an erupting crater; the sociologists who experimented on orphans to make them stutter; the guy who convinced Congress that E was a dangerous drug (by killing monkeys with methamphetamine).
  

Minuses:

• The boring stories. I couldn't believe that his opening tale from the dark side was a BORING tale of a man getting Parkinson's disease and having experimental surgery that killed him. Admittedly, it killed him in a really gross, weird way, but still.
• Each blip could have been related in 5 pages instead of 40 or so. The author really dragged this out to make it a book, rather than just doing more research to come up with new anecdotes.

I would recommend a quick perusal of this book while standing/sitting in a cafe at Borders. I would not recommend buying it.