Science

For those who need medical care, Gillick would deliver more of it at home, via phone calls, visits from practitioners and other simple measures that have proved effective and efficient. But don't mistake Gillick for a heartless advocate of rationed care. She wants to keep old people alive and well for however long each person can thrive. But she views many efforts to protect nursing-home residents as more of a problem than a solution. By focusing on statistics and standards aimed at ensuring quality of care for these people, she contends, the government is actually prompting these institutions to ignore quality of life.

Gillick challenges Baby Boomers to reengineer nursing homes, first into true homes where elders can thrive and, when necessary, into places providing the care they need to either recover or spend their final days in comfort. More broadly, she challenges her generation to embrace the inevitability of aging and to make the most of it. That would be quite a legacy for the Baby Boomers to leave their children.

-- Tom Graham

Storm Watcher

Like the weather forecasters who warned that Hurricane Katrina possibly, then probably, then almost certainly would be the Big One, Marq de Villiers is not someone to let a gathering storm go unwatched. Bitten almost fatally by the weather bug at an early age and stung again by storms several times thereafter, de Villiers appreciates the damage caused when a billion tons of water suddenly go airborne. He also knows that weather can feel intensely personal -- to the yachtsman who didn't hear a bulletin and even to a battened-down writer marveling as a storm born in the tropics tears up the coastline outside his Canadian home.

De Villiers's new book, Windswept: The Story of Wind and Weather (Walker, $25), excels in tracking 2004's Hurricane Ivan, from its inconspicuous birth in the Sahara to its final furies weeks later. Sadly, Windswept digresses too often. Yes, it's good to learn about planned wind farms in Nova Scotia, in Massachusetts, even in West Virginia. And given the huge spike in electricity prices facing many people in the Washington area, it's intriguing to learn that wind power may not always be too expensive to produce on a large scale. But de Villiers spends too much time on such matters, as well as on the mechanics of flight and the ancient mythology of wind.

The further de Villiers strays from his own experience, the more a reader feels unmoored. He is admirably honest about relying on a number of books by other authors, but one wonders whether he has leaned on them too heavily. The result, too often, is that we seem to be reading his account of other people's work rather than an original perspective on wind and weather.

-- Tom Graham

The reviewers are editors at The Washington Post who cover science and health news.