This week, Connie Leas offers us excerpts from her two recent nonfiction books. In last week’s article, you read about how the author decided to write on topics that interested her; now you get to read her approach to offering others the information she finds and digests.

Excerpt 1 – from The Art of Thank You — Crafting Notes of Gratitude

Chapter 4 “Writing and Composing”

Special situations

Occasionally, acknowledging gifts — especially wedding gifts — can be tricky, as when you receive —

Gifts of money. Express gratitude for monetary gifts by mentioning how you will use the money. (“I’ll put the check toward the car I’m hoping to buy.”) Some experts advise against mentioning the amount of the gift; others think it’s a good idea. Use your own judgment. If you don’t mention the amount, describe it as “generous.”

Unidentifiable gifts. If you can’t figure out how a gift is to be used, do your best to describe it and show your appreciation. (“The engraved silver piece you sent has generated lots of comments around here. Such a generous gift!”)

Gifts that are not to your taste. If you don’t like the gift, you can show your appreciation by focusing on the kindness of the giver instead of the gift. You can avoid lying by mentioning truthful qualities of the gift. (“Thank you so much for the colorful lap blanket. It simply exudes warmth.”)

Duplicate gifts. If the gift is a duplicate or there is a problem with it, don’t mention it. Don’t ask where the gift was purchased so that you can return it. If you exchange a gift, don’t inform the giver. Conveying your disappointment to the giver, who has been generous on your behalf, is unkind.

 A gift that arrives broken. Write your thank-you note as if all were well. That way, you’ll avoid worrying or disappointing the sender. If the gift was sent from a store, try contacting them to see if you can obtain a replacement. If that doesn’t work, forget it.

Gifts from multiple givers. If you receive a single gift from more than one person (unless it’s a family) thank each individual — and don’t send identical notes to each. The editors of Brides magazine suggest the following rule: If you receive a single gift from several relatives or friends, write each a separate note, provided the group numbers less than ten. If the group numbers more than ten, one thank-you note is sufficient, “but be sure to thank everyone in person as well,” they advise. I’m not sure I agree. Ten notes don’t strike me as too burdensome. On the other hand, in certain situations, a single thank-you is sufficient. For example, if you’ve received a gift from a large number of people — say from the 150 people who work at your firm, many of whom you don’t know — write a thank-you letter to the office manager asking her to convey your appreciation and gratitude on your behalf.

If you’ve waited too long. If you’ve put off note writing for an embarrassingly long time, go ahead and write tardy notes, but now each note must be long and effusive — and without excuses. I read of another strategy for too-late notes, which was to write a letter saying how much you’ve been enjoying the gift, using words implying that this is a follow-up to your original thank-you note, which of course, never existed. I disapprove of this ploy because it’s not truthful and because, for the recipient, it casts doubt on his or her memory or on the reliability of the post office.

In a Town and Country magazine article, Catherine Culvert describes the results of her lapsed note writing:

I remember bogging down while working my way through a very long list of wedding-present thank-yous. The first few were buoyed by the joy of using stationery with my new initials, the next hundred a connect-the-dots exercise in getting the job done. But almost at the end, I petered out. It took a call from Tiffany & Company, gently inquiring whether I’d actually received the five china plates because the donor was concerned, to send me back to my desk. There I concocted an abject apology and fulsome thanks, after rejecting all sorts of alternatives, like moving overseas. I winced for months whenever I encountered that woman of a certain age, gracious to her gloved fingertips, who’d seen my seamy, sloppy side.

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Excerpt 2 – from Fat: It’s Not What You Think

 “Introduction”

This book started out as a sort of encyclopedic “everything you always wanted to know about fat….” But as my research progressed, I began to encounter controversy, especially where saturated fat and cholesterol are concerned. The more I researched, the more convinced I became that we’ve been misled. For example, in the media, the term “saturated fat’ is frequently preceded by “artery-clogging,” which makes us form a mental picture of fat slithering down our gullets and working its way into our arteries, there to stop them up like a clogged sewer line. This is a sort of cartoonish description of what is known as the “lipid hypothesis” or “diet/heart” dogma. This idea, familiar to us all, holds that eating saturated fat and cholesterol leads to arterial plaques and heart disease. I quickly learned that plenty of scientists disagree with that notion (not to mention Julia Child, a butter lover who lived to be 92). In fact, those who still adhere to the notion seem to be fading away. Dr. Uffe Ravnskov tells us “huge numbers of published medical studies reveal results that are totally at odds with this idea.” Nevertheless, the idea persists, no doubt with the help of those who produce cholesterol-lowering drugs, low fat products, and butter substitutes.

The idea also persists because of a phenomenon social scientists call an “informational cascade,” which simply means that people — even scientists — tend to follow along with and propagate the ideas of someone who acts like an authority. As explained by John Tierney, in a New York Times article, “Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus” (October 9, 2007), the informational cascade begins when a person of stature makes a public declaration — in this case, that fatty foods shorten your life. “If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does.” One person after another assumes the rest can’t all be wrong. In the case of the diet-heart hypothesis, the first person was, unfortunately, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who, in 1968, took his cue from Ancel Keys, whose erroneous but popular anti-fat message started the whole anti-fat campaign. Even after scientists were unable to confirm the diet-heart hypothesis, the mistaken consensus held fast, partly because of another sociological phenomenon called a “reputational cascade.” This phenomenon kicks in when scientists fear that questioning the popular wisdom may pose a risk to their careers.

As Kierney explains, “Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to over-diagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look to guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.” So what you have — and continue to have — is science by consensus. Indeed, when asked why the American Heart Association still warns against saturated fat, Dr. Ronald Krauss, who has headed up the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association and who stated in an interview that “the message of low fat has not been based on the best science,” answered that the guidelines are made by voting. In other words, the bases for “authoritative” nutritional guidelines are closer to a Gallup pole than scientific studies.

It didn’t take me long to come down on the side of those who deny that saturated fat and cholesterol are the culprits in heart disease — scientists such as Drs. George V. Mann, Mary Enig, Uffe Ravnskov, and science writer Gary Taubes. This is partly because their arguments are the most compelling. But it’s also because my instincts pull me in their direction. I tend to learn toward the commonsensical, which, in this case, favors natural processes over man-made interventions. Our bodies make cholesterol for a reason; saturated fat is a natural substance that has a rightful place in our diets.

Saturated fat, by the way, is saturated with hydrogen atoms — not glop as we might imagine. We imagine glop because of the way “saturated” is presented in the media — that is, preceded by “artery clogging.” But the word “saturated,” like “triglycerides,” “LDL,” and other heart-disease-related words is a scientific term. Scientific terms are tossed about frequently and casually in the media, often to instill fear and motivate us to purchase products. The terms have become so commonplace we think we know what they mean, but usually we don’t. To help you become a savvy consumer of food and pharmaceuticals, I’ve devoted space to explaining some of the terms, trying to be as thorough as necessary without including too much mind-numbing detail. As Einstein said “make everything as simple as possible, but not more so.”

Don’t get the idea that this book is only about saturated fat and cholesterol. It’s still intended to provide everything you need to know about fat. For this reason, the subjects are wide-ranging and cover body fat as well as food fat. Because the amount of material on these topics is overwhelming, I spent a lot of time sorting through it all and selecting what I consider to be the pieces that are the most important, interesting, and to the point. But whole books have been written on the subjects to which I devoted just a chapter — or even a section. For example, there’s Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin, which covers the genetics of obesity; Paul Campos’s The Obesity Myth, which looks skeptically at conventional notions of weight; Ellen Ruppel Shell’s The Hungry Gene, which explains the genetic components of appetite; Uffe Ravnskov’s The Cholesterol Myths, which exposes “the fallacy that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease;” Gary Taubes’s Good Calories, Bad Calories, which meticulously documents the history of the anti-fat movement and explains the role of insulin in obesity, and Nina Planck’s real food, which promotes the health-giving properties of saturated fats. These books and others explore in depth some of the topics I discuss more briefly. The history behind the anti-fat movement is a case in point. It’s a rather long and involved story, and I didn’t want to get bogged down with it, so I gave it rather short shrift. But you can learn about it in both Ravnskov’s and Taubes’s books as well as in Taubes’s excellent article, “The Soft Science of Dietary Fat” published in the journal, Science, and downloadable from www.sciencemag.org. I wanted this book to be more of a romp than a slog. I hope it strikes you that way.