Though I haven’t read Atul Gawande’s most famous book, Complications, I read Better a year or so ago and found it compelling and thoughtful. As a result, I was intrigued by the prospect of his most recent book, Being Mortal, about medicine and end-of-life issues, including the story of Gawande’s father’s battle with cancer. Yet, I put off reading it for a bit because a book about death and dying isn’t exactly something you eagerly jump into. However, once I saw it on the best-seller […]
Everybody Know
I heard Jill Leovy on NPR’s Fresh Air back in January talking about this book and the newspaper blog that started it, The Homicide Report, and was intrigued. The book does not disappoint. Leovy, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, developed this text after years of reporting on homicides in LA and actually “embedding” herself at the LAPD’s Seventy-Seventh Street division and it attempts as she puts it in the author’s note, “to penetrate the mystery of disproportionate black homicide”(323). She uses the murder […]
Just One More Strike Against Standardized Tests
If you crossed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time with a Jennifer Crusie romance, you might end up with something like this novel. Simsion tells the story of Don Tillman, a genetics professor at a university in Australia, whose precisely ordered and scheduled life and lack of social awareness suggest to the reader that he’s on the spectrum, long before Don comes out and says it directly. Don decides he needs to find a wife so he develops a questionnaire that […]
It’s All Fine Until the Killer Unicorns Show Up
My fondness for Peter Grant and the London he occupies is now so strong that I’ll follow Aaronovitch wherever he decides to take Peter and his friends. In this fifth installment of the supernatural noir series (with excellent comic timing), Peter ends up being sent out of London up to North Herefordshire to help with the investigation of two missing girls. His job is basically to determine whether or not magic is involved, or as the police put it, whether it is a “Falcon” situation […]
Foster Care and Flowers
When my book club chose this as our March selection, I was worried that it would be overly twee—I just knew it had something to do with the Victorian language of flowers and a damaged young woman. Luckily, this first novel by Vanessa Diffenbaugh is a bit grittier (even though there is a small bit of magical realism) and I found it quite engaging. The novel alternates between two stories: what happens when Victoria Jones turns 18, leaves the group home she’s been living in […]
By the Numbers (or I miss Tony and Tia)
About six weeks ago, I caught the tail end of the movie version of I am Number Four on TNT or USA or one of those other cable networks. I had seen it before and found it a mindless way to spend 90 minutes, but not particularly great. (Though Timothy Olyphant is always appreciated.) The movie ends with a set-up for future movies and this made me wonder about the book—whether there was more to the story and whether the book had done it better. […]
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