Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

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Another flu book! Like Albert Marrin’s Very, Very, Very Dreadful, Pale Rider is an investigation into the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918-1919. Unlike Marrin’s work, however, Spinney goes more global. When Marrin focused a lot on how the Spanish flu affected World War I (and vice versa), Spinney looks at how it affected the world. She also looks more into the future — the question of a re-occurrence of a similar pandemic not if, it’s when. “Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and […]

The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery by Barbara K. Lipska

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Barbara K. Lipska had something incredibly unlikely happen to her — after years of studying the brain, she herself began to experience neurological symptoms. Although it took quite a while for her to realize and then come to terms with the symptoms she was experiencing, this did allow her to eventually be able to describe what the disorders she had been studying for years felt like from within. “Emotions, which form the foundations of our personalities, are not contained in a single brain region, as […]

“Staying alive, as it turns out, is mostly common sense.”

Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Judy Melinek MD

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Working Stiff is a fascinating look at the inner workings of a real forensic pathologist. While Judy Melinek’s day to day job scarcely resembles the medical examiners you’ve see on TV her memoir is ten times more interesting that any Law & Order episode I’ve seen recently. Judy Melinek went to medical school with the plan to become a surgeon but the unrelenting schedule and her boyfriend’s hesitation to marry a surgeon led her into forensic pathology (and a happy marriage!) Mine is a gruesome job, but for […]

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Borrowed Time: The Science of How and Why We Age by Sue Armstrong

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I really wanted to like this one more than I did. After all, it’s a book about (as the subtitle says) how and why we age, and as I’ll be fifty at the end of June it’s a topic that doesn’t exactly weigh on my mind, but does make me curious. Run-on sentence, hoy. Armstrong’s book looks at a great many of the physical processes behind aging (the way our cells tick down moment by moment until they die), the ways people have tried to […]

“A kid born in Flint will live fifteen years less than a kid born in a neighboring suburb. Imagine what fifteen years of life means.”

What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City by Mona Hanna-Attisha

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What the Eyes Don’t See is an eyeopening look at the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Flint, Michigan written by the pediatrician who brought the health crisis to national prominence by holding a press conference to discuss the correlation between the blood lead levels in children following the change to Flint River as the water source for the city. “Where is the American Dream in the Flint scenario? It’s not there. It’s not even talked about. It is becoming so out of reach. At the end of […]

Finish your z-packs!

Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine by William Rosen

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Less than 100 years ago, medicine was unrecognizable from what we have today. Drugs to treat infections, diseases, any kind of illness simply did not exist the way they did now. Post-operative infections ran rampant, and while doctors knew about germs they didn’t have any way to treat the issues they caused. And then in the 1930s and 1940s, small glimmers of hope appeared: antibiotics. Of course, once discovered, antibiotics still took decades of research and testing to hit the market. And they brought their […]



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