Oh my gosh I am going to be annoying everyone about this book: apologies to everyone who knows me or meets me. This book is my new most favorite thing ever. I’m familiar with Michael Pollan by reputation more than experience as this was the first thing of his I had ever read. As one of “those people” who constantly takes pictures of food, strives for a healthy diet, and is spouting recipes to anyone who indicates vague interest, it was only a matter of […]
Dense but interesting
This is not a book to read in an evening or two. For one thing, it’ll depress the hell out of you. It’s also very dense, very technical and chock full of information. But don’t let that dissuade you, if you’re interested in this sort of thing — taking it a chunk at a time made it digestible, and very, very interesting to read. “Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.” Siddhartha Mukherjee tells two […]
I usually hate writing reviews about books I didn’t enjoy: This one made me mad enough that it was kind of fun.
A few weeks ago, I wrote this tweet: I wrote that note to myself less than 50 pages into the book The Diabetic and The Dietitian by Dr. Ellen Albertson and Michael Albertson. And then I repeated the sentiment approximately every other page of the book I managed to read over the course of the last three weeks. The book actually isn’t very long, and would, in the normal course of things, take me less than a few hours to read. But that did not […]
What Do You Mean We Don’t Agree On How To Run Triage?
I have an interest in what happens in worst case scenarios. I find disaster documentaries fascinating. I don’t know what that says about me, but it does mean that books like Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital are up my alley. Following a glowing review from Lollygagger way back in Cannonball Read 6, I added Sheri Fink’s book to my to read list, and then kept pushing it farther down. Because even though this is an area of non-fiction that […]
Going Home
Last summer, as part of my job as a health educator, I visited a woman at her home who had recently given birth. Newborn tests showed that the baby may have had a serious hemoglobin disorder. The woman spoke no English, and in fact her native language was spoken by such a small population that it had taken a lot of work to find an interpreter, who I had on speaker phone. At one point I asked the interpreter to define hemoglobin, explain that her […]
Fault Lines
This book was a huge disappointment. I’m a public health nerd, and my standards for a book about infectious disease is pretty low. Rising Plague didn’t meet them. The book starts with an introduction to multi-drug resistant bacteria, which is illustrated with stories of real patients Dr. Spellberg has treated, and then moves into an exploration of the pharmaceutical industry, and the barriers to creating new antibiotics. This section was pretty successful. The patient case studies are interesting, and I learned quite a bit about pharmaceutical companies, […]
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