Have you ever read a Cracked.com article? It’s a website with clickbait-y titles (6 Animals That Are Secret Badasses! 5 Ways College Makes You Dumber!) with pretty substantial content. It’s been around forever. I’ve been reading it for 7 or 8 years and it’s definitely older than that. If you’re familiar with it, do you like it? If so, good news, this is basically 200 or so pages of Cracked articles. Your mileage with that, I guess, depends entirely on whether you enjoy Cracked.com. The […]
I Try Not To Judge, But…
Best for: People looking for some solid details on how vaccines work and facts about what they do and don’t lead to. In a nutshell: Infectious diseases expert provides an easy-to-read and detailed explanation of the history of anti-vaccine movements, from the 1800s to today. Line that sticks with me: “Because anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots — conditions that aren’t caused by vaccines […]
Good skin care, if you care
This book isn’t exactly my normal fair, it was a book club selection of the Chicago chapter of Slow Food. Essentially, Slow Food is the opposite of fast food: processed and unfamiliar in origin. Slow Food is about food that is good, clean, and fair. Not necessarily healthy food, but the main principles are that it is important to know where your food comes and attempt to preserve important cultural food traditions. Anyhoo, this book doesn’t have anything to do with food really, but it […]
Just your standard A.J. Jacobs book.
A.J. Jacobs has a formula, and I guess it’s working for him. He spends a year or two of his life devoted completely to “living” a concept, and he writes a book about it. In The Know-It-All, he reads the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. In The Year of Living Biblically, he adheres literally to the Bible for a year. In Drop Dead Healthy, he spends a couple years doing everything that’s recommended to be healthy. To me, his books are like Mary Roach books if instead […]
Well, this disease sounds terrifying…
I’ve seen Brain on Fire a few times at the bookstore, and it was the subtitle that kept catching my eye – “My Month of Madness” – and so when I found it on sale, I picked it up. I thought I would be getting a book about a Nellie Bly-style reporter who feigns mental illness to write an expose on our country’s health care system. Instead, I got a terrifying account of what happens when a young woman can’t get the right diagnosis, and […]
I finished this book, exhaled, and flipped it over to the beginning again.
Reading the late Paul Kalanithi’s spectacular memoir When Breath Becomes Air, a meditation about love, literature and science in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis was a strange experience “The good news is that I’ve already outlived two Brontes, Keats and Stephen Crane,” Kalanithi wrote to a friend. “The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.” He was trying to be funny, using the kind of dark humor you get from people facing the unfaceable. But it also revealed Kalanithi’s tremendous ambition. He […]
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