It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed a book about birds, so I figured I’d better remedy that. I do quite a bit of reading about animals, zoology, and natural history in general and at times it can get repetitive. In The Thing with Feathers, Noah Strycker spices things up a bit by drawing parallels between birds and humans. Strycker takes the reader on a journey of body, mind, and spirit while dazzling with tales of amazing avians, from the tiny bee hummingbird of Cuba (which […]
The (never-ending) End of Food
Paul Roberts has provided an incredibly in depth and comprehensive study of food systems in the modern age. He has charted the progress and missteps that have taken place from the time of farmers and pre-industrialization to our present day globalized food world. From our front yard gardens to increasingly manufactured products and technology, there is a lot of ground to cover. Overall, Roberts painted a pretty dire picture for the future of food and food access. I picked up this book as it is […]
In Which I Learned A Lot More About Chemistry Than I Ever Did In School
First, a confession. I attended four different middle schools and three different high schools. I managed to take Earth Science, Environmental Science, and then Biology five times over before pursuing a liberal arts degree. I never learned much of anything about chemistry in school, so that bar may be artificially low. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is a wandering, at times rambling, collection of stories that winds along with the Periodic Table of Elements. Like a good liberal arts science class, the book does […]
A Bible for Cat Training
Cats are jerks. Don’t get me wrong – I have 3, they’re adorable, and I love them to pieces. Cats are rewarding pets, but there are definitely cat owners out there who would agree that it’s a good thing cats are cute because they can be obnoxious. I’m hoping this book will help with that. It’s phenomenal and wasn’t remotely dry, perhaps because I was thinking about how I could apply what I was reading to my own cats. I underlined a lot of the […]
Three Stories of Motherly Love in Unbearable Conditions
I ended up going to Krakow, Poland for Easter weekend, and while I was debating whether visiting Auschwitz would be crass or an important educational moment, I decided it might not be bad to read a book related to the Holocaust in preparation for the trip. I didn’t actually finish this until after my visit to Auschwitz but I appreciated having a personal story to attach to the victims since at some point the brain stops processing the scale of large numbers. The book follows […]
“Health and dignity are indissociable in human beings.”
It’s hard for me to gauge exactly how interesting a book like this may be to someone else, because when asked about my fantasy dream career, I say epidemiologist. And not the fun kind – the data wonk kind. I think objectively, this book is objectively “exciting” if you have a tolerance for fairly dry excitement, and a lot of details on slow, frustrating, painstaking searches for pathogens, outbreaks, sources of contamination, and underlying causes of the things that plague us. Despite the rather dramatic […]
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