Becca

What an uneven collection. It's not even just the wide variation of quality (although there IS a wide variation in quality), but it seems like the stories chosen have only a glancing association with the ostensible theme. This is particularly notable given the hubris expressed in the introduction that this will be the ur-collection of modern faery tales (Klima goes as far as to imply that it is the ONLY collection of this sort, which is laughable, given that not only are almost all of these stories pulled from other, similar, anthologies, but the vast majority of them have been published in one of the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling anthologies.) Its also poorly organized, with adjacent stories doing nothing to build or communicate with each other and some stories on the same faery tale are close to each other, while others aren't. The theme is also poorly defined, with some stories being modern interpretations of faery tales, some being retellings without a change in setting, and yet others seem to come from a universe where the words “faery tale” have no meaning.

All of that notwithstanding, there are some excellent stories:
-Wil McCarthy's He Died That Day, in Thirty Years is one of those rare pieces: a sci-fi short story that actually is satisfying. It stood on it's own and yet was clearly related to Alice in Wonderland. It was rich and provocative and wholly original. Perhaps particularly remarkable is how every little detail of the story was rich with information.

-Michelle West's The Rose Garden was something that I wanted to hate. I hate Beauty and the Best as the exemplar of the Bad Boy genre – that horribly insidious, misogynist trope by which women should cleave to cruel, angry men and by their love covert them into some sort of paragon. But The Rose Garden, while not being a full inversion, was raw and honest about its intentions. And, I'm a sucker for platonic romance, so...

-Robert J. Howe's Pinocchio's Diary is terrifying, brutal, and an absolutely fascinating retelling. I loved his exploration of “realness” and bullying and othering. This is faery tale telling at it's best – using a tale familiar to all of us, to tell a moral familiar to all of us, but to also tell a story that feels real and visceral and to twist it into something new that has a new moral.

There are also some completely AWFUL stories
-Howard Waldrop's The Sawing Boys is completely impenetrable. You see it's a modern twist on the faery tale in which a bunch of Yiddish gangsters are finally thwarted by a Klezmer band playing construction equipment. No? No hint of recognition? Maybe it will help if they only speak in roaring twenties slang, which is converted into Pig Latin such that you both have to decrypt every utterance and then further deduce it's meaning based on the glossary at the end of the story? No? Yeah, me neither. Also, apparently Yiddish is the new black in faery tales, as it also seems to infiltrate Leslie What's The Emperor's New (and Improved) Clothes for no clear reason, too.

-Gregory Maguire's The Seven Stage a Comeback, which unfortunately starts this collection, may work as a play, but as written media is completely god-awful. It's impossible to keep the dwarfs straight, as they have no names; only numbers, therefore there is no character development evident.

The rest is mostly pretty cliched and unmemorable. (I do love Neil Gaiman's The Troll Bridge, but I've already read it in a different collection, so it doesn't count)

This is intended to be a complete overview of medical genetics and the current dilemmas at the forefront of the field. And, to be honest, as a medical geneticist (trainee) myself, I felt a little bored at times. It hits all of the cliche notes: Dor Yeshorim, Jesse Gelsinger, Dolly the Sheep, Rosalind Franklin, the Ashkenazi Y chromosome, HeLa cells, Myriad's BRCA patents and sickle cell screening; basically, if you've read anything about genetics in the news in the last ten plus years, it's in this book.

The organization is also sloppy - chapters tend to be made up of semi-related topics trying desperately to coalesce into a theme. There's no segue or connection between chapters, to the point where if a concept explained in one chapter comes up in another, it is explained again (sometimes verbatim from the prior chapter.) I'm also not sure that there is consistency in the explanations of topics for a lay audience. Sometimes there would be an extensive explanation of a topic that seemed pretty self-explanatory and other times, I was left wondering if the average reader would come away with any understanding of what mass-spectroscopy is and why it's different than a Guthrie test. Each chapter ends anti-climatically with a sentence such as “we hope we have convinced you that [this chapter's issue] is worth thinking about”

That being said, it really is a thorough coverage of almost all recent issues in medical genetics and highlights of where the field is going, as seen by two big names in the field. And despite my high level of knowledge going into the book, I found a sizable handful of anecdotes that I had not previously known.

There are a few touchpoints that I can say were truly essential to the trajectory of my life. One of them was going to college with one of Reb Zalman's sons. I didn't know who he was (or R'Zalman) at the time, and I'd never heard of Renewal Judaism. I already considered myself observant, with a deeply intellectualized Judaism. And here was this other religiosity, basically sideswipping me, encouraging me to instead enter religion through emotions. It shaped how I think of myself as a Jew, how I show up to services. I was talking to a friend about it a few years ago and he suggested I actually read some of R' Zalman's writings.

This was everything I might imagined it would be – an honest, vulnerable, thoughtful approach to what we literally do when we pray and how we can make it feel real, meaningful, emotional and worthwhile. R'Zalman helps prayer feel real and living and applicable to daily life with both concrete tips on how to approach prayer with intention and stay present as well as bigger philosophical musings on the ways that spirituality can feel distant from us. This is really a must read for all Jews, but especially those who feel like religion has nothing to offer them

I was hoping for a really thoroughly researched, encyclopedic book about all sorts of different flavors and their genetic, historic and anthropologic rationales. In retrospect, that was a really tall order, so the fail to meet expectations needs to be put in that context.

And the book isn't bad. Parts are quite good: the conversation about the diversity of human diet and evolution since paleolithic times and the hypothesis that dependent on different genetic makeup people need different foods in order to be healthy (although he seems to view this in a very prescriptive fashion, leaving those of us with mixed genetic ancestry, which, I mean, is nearly everyone these days, to wonder if we need to whole genome sequence ourselves just to answer “what's for dinner?”)

I also really enjoyed the chapter on different tasters. I knew that I was a bitter taster from high school bio taste tester strips, but I like many classically bitter foods – cruciferous vegetables, very dark chocolate, etc., so I had always discounted the idea of chemical tasters, but the chapter really helped explain the spectrum of phenotype and expand it to things that I am averse to (grapefruit, orange pith).

The chapter on G6PD is decent. Anyone who reads popular science with any avidity already knows G6PD, but the speculation about its coincidence not just with regions with malaria but also the timing of the fava season to the malaria season expanding the discussion.


There was a very long discussion at the beginning about Native Americans, alcoholism and diabetes. These topics have been covered at length and certainly Dr. Nabhan explores his personal ties to these issues, but this part is not very scientifically interesting.

His section on MTHFR is probably the poorest – people are at a cardiac disadvantage if they carry the polymorphism and don't ingest enough folate, and then he concludes that the polymorphism flourished in Northern Europe because it encouraged folate dependence and therefore encouraged selective mating (i.e. mates who did not have access to folate would become sick, allowing people of mating age to select only those with access to folate.) However, that is a pretty flimsy explanation for why there would be a selection advantage for the mutation (versus the wildtype, which would appear fit regardless of access to folate.) It's clear Nabhan is not a geneticist!

Another complaint is that he is obsessed with the idea that we have nutritional diseases. He keeps alluding to the fact that food intolerances are growing and that we as a population are increasingly unhealthy (and hypothesizes it's because we don't eat our specific ancestral food, which, see above re: genelogical prescriptivism.) This is just a pet peeve of mine – people are mostly getting healthier as time passes.

My biggest complaint overall, though, is how thin the volume is: it includes the chapters I mentioned and another exploring why we eat spicy food and why different people tolerate it more than others and that's it.

So, let's start off by being fair: 1) I would never had even looked twice at this book had it not been by Michael Chabon. 2) I had idly wondered, in my revery at [b:The Yiddish Policemen's Union 16703 The Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386925449s/16703.jpg 95855] how people who weren't me and didn't share my passions reacted to the book. And now I have an answer.This book is ostensibly about lay midwives, jazz music and blaxploitation films. I can't quite figure out how to put how I feel about lay midwives into a sentence that is polite enough for social media and does not horribly side track this review, so let's let that suffice. I certainly don't hate music, but I'm just not one of those people who gets music, you know? Like, I wish I did and I respect people who are into music, but Chabon goes on and on about a piece, or whatever, and my eyes glaze and I skip several paragraphs and he's still going on and I have no idea what he's talking about, and if we're truly being honest here (because hey, why not?) I really don't know why anyone would buy a record in 2014 anyway so the fact that there are COMPETING record stores seems ridiculously anachronistic, but again, I don't get music, so what do I know? And finally, I've never had an opinion on blaxploitation films (although I strongly recommend going down the rabbit hole and wikipedia-ing blaxploitation, and that finding the legions of other subgenres ending in -ploitation.)So the idea that I would read and enjoy a book about lay midwives, jazz and blaxploitation was already on flimsy ground.And let me also say, that I certainly don't believe that there are certain topics that are verboten based on race or sex or religion. But then, let's pretend to ourselves for a second that we're Michael Chabon, and we're famous for writing books about bi-curious geeky Jewish boys and we start a book about a bi-curious geeky Jewish boy, who happens to be into Jazz and then we end up also writing about blaxploitation and then before you know it, there are a couple of Black characters and then all of a sudden you're knee-deep in racial tension. So there's a few of things you can do: you could back out until you're back on safe territory; you can do a lot of researching or you can decide to forge ahead, gunsblazing, and write about racial relations.Chabon clearly decided to do that latter, and while I will continue to sing his praises for writing uncomfortable truths and borderline offensively accurate portrayals of the Jewish community, as a Jewish woman reading a book by a Jewish author, I was pretty unsettled by him (attempting to) do the same with the African American community. And intersectionality was definitely problematic: in an entire book on Jewish-Back relations there were two female Black characters: An afro-touting, impossibly skinny, impossibly sexy, aged sex symbol/film star and a perpetually hungry, perpetually angry, perpetually pregnant woman. Not that the Black men were portrayed that much better: they inevitably abandoned their children and were to a one portrayed as violent, cheating and irresponsible.Also, his conclusion seemed to be that White people (of whom there are no non-Jews in the book) and Black people are too different and want things that are too different and any partnership, or indeed real friendship is doomed to fail. In conclusion, if this had just been a book about privileged, Jewish, Julius Jaffe, who writes Lovecraftian poetry, and his questionably unrequited love for Titus Joyner, obsessed with Blaxploitation and trying to come in to his own after a troubled childhood, and it was done respectfully, without stereotypes and the other 95% were jettisoned, I would have read the heck out of it. As was, an extremely poor showing by one of my favorite authors.

Previously on Rebecca Reads Tana French: I was a mystery book junkie for all of my childhood, but I fell out of the habit as an adult – I found the plot twists too obvious and the characters too derivative. So when Tana French was first recommended to me, I figured I'd read one and move on. Instead, I became completely entranced with her approach to mystery. Murders tear at the fabric of what we believe makes us human. French uses this tear the same way that speculative fiction writers use magic or giant robots: to explore what makes us human and where the borders of humanity are. Although Witch Elm departs from French's previous formula by not including the detectives as protagonists, it's otherwise true to form. The book centers on two main themes: first, the warmth of families, and on the obverse the distance that can grow in relationships by pretending that everything is normal and second, who well one can ever really know themselves. French excels at evoking visceral feelings – both positive and then rapidly cooling as things go wrong – and here the set up of friends, romantic relationships and family all feel very real. The new format really gives her space for thematic development and she uses it to approach these questions from multiple angles even before the central crime comes to light (over 100 pages in – a corpse in the witch elm, details borrowed almost completely from the “Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm” case)I really loved the exploration of self and how well one knows oneself. Although not the protagonist, the most vivid character is the spiritual patriarch of the family, Hugo, slowly losing his personality to a brain tumor, and his response to why he never had children of his own: “one gets used to being oneself” sets the tone for the whole book. What does it mean to be oneself? Who are we? Do we ever really know how we will react to events that unsettle us. It's a very 2018 book: in the face of rising white nationalism does one resist or cling to routine? (I'm turning out to be the latter, much to my own dismay. If that's you, too, this is your book.)Much like other French books, the whodunnit of the murder is not the point, although I found the plot twists more satisfying than usual perhaps because they all happened from the lens of a pretty unreliable narrator. Also, I love unreliable narrators and this was a very satisfying instantiation – ostensibly, the narration is simply unreliable because the protagonist is recovering from a concussion; however, even before the head injury, the narration reminded me of [b:The Farm 17557913 The Farm Tom Rob Smith https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391017911s/17557913.jpg 24485092] – the narrator would report out his happy-go-luckiness and how fine everything was, while clearly panicking. I enjoyed the exploration of what it's like inside the psyche of someone who's invested in being OK – it's a common personality trope in real life and pretty alien to me.It's clear that without the detectives, French had even more room to blend into “literary fiction” and develop her themes. On the other hand, I thought it also resulted in a loss of the internal skeleton of the narrative. Without it, some parts seemed bloated, while others seemed overly condensed. Particularly the last plot twist, which was given so little space within the narrative, suffered from this. Nonetheless, French is the only mystery writer whose books are appointment-reading for me and this didn't disappoint.(I received a free copy in exchange for my unbiased review. But also I'd already bought a pre-order copy before I won the giveaway.)

This slender volume tackles a couple of the most insidious examples of marketing to children: “educational” products that lack any educational research supporting them, cartoon branding of products and the involvement of very young children in marketing. Thomas interviews industry insiders to understand and explain how decisions about children's TV, children's books, children's characters and even preschool curricula are influenced by money making decisions. Some of her research is truly eye-opening - for instance that young children can recognize characters but not truly follow plot or context and this makes them extremely vulnerable to branding.

However, for such a small volume, I would hope it were crammed to the brim with commentary on marketing to children. Instead, she gets side tracked with the topic of screened media (important in its own right, but not central), and feels the need to repeat several points throughout the book. I also wish she would have spoken a little bit about the Gen-Y parent. She seems to think that all of the current parents are Gen-Xers. I personally missed Gen-X by a handful of years and was still well into my 20's when this book came out. Surely Gen-Y parents warranted at least a sentence?

I'm not sure how I feel about finishing this. Dr. Martin and her friends really smart. From the gender essentialism (we learn women are more thorough and detail-oriented, which is why they shouldn't be in study groups with men) to the pity poker that Dr. Martin is sure she's winning against modern women doctors (because we have it so easy), everything in this book rankles me.

Maybe it's that I read Dr. Martin's “poor me” stories on the walk to and from my 30 hour shifts, because that's the only time during my 80 hour weeks that I have time to read and that makes it hard for me to feel bad for her 60 hour work weeks as a med student (I worked up to 120 one memorable week during my third year, and averaged over 90) and her “We only got summers off” (nowadays, medical school and residencies are competitive enough that the “summers off” end up being research time.) I scoff at her “dilemmas” such as whether to take her bra off when she sleeps on call (I have nights where taking my SHOES off seems like a bad idea.) But what really bothers me the most is the trivial work choices that she and her friends face. All of them work part time, most in private practice. Many have taken years off (a luxury the licensing boards in most states now frowns upon) and they complain about only having a month paid maternity leave plus 2 unpaid months. It's really hard to feel sorry for a women who states that she first learned “that I couldn't have it all,” when she had to move to SoCal, to marry a rich dentist, and where she rapidly joined an affluent private practice. Poor thing.

Over and over again, I think that far from being exemplars of female physicians, these women would be eaten alive in today's training world. And don't even get me started on her chapters on what clothes to wear in the hospital, her trivialization of reproductive health debates, or the easy way that the “study group” abandons the “politically correct” movement

I'm usually very deliberate about my book rankings. I think about what I like and what I didn't like and assign and deduct points to come up with a final opinion. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is NOT that kind of book. T.S. Spivet gets five stars for the room-feeling of the book. Yes, it deserves them for introducing concepts such as room-feelings, for its unique approach, and for its gutsy nature. Yes, it deserves high recognition for depicting the portrait of the scientist as a young man - the coming of age of one young scientist from a obsessive prodigy who values science above all else into a nuanced adult who seeks to be a part of the world as well as depict it. It is amazing to me that I have never even heard of another book focusing on the development of a scientific mindset within a character in a way that is nuanced and treats science respectfully, rather than a foil for robotic rationalism or an idol for intelligence. Larsen uses every single trope of a conventional coming of age story, which adds to the power.12 is such a perfect age for a child protagonist. Larsen depicts the emergent adulthood of a 12 year old almost perfectly (there are a few stumbles). Like a true tween, T.S. at times acts like an adult and at others acts like a toddler, with very few in between moments. It's rare to capture the true granular nature of coming of age, where childhood falls away chunk-by-chunk and memes of adult life settle in, rather than as a linear progression.But despite all of that, the best thing about T.S. Spivet is simply a ton of fun. We're having a bad week at work. Everyone is cranky. Usually, the worse of a mood I'm in, the less I read (and the more I use pure escapism that doesn't require reflection) But even after long, cranky calls, all I wanted to do was read about T.S. I laughed out loud at points on his reflection on adulthood, science and cross-country travel. I flipped through to find my favorite illustrations. I smiled when he name-checked Paul Ekman (a Duchenne smile, of course.) Pure enjoyment.There are a lot of criticisms that one could level at T.S. Spivet: it is a pretentious novel, built on a schtick. In fact, built on a ton of schticks. It's like someone got a deal on schticks: there's the child protagonist, who is a prodigy, and may also have an autistic spectrum disorder, the maps/illustrations, secret societies, a book-within-a-book, just to name in a few. Luckily, I am a sucker for pretentious novels built on schticks, so it is going to go right next to [b:Special Topics in Calamity Physics 3483 Special Topics in Calamity Physics Marisha Pessl http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309200115s/3483.jpg 910619] on my shelf. More bitingly, there are several narrative threads in T.S. Spivet that never satisfyingly come together on the level of the plot: the Emma thread, the Mother as a Writer and Mother but Not as a Scientist thread, the Wormhole thread and to be honest, the Layton is Dead thread. They are all tied up from a thematic level, but I would have liked more literal closure.

A fascinating historical and medical perspective on fatal familial insomnia and prion disorders in general, highlighting historical and modern controversies on these fascinating diseases. Max's strength lies in characterization and the placement of the events occurring in one family with FFI within a historical context. His prose is rich and readable. The subject matter is unspeakably sad, but Max handles a book about rapid neurodegeneration with ease, focusing on the excitement of discovery, the hopes of family and the scientific and medical curiosity evoked by the strange mysteries of prion disorders.

The major flaw is that by attempting to focus on prion disorders in general, what Max covers in breadth often lacks in depth. The discussion of kuru seems to focus on one of the main researcher's pedophilia to a large extent, which seems to occur in place of a real examination of the husband and wife team that did the anthropological work to discover the true origins of the disease. It would be both more salient and more interesting to focus instead on the controversies of cannibalism and how that discovery was made. In addition, Max remarks several times on the similarity between scrapie and FFI to the already discovered hereditary prion disorders CJD and GSS, without ever really discussing the discovery of those conditions. Since one of the stated goals of the book is to bring about public awareness and support for research to inherited prion disorders, more exploration of these two diseases would have added a lot, in addition to enriching the history of the field.

When this book first arrived, I was not quite sure why I had registered to receive an episotlary novel set in a retirement home. Most epistolary novels suffer from clumsy exposition and slow pacing. However, Getting the Picture was immediately compulsively readable for me, with the epistolary format only very occasionally being disruptive to the flow of the narrative.

This is truly a unique work – the multi-narrator format is used to its full potential, showing a multitude of characters first from an external perspective, and then, once the reader has her loyalty set, Salway changes narrators in order to reveal the motivations of another characters, changing our sympathies all over again. The ending is telegraphed about three-quarters of the way through, but that makes the redemption theme no less sweet or rewarding.

The real charm of Getting the Picture is the quirky, full-of-life characterizations that Salway brings to her geriatric characters. They are colorful, storied and ultimately extremely believable. The younger characters are also well-drawn, but less memorable.

Peninah Schram is one of the great Jewish storytellers of our time. These stories range from traditional to original and are based in every Jewish culture. It's intended for family use, with suggestions for holiday celebration and an appendix with music to sing-along to. The main flaw with this is that, despite the large book layout, this is really more of a chapter book inside. The stories are long (for probably an 8 or 9 year old to read by themselves, or to be read to a patient 5 or 6 year old) and unillustrated.

I'm in love. Great graphics, nice pathway diagrams and comprehensive coverage of disease. Not really a book for making treatment decisions, but great for diagnosing and understanding IEMs.
I was hesitant to buy it because I don't need the endocrinology and I worried IEMs would be included as an aside, but they in fact predominant, the chapter authors are a who's-who of metabolic disease and the chapters include the diseases that you (I) wish most metabolic textbooks would: comprehensive review of CDGs, neurotransmitter deficiencies, purine and pyrmidine metabolism, B12 and folate metabolism, disorders of mineral metabolism and metabolic bone diseases

This is one of my favorite books of my childhood. I reread it nearly every time I'm at my parent's house.

I was always intimidated by this book, because I was intimidated to meet Jean Little. She was billed to us in second grade as an inspiration; a partially blind author as evidence that we could do whatever we set our hearts to. I was nervous to meet her less because she was an inspiration and more because it was the first time that I'd ever met an author. But then I was nervous to read her books because I was scared that they would be books about being an inspiration over and over.

However, her books stand completely on their own merit. Kate in particular is my favorite. It is the most honest narrative I've ever read about friendship and the perils of being friends as middle schoolers, who are constantly changing, but trying to be the best self that they can. It also deals with being the product of an inter-faith marriage and about finding an identity separate from that of your parents while still being a part of the family.

More than any other childhood book, Kate still speaks to me when I read it. It's rare to find a book about middle school that's this faithful, especially one like Kate, which deals with the parts of middle school that apply to everyoneover and over throughout life

This book creeped up on me. It started slow and I kept dropping it to read something else. Then it gradually became mind-blowingly terrific. Chabon uses language in a way that is approachable, witty and literate. It's rare to find a book that is both fun and as full of imagery and symbolism as Kavalier and Clay. The 630 pages are filled with Chabon's unique voice on reality, escapism, narrative, imagination and family.

Of course, my typical Chabon comments still stand – after reading a Chabon novel, I always feel as if it was written just for me to address things uniquely about my life. And I feel like Chabon is one of my closest friends, whom I know better than anyone else in the world. The universal popularity of Kavalier and Clay should disabuse me of these notions, but this is truly Chabon's unique gift.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is an unparalleled work.

I've read most of this book several times in the three weeks since I started my new role as a metabolism and genetics fellow.
In the weeks leading up to starting fellowship, I read this book once and was quite enchanted with how succinct and well-laid out it was. Once I started seeing patients; however, this book just doesn't cut it. It is much more a biochemical text with a few clinical pearls. Many relevant clinical details are completely absent. To be fair, many relevant biochemical details are also completely absent (want to know why glycine is high in MMA and PA? This book won't tell you.) Information about any given disease is scattered through many chapters. Sorting the book by organ system involvement makes some sense, but then diseases that are biochemically related, such as mitochondrial diseases, are splayed throughout. Also, to be done that way, the book should commit – I would expect a list of diseases that can cause epilepsy or liver failure, etc.
So why three stars? Because I haven't found a better alternative, especially not for the price. My coworkers make fun of me, because I spend a lot of time with MMBID up in my browser, at least one review article printed out on my lab, a basic biochemistry textbook on one desk, handdrawn diagrams up on my whiteboard and this book on my other desk. As long as it's part of that multi-reference puzzle, it deserves three stars. That being said, I would love to have one go-to reference.

Every other Michael Chabon novel that I have read has started out so slow that I've abandoned it for months at a time, but ultimately has been profound and moving and made me feel like I have a place in the universe. Wonder Boys did the opposite. Despite it's easy readability, Wonder Boys made me feel hated, like the world for which it's written or is found funny is a world that is antithetical to people like me.

About a quarter of the way through, I realized that I'd seen and hated the movie. That added to the feel of the novel, to be honest – this is a novel about people using drugs and alcohol to self-medicate the sort of depression that comes not from any sort of psychopathology, but rather the reasonable self-loathing if you're the sort of dick to do idiotic things while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Not surprisingly, this becomes a downward spiral of totally unsympathetic assholes continuing to do idiotic things then self-medicate further, then become more of a self-absorbed asshole who does even more idiotic things. I read the book with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, anticipating how things could possibly get even worse. Knowing the specific form the devolution takes from watching the movie added to the ambiance, so to speak.

So why two stars? The second star comes entirely from a Passover seder scene that is laugh-out-loud funny. Fights over what to put in the second seder plate space for bitter herbs (or even how to pronounce “Chazeret”) are reminiscent to every Jewish home and also to what I love about most Chabon novels. It was like a breath of fresh air (before that, too, became another drug-using, drunk-driving, pet-killing rampage)

Joseph Priestley discovered carbon dioxide, breathable air, invented carbonated water, was a best friend of Benjamin Franklin and instrumental in the founding of the Unitarian movement. Nonetheless, despite living in Benjamin-Franklin-opolis (AKA Philadelphia), I had never heard of him.

Johnson's biography is fascinating - a true examination of the life, beliefs, political allegations, science and religion of Priestley. In addition, there is another book nestled above the level of the biography: a book primarily about the process of science. Johnson explores how the process of science has evolved since Priestley's time, the factors that were instrumental in setting Priestley up for success, the model of the paradigm and the development of ecosystems as a model of thought.

On the one hand, this book totally fulfilled it's purpose: free ebook that was handy on my smart phone for reading while pumping. On the other hand, it wasn't good for much else. It was clearly self-published, in that it wanted desperately for an editor: characters names changes (Sandra Klee Mason was Sandra Mason Klee in every other chapter); there were factual errors (as someone who lives on South 45th St, I can tell you that there's no West 45th St in Philadelphia and anything east of about 50th street no longer has the West Philadelphia connotation that Dr. Miller seemed to be going for, anyway.) But even putting that aside, the book was both oddly shallow and simultaneously, obviously written by a psychiatrist, rife with psychoanalysis of every character's motivations. The plot was very thin and very predictable, although some threads (such as bone marrow transplant) were dropped never to be heard from again.

Given that I have an entire shelf for adult literature with child protaganists, the concept of a child narrator was not the novel part of this book for me. But what really stood out was that Donoghue made Jack a very normal five year old. He was in no way a prodigy or wise beyond his years. Instead, we were given access to the routine-oriented rigidity of a five year old. The description of Jack's life inside of Room was interesting - with his routines and his properly named personified objects and his perceptions of events that were much darker than he could understand. However, what made the book was his perception of the world following his rescue and his adjustment to the world outside.

My only objection was the occasional detour into preachy land - Jack notes how tired adults are in the outside world and how they don't have enough time to spend with their kids and I wonder what the author's trying to imply? That women would be happier if they were locked in a room with nothing to do other than play with their kids? I don't think that's her point, but it comes uncomfortably close to reading that way.

Dr. Zuk is first and foremost a terrific parasitologist. The portions of the book that Zuk spends discussing her own Ph.D. thesis and her own research, especially regarding sexual selection. The central portion of the book from about page 80 to page 180 is fascinating & probably should have been released as a stand-alone book – it is focused, it flows and the topic is fascinating (these are the chapters on sexual selection, infection differences between the sexes and sexually transmitted diseases.)

The first 80 pages drag, and are covered both more interestingly and in more detail in hundreds of other popular science books. Also, the topics in these chapters (heterozygote advantage, hygeine hypothesis) have little to do with Zuk's central themes. Theis portion of the book also is infested with what Zuk seems to think are wry little asides, which grate terribly. The concluding paragraphs are interesting, but lack the compulsive readable of the earlier chapters.