I’m not sure how to review this book. For those who don’t know (am I the only one who never had to read this in high school?), the first half is an account of Frankl’s time in concentration camps during World War II, while the second half discusses in more detail the psychotherapy that Frankl developed, logotherapy. And now that I’ve summarized it, I still don’t know how to proceed from here. I don’t think this book can be reviewed in the traditional sense–I certainly don’t want […]
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, […]
Five minutes looking in his eyes, we all knew he was broken pretty bad
Reading an Anne Tyler book is like snuggling into your warm bed when it’s raining and you have nowhere to be. There are no Big Bads, no scary, suspenseful moments, and no dramatic confrontations. Her books feel like a snapshot of the characters’ lives, which are mostly very ordinary. I adore them. The Accidental Tourist is the story of Macon Leary, a middle-aged man who writes travel guides for businessmen (and since it was written in 1985, they are indeed guides for businessmen, not businesspeople). His son Ethan was […]
Every moment points toward the aftermath
If you were asked to name every president who was assassinated, would you remember James Garfield? He was president for only a matter of months, part of a generally undistinguished cohort that served between Grant and McKinley. There is no great legislation that we credit to Garfield, no famous speeches or charismatic wife. On the surface, Garfield was nothing more than a generally decent man, a loving father, a good husband–an ineffectual president, although to be fair he spent a third of his term in office dying of a […]
We will recognize each other, and see ourselves for the first time the way we really are
“We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are.” Why do bad things happen to good people? Has there ever been a satisfactory answer to that question? The people of Salem thought they had one–bad things happen to good people because bad people–witches–make them happen. Cow suddenly dies? Lightning strikes your house? Child is stricken with a mysterious illness? Without a solid understanding of veterinary medicine, electricity, or germ theory these may well seem like magical events. Is it […]
I am Healthy, I am Whole, but I Have Poor Impulse Control
Laurie Notaro calls herself a “Pointer-Outer of Extraordinary Acts of Incredible Foolishness and, on Occasion, Rudeness.” I find that the older I get, the more I become one of these Pointer-Outers myself. Although I’ve never yelled at an old woman for walking too slowly through a Costco (only to discover she was walking that way because she was on oxygen), or lectured the characters at Disneyland for not wearing pants (Notaro does both), I fear the day may come, if I don’t learn to keep my mouth […]