It is difficult to capture the theme of this book as there is none. Murakami writes a journal while training for a marathon. In this process he talks about life as a novelist, life as a runner and life as a person who is living it. Sometimes he takes you running. You are there alongside him when he runs mile after mile next to rivers while being passed by college runners and 70 year old ladies. He will build you up on the run, let […]
Who wants to live forever?
In 1951 Henrietta Lacks died from aggressive cervical cancer. She left behind a husband and four young children. She also left behind a sample of cancerous tissue that did what very little other human tissue had ever done before, it lived. Her tissue survived and reproduced, providing a unlimited source of human cells for experimentation. You can imagine the breadth of research possibilities that became possible when this cell line – called HeLa – originated at Johns Hopkins. But the Lacks family couldn’t. They were […]
War Is Never Over
Primo Levi’s memoir The Reawakening begins where his Survival in Auschwitz ended. It’s the last days of the WWII, and Levi is trying to stay alive in what passes for a hospital or sick bay in concentration camp. Levi, who committed suicide in 1987, was an Italian Jewish writer and a chemist. He was arrested in as a part of the Italian resistance in 1943, and to escape being shot as a partisan, he confessed to being Jewish, and after a short interment in Italy, […]
“Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?”
After binge-watching the Netflix original series “Orange in the New Black” in only three days, I knew I had to read the book to compare the real accounts of Piper Kerman to the dramatized television series of Piper Chapman. I’ve always liked books better than their movie or television counterparts, and because I enjoyed the series, I expected to like the book more. I wasn’t disappointed. Without going into too many details because of the differences between the two versions, the basis of the story […]
If there’s Sex in the Title it’s bound to be good right?
My boyfriend and I binge watched the Showtime series “Masters of Sex” and once I finished I was keen to learn more so I decided to read the book by Thomas Maier. In the past I had learned a bit about Masters and Johnson when reading “Bonk” so this book was not entirely unfamiliar territory. It was interesting to read how the book differed from reality (although even in a non-fiction book like this I am sure that some liberties were taken). Overall it was […]
It’s getting plainer all the time
This book is the follow up to Why I Left The Amish. That book dealt with the author’s “now”, her mature years while confronting her father’s impending death, and her remote past, her childhood. This book fills in her young adult years. Saloma grew up in an abusive family, physically abused, emotionally damaged, and sexually violated. As we left her in the first book, she was escaping to the real world of her dreams, Vermont. Saloma makes what seems to be a successful transition. She […]
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