I first read An Enemy of the People when I was in high school and I can recall being quite moved by it. Since the phrase “enemy of the people” has been bandied about in the news lately, I thought this would be an excellent time to revisit the play. Would it be as poignant as I remembered, or would I discover that the brain of a teenager is too unsophisticated to appreciate Norwegian drama and that I’d missed the nuance? The plot is pretty much as […]
Too cute for words (but I’ll try)!
I took my first trip to Yellowstone last summer and in one of the official gift shops in the Park, I picked up this innocent little book as a souvenir–supporting the Park Service and all that! Originally published in 1932, Cubby in Wonderland tells the story of a mother bear and her cub as they travel from Grand Teton National Park to Yellowstone and the many interesting critters they meet along the way. I’ll confess, during the opening pages I was all set to make some good-natured jokes about this book, like how […]
So now I feel like an underachiever
Lab Girl is one of those books that makes you sit back and wonder what you’ve been doing with your life. It’s not enough that Hope Jahren is an accomplished geobiologist and geochemist, or that she has a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley. It’s not enough that she’s won three Fulbright Awards, or that Popular Science magazine named her one of its “Brilliant 10” scientists in 2006. It’s not enough that in 2016 Time named her one of the world’s “100 Most Influential People.” With all those accomplishments, you’d think she’d have […]
How many cats DOES it take to qualify as a crazy cat lady?
I’m not sure precisely where the line falls between well-adjusted individual and crazy cat lady (or cat person, to be gender-neutral), but I want to say for the record that the quantity of cats in my home is within the legal limit. I have a deep appreciation of felines on both an aesthetic and a scientific level. I’m not one of your run-of-the-mill cat lovers who will squee over every cat video on YouTube–except maybe this one, and possibly this one, and well, maybe I do […]
There’s a human being behind that brain, people
When Henry Molaison was 7 or 8 years old he collided with a bicycle and hit his head, an incident that many scientists believe was the cause of his subsequent epileptic seizures. By the time he turned 27, Henry and his parents were desperate for relief from what had become a debilitating condition, so much so that they agreed to let Dr. William Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital, perform a lobotomy. This would be a new type of lobotomy that would specifically target the medial temporal lobes. While […]
Some Books Can’t Be Read Too Many Times
I don’t recall exactly how old I was the first time I read A Christmas Carol, but I was in grade school, and I knew enough to know that this Dickens fellow was an author adults read. Still, the volume was thin enough to be un-intimidating, and the illustrations were friendly, so I checked it out of the library (with the encouragement of the local librarian, I should say!). I remember being a bit taken aback when Dickens spent the better part of the first […]