Get connected to us with our new mobile app!
I thought it fitting to read about this disease on the 100th anniversary of the devastating pandemic of 1918, commonly referred to as the Spanish Flu. Dr. Brown writes clearly and cogently of the disease’s history (a very long one), its laundry list of so-called “cures,” how a typical doctor today treats a flu patient, […]
After reading In the Hurricane’s Eye (2018) by Nathaniel Philbrick, the story of George Washington and the battle of Yorktown, I wanted to learn more about Washington and his position on slavery, which is only touched on briefly in that book. Never Caught brings us a heroine from history, Ona Marie Judge, Martha Washington’s lady’s maid. […]
Joshua Becker’s book really made a difference to me; after reading it, I started to work on my home. The difference between this book and all the others is that this book does NOT assume a decluttered home is the goal. The freedom to pursue your life’s mission is the goal and the cluttered home […]
In The Hurricane’s Eye opens five years into the Revolutionary War , with a stalemate. The rebels had the advantage on the land. They usually lost their battles, but when the battles were done, they could retreat to the countryside and await another chance. There was too much land for the Empire to occupy to […]
When Ann Arbor bookstore owner Gustafson set up a small desk upon which he placed typing paper and a blue Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter (vintage 1963) he created a portal into the minds of his customers. Confronted with a blank page people tend to type something. Sometimes it’s just a random cluster of letters, maybe […]
This is book is a mind-opener! Irving grew up in a upper middle class suburb of Boston in the 60s and 70s. Well-educated and self-identified as a “good person,” she writes a brutally honest assessment of how she grew to become a person who takes action to contribute to racial justice rather than mindlessly letting […]
It turns out that women are often extremely good at code-breaking or cryptanalysis as it is technically known, and this book tells the fascinating story of Elizebeth Friedman, perhaps the world’s best cryptanalyst of the 20th century. In 1916 she was hired by an eccentric tycoon, George Fabayan, to work at his private estate near Chicago […]
Much of the stuff I thought I knew about sleep has had a major and often surprising up-date within the last decade or so due to the ever-increasing sophistication of brain imaging techniques (MRIs and the like). In his very readable book, Walker, a neuroscientist, reveals how some of the huge questions we have had […]
If you were to wander into the research cabinets of the Field Museum of Natural History, or any other natural history museum, and open a drawer, you would be stunned by the sheer number of specimens collected, tagged, and preserved for research. If you were in the bird section, you would be overwhelmed by the […]
Simon Winchester is a master at both explaining things and telling us gripping stories. In his latest book he takes us on a journey of the history of precision. As a concept, the drive to greater and greater precision in order to create tools (machines) that perform extremely well started in 18th century England. In […]
