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Category Archives: Nonfiction – Science
A Review of Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto And Why It Had It Coming
I bought this book several years ago, back when I qualified for an educator discount and could get paperbacks from Random House for $3 apiece. Whenever you see me review a book that seems out of my usual oeuvre (I … Continue reading
Final Thoughts on Jonathan Lyons’ The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
The anti-intellectualism of early Christianity makes me genuinely angry. This anger dates back to my reading of Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason in the winter of 2012, but … Continue reading
Thoughts on Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think (by Jill)
I started a post on this book about a week ago and it seems to have vanished off my hard drive. That’s fine with me, actually, because it was going nowhere fast, and I’m hoping I can do a … Continue reading
Algebra and Basic Human Decency: Early Thoughts on Jonathan Lyons’ The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
I read the coolest little tidbit today in The House of Wisdom. It has to do with the invention of algebra. According to this author (and the source he cites; more on this in a moment), algebra was developed by … Continue reading
A Quick Review of Holly Tucker’s Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution
This will need to be a brief review, as my newly-reconstituted work schedule requires me to go to bed early some nights, including tonight. But that’s OK – all I really need to tell you is that this book is … Continue reading
A Review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Can you imagine childhood without dinosaurs? I can’t. What did three year-olds do before there were books of dinosaurs to pour over? How did they learn to pronounce multisyllabic words in the absence of archaeopteryx, velociraptor, and tyrannosaurus? Were they … Continue reading
A Review of William Rosen’s Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (by Bethany)
This is the sort of history book I love – multidisciplinary, oriented around synthesis rather than analysis, and not afraid to go into detail about a sex act that a certain former empress of the Eastern Roman Empire liked to … Continue reading
Thoughts on Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (by Jill)
I don’t even know how to begin talking about this book. Atul Gawande is a surgeon who has written several books before this one. Being Mortal is, essentially, about dying in a time in human history when more can … Continue reading
A Review of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (by Bethany)
This book was everywhere for a while. I know that I resisted its pull for a long time before I bought a copy. I was intrigued, but this was maybe 10-12 years ago and I knew myself to be very … Continue reading
A Review of John Durant’s The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health (by Bethany)
I read this book not because I’m planning to go on the Paleo diet but because I thought (correctly) that it would affirm my general belief that the world has been screwy since the Industrial Revolution. (The world was screwy before … Continue reading
Postcards From Purgatory 