Becca
This is a hard review: I'm goodreads friends with the author, so I'm hesitant about what I say here. But this book was...not good.
Let's start with the positive: this is a quick read. There are multiple narrators telling intertwining stories about the same period of time from their perspective, which is an interesting narrative device, filling in what seems like a subplot in the first narration. Each of the characters has different flaws, coloring their narrative slightly (although each seems to be a reliable narrator. I think unreliable narration would have added a lot here.)
And the negative:
For me, the most difficult was how flimsy the characters were. Each was a very classic stereotype, most to the extent that I have never seen in relief, despite having gone to medical school, residency and fellowship myself and having a facebook feed that is literally full of doctors: one character is girly, obsessed with her long distance boyfriend and not very smart; another is ultra-feminist, but just needs to be laid by a good guy; another is an ultra-gunner who will go out of their way to set back others in the class, even going so far as to poison her boyfriend. Another is an insanely rich child of doctors, looking to be a plastic surgeon. Another is A Nice Guy. I just...these aren't characters, they're archetypes. And the one we're supposed to feel the most sympathetic for is the ditzy dumb one, which didn't work out in my life.
The details are also lacking: The rich one? Has a doctor dad and a stay at home mom; the idea that someone could be so filthy rich from having one working parent who was a doctor is kind of hilarious.) The gunner? Wants to go into emergency medicine...at Yale...because her father's Parkinson's disease was late to diagnosis you know, that ultra-competitive specialty where you get to focus on making hard diagnoses?
The next biggest problem is the pacing: just as I felt I was getting into each character's story, the narration would switch. And not in a way that built tension and was rising action, just in a way that was disruptive. Ultimately, the book led up to this huge climax, and then we had to hear about the climax from several characters points of view (although to be fair, some of them really helped flesh that part out) and a totally unnecessary epilogue
The pacing was a big deal from the mystery standpoint, too. The central mystery? That there was a suicide every year and that's why it was called suicide med and how was this happening? Med students get depressed. The end. Another one of the side mysteries: that bodies got turned upside down and no one knew why? The anatomy professor was running a public tutoring session during which they reviewed the back muscles. Mysterious....
Finally, a big grief that I have with the book is the sci-fi plotline. It's kind of out of place in what's supposed to be a realistic thriller. It doesn't really relate to anything else going on, and it makes every narrative event including that character seem jarringly out of place and unrelated to the central narration. and while a form fruste of conjoined twin manifesting as only a single eye with some attached brain matter seems plausible, the idea that the host twin would lose significant executive control when the conjoined twin was removed does not...the host twin had no apparent conjoining of his brain matter and his brain matter was unaltered.
So overall, a fast light read, without much there there.
This is like a high-end restaurant's classy, deconstructed version of one's favorite childhood dessert: it hits all the warm and fuzzy notes that a fun, romp-like, young-adult faerie tale should, while also having very worthwhile commentary on such topics as security theatre, the advantages and lack thereof of growing up, and the importance of feeling that you have agency over your own life.
Despite trying to cover some Big Ideas, and despite having some of the best world-building I've ever read, I barely noticed either of those things until I finished, because ultimately, The Girl Who Circumnavigated [etc] is, at it's heart, a faerie tale, and it reads like one: seamless and mythic. I felt wrapped up in the plot and the characters, with some room spared to appreciate the atmosphere. It was just once I finished that I realized how novel the book was. This is the type of book that I'll want to reread over and over again, and I am completely confident that I will find more each time I do.
It's worth noting, as an aside, that Valente's work is also extremely strong from a gender perspective: she has self-sufficient, interesting female characters who have myriad personalities and goals besides romantic ones. And unlike some books that have gotten critical acclaim for strong female characters, The Girl Who [etc] stars characters who break the bookish-eager to please-sidekick mold of female characters: the titular September is brash, nosy and heartless as well as brave, inventive and persistent; her mother is a mechanic.
There are so many other positive things to say: the denouement is clever (and extremely obvious once you know it, but so brave that I never expected it to be true!) and profound and sad, all at once. There is a Wyverary - a mix of a wyvern and a library who knows everything about everything as long as it starts with the letters A-L. There is a soap golem, who of course, has Truth inscribed on her forehead, and is of course, named Lye.
It's like the Phantom Tollbooth crashed into a faerie tale and it is absolutely delicious.
Nussbaum succeeds at her goal here: to write a book about characters with disabilities, who have personalities beyond their disabilities, interact with each other and with characters who are able-bodied. The characters are fully fleshed out and interesting, realistic characters.
But this absolutely comes off as a political piece. It is certainly enjoyable in its own right, but it is impossible to read without thinking of it as a piece about disability-rights, criticizing institutions (which, I agree with in spirit, but also agree that there are nuances to the discussion not fully elucidated here.) and discussing discrimination, over-utilization of intelligence and personality testing and casting a cynical eye over seemingly all parties involved in providing care to those with disabilities.
Perhaps the best part of the book is that Nussbaum portrays even most of her villains as human, simply ignorant or over-worked or otherwise preoccupied. She does have a few truly irredeemable characters, but by and large, especially for a piece trying to make a statement, this is done well – an invitation to dialogue.
So, let's start off by being fair: 1) I would never had even looked twice at this book had it not been by Michael Chabon. 2) I had idly wondered, in my revery at [b:The Yiddish Policemen's Union 16703 The Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386925449s/16703.jpg 95855] how people who weren't me and didn't share my passions reacted to the book. And now I have an answer.This book is ostensibly about lay midwives, jazz music and blaxploitation films. I can't quite figure out how to put how I feel about lay midwives into a sentence that is polite enough for social media and does not horribly side track this review, so let's let that suffice. I certainly don't hate music, but I'm just not one of those people who gets music, you know? Like, I wish I did and I respect people who are into music, but Chabon goes on and on about a piece, or whatever, and my eyes glaze and I skip several paragraphs and he's still going on and I have no idea what he's talking about, and if we're truly being honest here (because hey, why not?) I really don't know why anyone would buy a record in 2014 anyway so the fact that there are COMPETING record stores seems ridiculously anachronistic, but again, I don't get music, so what do I know? And finally, I've never had an opinion on blaxploitation films (although I strongly recommend going down the rabbit hole and wikipedia-ing blaxploitation, and that finding the legions of other subgenres ending in -ploitation.)So the idea that I would read and enjoy a book about lay midwives, jazz and blaxploitation was already on flimsy ground.And let me also say, that I certainly don't believe that there are certain topics that are verboten based on race or sex or religion. But then, let's pretend to ourselves for a second that we're Michael Chabon, and we're famous for writing books about bi-curious geeky Jewish boys and we start a book about a bi-curious geeky Jewish boy, who happens to be into Jazz and then we end up also writing about blaxploitation and then before you know it, there are a couple of Black characters and then all of a sudden you're knee-deep in racial tension. So there's a few of things you can do: you could back out until you're back on safe territory; you can do a lot of researching or you can decide to forge ahead, gunsblazing, and write about racial relations.Chabon clearly decided to do that latter, and while I will continue to sing his praises for writing uncomfortable truths and borderline offensively accurate portrayals of the Jewish community, as a Jewish woman reading a book by a Jewish author, I was pretty unsettled by him (attempting to) do the same with the African American community. And intersectionality was definitely problematic: in an entire book on Jewish-Back relations there were two female Black characters: An afro-touting, impossibly skinny, impossibly sexy, aged sex symbol/film star and a perpetually hungry, perpetually angry, perpetually pregnant woman. Not that the Black men were portrayed that much better: they inevitably abandoned their children and were to a one portrayed as violent, cheating and irresponsible.Also, his conclusion seemed to be that White people (of whom there are no non-Jews in the book) and Black people are too different and want things that are too different and any partnership, or indeed real friendship is doomed to fail. In conclusion, if this had just been a book about privileged, Jewish, Julius Jaffe, who writes Lovecraftian poetry, and his questionably unrequited love for Titus Joyner, obsessed with Blaxploitation and trying to come in to his own after a troubled childhood, and it was done respectfully, without stereotypes and the other 95% were jettisoned, I would have read the heck out of it. As was, an extremely poor showing by one of my favorite authors.
I was hoping for a really thoroughly researched, encyclopedic book about all sorts of different flavors and their genetic, historic and anthropologic rationales. In retrospect, that was a really tall order, so the fail to meet expectations needs to be put in that context.
And the book isn't bad. Parts are quite good: the conversation about the diversity of human diet and evolution since paleolithic times and the hypothesis that dependent on different genetic makeup people need different foods in order to be healthy (although he seems to view this in a very prescriptive fashion, leaving those of us with mixed genetic ancestry, which, I mean, is nearly everyone these days, to wonder if we need to whole genome sequence ourselves just to answer “what's for dinner?”)
I also really enjoyed the chapter on different tasters. I knew that I was a bitter taster from high school bio taste tester strips, but I like many classically bitter foods – cruciferous vegetables, very dark chocolate, etc., so I had always discounted the idea of chemical tasters, but the chapter really helped explain the spectrum of phenotype and expand it to things that I am averse to (grapefruit, orange pith).
The chapter on G6PD is decent. Anyone who reads popular science with any avidity already knows G6PD, but the speculation about its coincidence not just with regions with malaria but also the timing of the fava season to the malaria season expanding the discussion.
There was a very long discussion at the beginning about Native Americans, alcoholism and diabetes. These topics have been covered at length and certainly Dr. Nabhan explores his personal ties to these issues, but this part is not very scientifically interesting.
His section on MTHFR is probably the poorest – people are at a cardiac disadvantage if they carry the polymorphism and don't ingest enough folate, and then he concludes that the polymorphism flourished in Northern Europe because it encouraged folate dependence and therefore encouraged selective mating (i.e. mates who did not have access to folate would become sick, allowing people of mating age to select only those with access to folate.) However, that is a pretty flimsy explanation for why there would be a selection advantage for the mutation (versus the wildtype, which would appear fit regardless of access to folate.) It's clear Nabhan is not a geneticist!
Another complaint is that he is obsessed with the idea that we have nutritional diseases. He keeps alluding to the fact that food intolerances are growing and that we as a population are increasingly unhealthy (and hypothesizes it's because we don't eat our specific ancestral food, which, see above re: genelogical prescriptivism.) This is just a pet peeve of mine – people are mostly getting healthier as time passes.
My biggest complaint overall, though, is how thin the volume is: it includes the chapters I mentioned and another exploring why we eat spicy food and why different people tolerate it more than others and that's it.
In essence, Orenstein has written a memoir about what it is like to be someone like me: a conscientious, modern woman trying to raise a girl to be anything she wants to be, and not just a girl, not that there's anything wrong with girliness (with that last part being basically all one phrase.)
It's hard and Orenstein nails her depiction of the double whammy: first they extensively market pink, princessy, unempowered women to our girls, and then society tells us we're not allowed to complain, because if we complain we're dissing feminity, disempowering our girls and being all-around anti-feminist.
Orenstein doesn't offer much in the way of solutions, but it's nice to know that there are others out there who want to raise our girls to be able to choose to be anything that they want to be, rather than “choosing” to be anything that society presents them with. And that even the best mom has girls who go through the princess stage, but that if you talk them through it, they come through the other side and realize that they don't need to sit on their duff waiting for a prince to save them and that there is more to the world than consumerism and aesthetics. Or at least Orenstein's daughter came out the other side – mine is still young enough that I cover her ears when people call her “princess.”
The other part that really spoke to me was the idea that she explores relating achievement to appearance – it has definitely been true for me that the more I have been academically and professionally successful, the more I am expected to perform a stereotypical female gender role. I had previously thought that was only anecdotally true for me, having transitioned from the world of computer science, where I could perform whatever gender I wanted, into the extremely gendered world of medicine. However, Orenstein presents it as a global phenomenon: “‘We can excel in school, play sports, go to college...get jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers, and so forth. But in exchange, we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast size, clothing brands...“
It goes without saying that “popular statistics” book is mostly an oxymoron. On the one hand, statistics is largely a very dry field. On the other hand, those of us who do understand statistics (and even freaks, like my husband, who enjoy statistics), find any attempt at popular statistics largely too elementary to be interesting. Nate Silver doesn't just walk the fine line in the middle, he eliminates it and writes a completely novel statistic book that is appealing to both the mathematician and the math hater: this book fascinates.
Nate Silver focuses on the forecasting in areas that are difficult to predict: weather, climate, earthquakes, poker, politics, chess and sports. Each of these areas is individually interesting – I had never spent much time considering online poker, for instance, and the chapter focusing on poker is not just mathematically-focused, but also an expose on the world of online poker and the life and times (or at least the two year subset thereof) of Silver's 6-figure gambling career. In addition, his overall thesis, which seems to be that we should use Bayesian analysis to think probabilistically about the world and continually evaluate our probabilities both builds naturally and has far-reaching applications.
I feel like I have spent years of my life trying to explain to medical students (and more advanced physicians who should really know better) why every time a paper is published with a p<0.05 we can't totally disregard all prior medical knowledge and dive after the new information. Silver's easy explanation of Bayes' theorem nicely summarizes why this is true - that alone should make this a must-read for anyone in an academic field.
I'll be honest - I didn't expect to like this book at all. I half hate-read Fizzy McFizz's totally obnoxious blog: A Cartoon Guide to Being a Doctor, because she is just so self-pitying, especially about residency. I went into this knowing that this was a semi-fictionalized account of Fizzy's intern year and expected the same over the top, self-pitying whining about a pretty normal internship.
I've got to say, this was more enjoyable than I expected, and on the nose about many aspects of medical training: it had the intern who always seems to manage to do less work than everyone else (and yet still complains about it), the cruel senior resident who seems to be enjoy being mean and you wonder how she can possibly also be a mom (my equivalent senior resident made me cry when I was an intern...more than once), the way that there is a culture to how to do everything (in my program it's four-colored pens, rather than sticky notes), and how bad things happen only to the nicest patients.
Overall, it was kind of fun and not nearly as obnoxious as expected.
This was a truly fantastic – spare, haunting, starkly illustrated, in turns innocent and worldly – memoir, depicting the coming of age of a young, Iranian girl. Like the best of such memoirs, the author spends equal time on the political and historical events in Iran, the day-to-day life in such a regime and normal childhood experiences.
There were a lot of books this could have been and I think my opinion of it suffered from having heard so much about it and wanting it to have been those other books. I wanted this to be a book about the unreliable memory of childhood and how age gives a mundane tint and banal explanations for the remembered magic, both awesome and awful. I wanted this to be a book about the adult that we become and how that holds up to the children that we were and the continuous source of identity.
Instead, it's a modern fairy tale. I love modern fairy tales and this is a great one, but I can't forgive it for not being the book I wanted it to be.
This was an unexpected delight. The love story of a man, Maxon, who uses pseudocode to define his verbal and emotional responses to the world and his wife, Sunny, born with complete alopecia in Burma. The real heart of the novel is the tension between Sunny's desire to fit in with the world as it is, and hide her baldness, as a metaphor for the things that make us different from others, coming to terms with wanting to be the hero of a world of one's own making, with those who are different from us being the outsiders.
The writing is gorgeous. The story beneath the story, of Maxon going to help colonize the moon is interesting and numerous backstories flesh out both characters as full, flawed people, not just subject to the plot.
Much of what I have to say about Redshirts has been already said, and better, by other reviewers: the core of the novel is a fun, scifi-ish, meta-ish romp that is of decent quality, whereas the novel really comes into its own in the three codas, which are each beautiful and existential meditations.
I have only two complaints: Scalzi tags his conversations way too much (“she said”) and it particularly bugs when listening to the audiobook. Wheaton, who is an exceptional narrator – full of verve and hitting exactly the right cynical tone – uses exactly the same cadence for every tag and it almost sounds rhythmic in this way that is very distracting. The second complaint is that the conceit of the books was well known a priori, and yet the majority of the book is spent leading the reader to it and describing it – I would have rather spent more time with the characters – and more fun, satirical romps through SciFiVerse.
I try not to read books when I find their central thesis a foregone conclusion, but this was good, even if it felt very self-indulgent. It is hard to love vaccines more than I already did, but Dr. Offit also reviews the history of the anti-vaccine movement, which is fascinating. He also gave answers to my husband's perpetual question of: “how do I enlighten parents who want to use the Dr. Sears' schedule?”
On the one hand, this book totally fulfilled it's purpose: free ebook that was handy on my smart phone for reading while pumping. On the other hand, it wasn't good for much else. It was clearly self-published, in that it wanted desperately for an editor: characters names changes (Sandra Klee Mason was Sandra Mason Klee in every other chapter); there were factual errors (as someone who lives on South 45th St, I can tell you that there's no West 45th St in Philadelphia and anything east of about 50th street no longer has the West Philadelphia connotation that Dr. Miller seemed to be going for, anyway.) But even putting that aside, the book was both oddly shallow and simultaneously, obviously written by a psychiatrist, rife with psychoanalysis of every character's motivations. The plot was very thin and very predictable, although some threads (such as bone marrow transplant) were dropped never to be heard from again.
This is a super sweet book. The illustrations are cute, with bright colors, but overall the best part is the message: I love you, even if I have to go to work, or you need discipline or it's bedtime. I can imagine it's a particular hit with twos and threes who have lots of tantrums and need to the reminder that no matter what, they're still loved.
Wow. I usually hate hard sci-fi. But this was captivating – Butler taps into ideas about what makes us humans, at a core, biological level. As a parent, the concept of what we desire for our offspring - the desire for sameness in our offspring competing with a desire for the greatness beyond what one could desire for oneself was very compelling.
I read this through the haze of sleep deprivation and baby blues that comes with the first two weeks of being a new mom. As such, I found the book both profoundly moving, and palpably, viscerally almost unbearably sad. See is very evocative – I usually do very poorly with historical fiction, especially set in an era about which I had little a priori knowledge, but I found myself very invested in the characters.
Wow, this was terrible. I read this because I was on maternity leave, and too exhausted at the beginning to even go upstairs to the bookcase to find something better, and one of my friends gave me this book, so it was sitting in my living room. It was so bad, I can't even. Girl meets boy. Girl has baby. Boy leaves girl. Girl meets another boy. The end. What happened to the baby? Girl neglects baby for the entirety of the book except when convenient to the plot. Let me tell you how angry that made me to read about while trying very hard to be able to ignore my own newborn for 30 seconds so I could brush my teeth.
A fairly realistic voice for an autistic protagonist. I found it preferable to the other YA autism book I read at the same time ([b:Al Capone Does My Shirts 89716 Al Capone Does My Shirts Gennifer Choldenko https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1309198452s/89716.jpg 2952174]), but not having read YA in a long time, parts seemed very superficial. In addition, the character sometimes seemed young or naive in a way that does not sync with my experience with high functioning individuals on the autism spectrum
So I read this while in labor. That's pretty much an adequate summary of what I really remember about this book.
Okay, to be fair, I also found the view of the inside of the kitchen a lot less interesting than billed, probably because after Bourdain wrote Kitchen Confidential, there was much in the way of copy-catting, culminating in a plethora of TV shows providing the same inside scoop. On the other hand, the view of Bourdain trying to move from being a lay-about to actually making something of a life for himself was fascinating
I read this immediately after [b:Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void 7237456 Packing for Mars The Curious Science of Life in the Void Mary Roach https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1290480157s/7237456.jpg 8159756] - high on a newly discovered favorite author. I think Reading the two quite so adjacently resulted in a less favorable view of Stiff - there is an almost completely replicated chapter between the two discussing the use of cadavers to simulate forces on an astronaut's body during spaceflight, and the voice and humor is nearly identical between the two books. That being said, Stiff was still quite good, perhaps objectively the superior book as Roach covers a very broad range of subjects. She again excels at covering all angles of a subject. For instance, when covering the history of medical cadavers, she comments on the setup of modern anatomy classes, ceremonies respecting cadaver donors, the history of graverobbing for the purpose of providing anatomic cadavers, the history surrounding specific graverobbers as well as specific professors using their services as well as the theories about human anatomy during each period and how these changed over time using knowledge learned through dissection.