This is a fantastic book. I know, I’m late to the game on this one, and I’m not sure why it took me so long to get to it. The premise bummed me out, a little. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is three stories. First, it’s the life story of Henrietta Lacks, a woman who died of cancer at age 31 and whose cells were cultured for use in tissue research. Next, it’s the story of what happened to those cells, whose remarkable ability […]
Ugly Things in the Darkness, Worse Things in Store
This is the third entry in the Cormoran Strike series, and by far my least favorite. It’s gory and disgusting and way too scary for a fraidy-cat like me. That said, I still enjoyed parts of it and I’ll continue to read any other books that come out in this series, for two reasons: Robin Ellacott and Cormoran Strike. The private detective and his assistant are fantastic characters and I love reading about them and their relationship. I don’t, however, like reading about a serial […]
America, You Great Unfinished Symphony
Losing Our Way is just about the saddest book I’ve ever read. It took me well over a month to read it, even though it’s great, because I had to keep stopping so I wouldn’t sink into a terrible depression. Losing Our Way is basically the story of everything that’s wrong with the United States today, from our failing infrastructure, to struggling schools, to wage stagnation and income inequality, to endless wars in the Middle East. Bob Herbert knows his stuff, and he doesn’t pull […]
You’ll Need a Strong Stomach for This One
I enjoyed the first book in the Cormoran Strike series quite a bit, so I picked up the second one, The Silkworm, basically as soon as I finished the first. This one was a little disappointing. In The Silkworm, private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin are investigating the disappearance of an author. It quickly turns grisly as they discover he had an unpublished manuscript (titled Bombyx Mori, Latin for silkworm) that contained grotesque caricatures of several people in his life, and that those caricatures were […]