This book was a huge disappointment. I’m a public health nerd, and my standards for a book about infectious disease is pretty low. Rising Plague didn’t meet them. The book starts with an introduction to multi-drug resistant bacteria, which is illustrated with stories of real patients Dr. Spellberg has treated, and then moves into an exploration of the pharmaceutical industry, and the barriers to creating new antibiotics. This section was pretty successful. The patient case studies are interesting, and I learned quite a bit about pharmaceutical companies, […]
Five minutes looking in his eyes, we all knew he was broken pretty bad
Reading an Anne Tyler book is like snuggling into your warm bed when it’s raining and you have nowhere to be. There are no Big Bads, no scary, suspenseful moments, and no dramatic confrontations. Her books feel like a snapshot of the characters’ lives, which are mostly very ordinary. I adore them. The Accidental Tourist is the story of Macon Leary, a middle-aged man who writes travel guides for businessmen (and since it was written in 1985, they are indeed guides for businessmen, not businesspeople). His son Ethan was […]
Every moment points toward the aftermath
If you were asked to name every president who was assassinated, would you remember James Garfield? He was president for only a matter of months, part of a generally undistinguished cohort that served between Grant and McKinley. There is no great legislation that we credit to Garfield, no famous speeches or charismatic wife. On the surface, Garfield was nothing more than a generally decent man, a loving father, a good husband–an ineffectual president, although to be fair he spent a third of his term in office dying of a […]
We will recognize each other, and see ourselves for the first time the way we really are
“We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are.” Why do bad things happen to good people? Has there ever been a satisfactory answer to that question? The people of Salem thought they had one–bad things happen to good people because bad people–witches–make them happen. Cow suddenly dies? Lightning strikes your house? Child is stricken with a mysterious illness? Without a solid understanding of veterinary medicine, electricity, or germ theory these may well seem like magical events. Is it […]