“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.” Stuart Brown’s book on play promises a lot; it’s not just a description of play, but play’s role in society and necessity in social and cognitive development. He traverses the animal kingdom to make his points in the first half and in the last half he veers off track and becomes totally anecdotal. First of all the whole animal thing could be science sure, whatever, but there is no way of telling, because there are LITERALLY NO […]
All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story
I’m a big fan of Atul Gawande’s work, easily the best I’ve read by a medical doctor. His style is effortless, and he manages to find the right balance of technical and non-technical. Being Mortal feels like his most personal work, and I loved it. While his first three books mostly covered his own experiences through surgical residency and practice, his latest explores a topic he admits up front to knowing very little about. He mentions right away that his medical training included almost nothing […]
A Comic’s Guide to Mastectomies
This is the book that I wish I had written. In fact, many of my friends and family did tell me that I should write it, but I was too slow, and Caitlin Brodnick did an amazing job of it instead. Ms. Brodnick learned at age 21 that she was BRCA positive. At age 28 she opted for prophylactic bilateral mastectomies, as a result of her family history. Ms. Brodnick spent some years engaging in self-destructive behavior in a effort to ignore her diagnosis. She did […]
More like cutting my heart….
Oh hello there. Well CBR9 was a bit of a bust for me, in that life got crazy and I read exactly one book in Nov/Dec. ugh. But let’s give it a go again! I’m starting off this year with a book club pick, Cutting For Stone…and yeah, it was great. After an unfortunate reading hiatus, and a crazy holiday, this was a great book to get lost in. Marion & Shiva are identical twins born to a nun in Ethiopia at the missionary hospital […]