After reading Schmookaria’s review, I ran right over to Amazon and picked this up. And I enjoyed every minute of it! This is the story of Dr. Thomas Mütter and the birth of modern medicine in America. I’ll just steal this part from Amazon’s summary because I like how they put it so succinctly: Brilliant, outspoken, and brazenly handsome, Mütter was flamboyant in every aspect of his life. He wore pink silk suits to perform surgery, added an umlaut to his last name just because he could, and […]
Not Grokking this One
This book is part of my effort to read a few books in the science fiction genre, and while I loved Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Side of Darkness, Stranger in a Strange Land left me bored and disappointed. Yes, this book is over fifty years old and the imagined future is not the present, yet it seems so incredibly dated. It felt very black and white, bouffant hair-dos, white lab coats intermingled with flying taxis and space travel. The story begins with a human mission […]
You’re Not Paranoid, You Really Have No Privacy
The title of this book really is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (WTF). As it clips along you find yourself wondering: who can you really trust? Who is watching you and why? Who is the greater threat: government or unregulated big corporations? We’ve given up our privacy willingly, but what else are we giving up? What if we’re giving away ourselves, only to have to buy it back? And why am I laughing? Leila, a non-profit worker stationed in Myanmar, is familiar with a government […]
By the Numbers (or I miss Tony and Tia)
About six weeks ago, I caught the tail end of the movie version of I am Number Four on TNT or USA or one of those other cable networks. I had seen it before and found it a mindless way to spend 90 minutes, but not particularly great. (Though Timothy Olyphant is always appreciated.) The movie ends with a set-up for future movies and this made me wonder about the book—whether there was more to the story and whether the book had done it better. […]