Mary Roach is a gem, truly, and a gift to the world. Every time I read a book of hers (and I’ve read all but one), “delightful” is the word that comes to mind, because her delightful personality shines through every word without ever overtaking the book. She has a very specific talent and she uses it so damn delightfully (there’s that word again) that the formula never gets old, even when it probably should. Her talent: taking a subject that is either kind of […]
What We Become is Old
What We Become reminds us that we become nostalgic as we get older. Picture an ocean liner out of Europe in the 1920’s. This isn’t a boat holding thousands of people playing in pools all day and gorging themselves at buffets in the evening. It is elegant. People wear furs as they wave from the first-class deck. Dinner is formal, dancing is optional, smoking is compulsory. Max is a ballroom dancer who entertains unaccompanied women, or those whose partners don’t dance. As the book opens […]
Good skin care, if you care
This book isn’t exactly my normal fair, it was a book club selection of the Chicago chapter of Slow Food. Essentially, Slow Food is the opposite of fast food: processed and unfamiliar in origin. Slow Food is about food that is good, clean, and fair. Not necessarily healthy food, but the main principles are that it is important to know where your food comes and attempt to preserve important cultural food traditions. Anyhoo, this book doesn’t have anything to do with food really, but it […]
Thirteen Nightmares in One Book
Surviving Justice is not so much one integrated story of wrongful conviction and exoneration as it is thirteen completely distinct ones. Thirteen individuals tell their stories in their own words, using their own language and perspectives. They were all given long sentences, or even death. Their convictions were all very serious – murder, rape, child molestation. They were all exonerated, most with the help of the Innocence Project. There were some truly horrific anecdotes (a man arrested for child molestation as he walked to the […]