One of my dearest friends sent me this book for Christmas. I’m glad she did because I had never heard of it, and it’s not something I necessarily would have picked up in the store myself, but it was a fascinating read. God’s Hotel is the story of one doctor’s journey and experience with the last American almshouse in San Francisco called Laguna Honda Hospital. It’s also the story of some of her patients and the changing over from practicing “slow” medicine to providing “efficient health […]
The hardest kind of book to review.
Ask Me Why I Hurt is the memoir of a pediatrician who operates a mobile medical van providing treatment to homeless teenagers. It covers his marriage to fellow pediatrician Amy, family life over a decade, the growth of his van endeavor to eventually provide more services, and a number of stories of the kids he sees on the van. How am I supposed to review a book like this? On its own merits, it simply isn’t a very good book. Dr. Christensen seems to be […]
The Story of a Life Well Lived
A few months ago, I was on a Radiolab binge at work when one of my favorite guests showed up to be interviewed. Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, author of scientific classics like The Man Who Mistook his Wife as a Hat was a Radiolab staple. His enthusiasm for science and discovery shined through in his interviews, whether he was talking about his love for the Periodic Table of Elements or the strange neurological cases he’d come across in his career. But from the start, this interview […]
Know Your Enemy
Like most people, I find pretty much everything about cancer terrifying. It doesn’t help that I’ve chosen a profession [Firefighter] that has all kinds of increased rates of cancer. Most of us at work don’t even like to talk about it because it reminds us that the unknown and uncontrollable might hit us at anytime. So you might wonder why I chose to read The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010) by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Every once in a while I like to delve […]