a tribute to great non-fiction books across multiple genres
I went through a whirlwind of books recently and one of them was the very fun Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. The book received a lot of positive attention when it came out, so it was on my must-read list for awhile. Unfortunately, it also received a […]
Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg’s book Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle is about medical science’s triumph over insulin-dependent diabetes. Breakthrough follows one of America’s first recipients of insulin, Elizabeth Hughes, but the book is only partly about her personal story. The book takes you on […]
Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock is an engaging historical tale about medical quackery from the early 20th century. I enjoyed the brief mention this story had received in Mary Roach’s Bonk, but it was great to read the whole tale. The book […]
I’m going to break my standard format here and talk about two books in the same entry: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? They are both collections of autobiographical stories and accounts from famed physicist Richard Feynman’s life. I’m combining discussion of these because they are both […]
I found The Wolf: How One German Raider Terrorized the Allies in the Most Epic Voyage of WWI (by Richard Guilliatt & Peter Hohnen) pretty worthy of the attention it received last year on various book lists. If you couldn’t figure out from the subheading, The Wolf tells the story of a German Raider during […]
There are a lot of great books that I’ve read in the past that I want to give a quick nod to. Eventually, I may go back and write a dedicated entry for any I re-read them. In the meantime, I feel I owe them a few words here: The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum […]