by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 19, 2022 | LEARN: Everything Else
Libby Copeland considers all the ways consumer DNA testing has changed our lives in The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Uncovering Secrets, Reuniting Relatives, and Upending Who We Are. She interviews scientists, career genealogists, ethicists, and lots of regular...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 17, 2022 | LEARN: Chronic Illness
Jennifer Wright balances aspects of medicine, science, and social history in her 2017 book, Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. Perhaps I connected most strongly to the human and social elements because of experiencing the COVID-19...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 15, 2021 | LEARN: Everything Else
Kevin Cook does the narrative nonfiction genre proud in The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA’s Challenger Disaster. His story of America’s Teacher in Space and the whole Challenger story kept me absorbed on every page. Once I started,...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 7, 2021 | LEARN: Everything Else
Douglas Abrams teams up with Jane Goodall to co-create The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. It’s a record of their conversations about hope, and focuses primarily on Goodall’s four reasons to be hopeful. Abrams is a skilled interviewer and captures the...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 28, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Leigh Cowart explores why people consent to experience pain in their upcoming book, Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. They take the science of pain and correlate it with a variety of intentional experiences from ballet class to eating wildly...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 12, 2021 | LEARN: Chronic Illness
James Nestor combines scientific exploration and his own experiences in Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. The two aspects keep the book from being entirely memoir or entirely an academic treatise. At its heart, Nestor asks why breath matters. We breathe...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 2, 2021 | RESIST: Politics
Tom Nichols is a credentialed expert discussing The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters in his 2017 book. No irony here. This is a serious subject that relates directly to today’s world. If you’ve spent any time discussing...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 4, 2021 | LEARN: Everything Else
Hope Jahren developed the crux of The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where We Go from Here as an introductory class for college students. And fundamentally, it reads this way. There’s a lot of science, some history, a bit of humor, and a smattering of...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Dec 29, 2020 | RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
The Red Lotus is another strong entry in the mystery / thriller genre from Chris Bohjalian. And this time, he chose an oddly prescient topic for a 2020 release. The story centers around Alexis Remnick, a New York City ER doctor. She’s on a bicycling trip to Vietnam...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Nov 20, 2020 | LEARN: Everything Else
Julia L.F. Goldstein offers environmental research and information in her upcoming book Rethink the Bins: Your Guide to Smart Recycling and Less Household Waste. Her first book, Material Value covered a lot of manufacturing processes and a little household advice. On...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Nov 8, 2020 | RESIST: Social Justice
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha wrote What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City to tell what happened in Flint, Michigan. But it’s not just her story. It’s the story of her clinic, her city, her state, and her country. And they are...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 14, 2020 | LEARN: Everything Else
From indigenous American botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass is absolutely beautiful in concept and execution. It’s the perfect antidote and balm for the world of 2020. Kimmerer takes indigenous wisdom and marries it with both science and social...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 23, 2020 | LEARN: Chronic Illness
Laura Spinney covers a tremendous amount of ground with her excellent book, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. It’s a timely read for 2020, of course. And Spinney talks about everything from how the flu started and traveled, to how it...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 1, 2020 | LEARN: Everything Else
Dahr Jamail is an adventurer and journalist. His 2019 book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, is both objective and deeply personal. Jamail has spent plenty of time exploring various parts of our world’s outdoors,...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jan 8, 2020 | LEARN: Everything Else
Julia Goldstein is a Ph.D. materials engineer. And her passion is exactly in line with the subtitle of her book: More Sustainable, Less Wasteful Manufacturing of Everything from Cell Phones to Cleaning Products. Goldstein takes readers through a journey that is part...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Dec 11, 2019 | LEARN: Chronic Illness
Donna Jackson Nakazawa is a favorite nonfiction author of mine. Her book, The Autoimmune Epidemic was one of the first books I read after being diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis 10 years ago. And I’ve devoured every one she’s written since. The Angel and the...
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