Kate
A good overview of some of the weirdest and most confusing ways that we've been trying to cure things over the lifetime of humanity. Thank goodness for the scientific method!
This book is written in a really casual and understandable style, a bit dorky and jokey. I think it's good for an overview, and anything that I wanted more in-depth information on I looked up later.
I really like this pre-apocalypse look at society. What happens when we actually know we're doomed? While we are currently doomed by climate change and not doing anything about it, too many of us are in denial so we're not actually acting like anything bad is going to happen. Though I suspect even with Maya a lot of folks would remain in denial.
A lot of people seemed disappointed in the ending, but I was okay with it. Maybe I just didn't have a lot invested in this book because I don't think there was an ending that I would have hated. The main character really rubbed me the wrong way at the beginning...she seemed naive to the point of stupidity sometimes at how she just didn't get the gravity of the stuff she did. I tried to think back to when I was a teenager and whether that makes sense but I wasn't really that rebellious so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask.
I also wasn't a huge fan of her love obsession but that's something I could more relate to as a teenager!
Lots of cool stuff in here about the linguistics of Black English. I don't know if the author really completed his goal though - I don't know that the people reading this book are the same people who want their minds changed about what Black English is. I think I would have liked it better if it stuck to the linguistics without the interjections about how other linguists have been talking about it wrong. But I just love the linguistics part of it so that's just me. It's a good book!
I came to this book because I heard an episode of The Nod podcast called How to Make Free People. They interview Casey Gerald and I was so drawn in by his voice and his take. The book didn't land as well for me. The message is harsh but sort of hopeful a little bit. Gerald's voice in the book is really stream-of-consciousness and I found it hard to follow sometimes.
I was more moved by his Ted Talk, The Gospel of Doubt. It's possible that as a white person, the Ted Talk format is just more comfortable for me (that's kind of a joke). Either way, I think this message is really important, that even if you win the American Dream you're not really winning if you're black (or gay or any other minority group). You're just being used as a tool to keep everyone else from revolting. If you couldn't make it through this book, please listen to the podcast or the Ted Talk or seek him out some other way!
The thing is, I love historical medicine, so this book is entirely up my alley. Another thing I love is that van de Laar seems as interested in language as I am so he often will indicate the meaning or etymology of medical terms when he brings them up.
Also this is the second book I've read that includes my now-favourite medical history anecdote, of Dr Liston, working before anaesthesia, who could cut with such speed that he once accidentally sliced off the fingers of his assistant, whose massive blood loss caused a spectator to die of shock, and later both the assistant and the patient died from infection, making this the only recorded surgery with a 300% mortality rate.
I think I didn't give this book a proper chance, because I was reading it in between other things and because I was thinking too much of the Netflix show while reading. I found it ok, but in reading the other reviews about it I think I may not be giving this book its due. I may read it again in the future when I can pay more attention and when I've forgotten how the tv show went!
I love Michelle Obama. She's smart and introspective in a way that I hope I can be someday. Of course it didn't hurt that her relationship with Barack reminds me of my own relationship. There's a part in the book somewhere (sorry I don't have the exact quote) where Barack is staring off into the distance and Michelle asks him what he's thinking about, and he says “the economy”. That's basically what happens at my house. Also the way they push each other to be better versions of themselves. Michelle and Obama are truly #relationshipgoals! And, not that I would ever be surprised by this, but reading this book you will see just how stark the difference is between Obama and Trump. Though he made some mistakes, Obama was a very good president and cared about the American people and America and the world. I miss the Obamas so much!
Yikes. This was a really good read, but tough. That shift where Junior felt like his father was a benevolent presence to realizing he was a dangerous one was really interesting. I liked that it was being told from the perspective of grown-up Junior, and hearing about the life he ended up having, and Dino not really getting much better...it felt too real, like this horror/magic story should have had a happier ending. But it didn't. It just ended up like life ends up.
This book is about perpetuating your trauma. Real life isn't a story, happy endings aren't easy or inevitable, usually we all just turn into what we feared and hated and can't break the cycle.
The body horror on display in this collection is just kisses fingertips. I was just enthralled almost the entire time. There were a couple instances where I wish I could have looked away, in particular during “Greased” (if you're into Doctor Pimple Popper then you'd probably be fine). I really loved “The Long Dream” - it's like the terrifying and awful version of “The Inner Light” episode from Star Trek TNG. I also really loved “Hanging Blimp”, which has such an odd premise but the sight of the face blimps hanging in the air had so much more of an ominous and eerie quality than a funny one.
Highly recommended if you love body horror and horror in general! Not at all recommended if you're squeamish!
Apparently Japanese horror is just it for me. I loved this anthology. The body horror element to many of these stories is so high that I got the creepy crawlies under my skin. “The Caterpillar” in particular has really stuck in my head - I don't even want to write anything about it because I could never do it justice and you really just have to read it yourself.
While I agree with some of the reviews that talked about the repetitiveness of this book, I liked it. Repetition helps get stuff in your brain!
I think I like this idea of mindsets because everything that Dweck described from a fixed mindset point of view described me. I really identified with it and some of the problems that she attributed to fixed-mindset thinking are things that I have been wanting to change about myself. This method of thinking about my goals and how I approach the world is a good fit for me, personally, so I am going to try and integrate it into my life when I come upon new challenges and setbacks.
The plot felt like it kind of ran away from itself throughout pretty much the whole book. It started off seeming like something I'd be really into, making a point about racism and eugenics and “purity”, and maybe a comparison of race to the difference of this parasitic species that lives off of humans...but kind of in the end it seemed like an excuse for a white guy to write the n-word a whole bunch of times? I was interested in a few of the characters but I was asking “why?” a lot and never really got an answer.
I really liked this book because it tended to describe me in a lot of ways. The difference between type 1, or heuristic thinking and type 2 thinking was pretty eye-opening for me. It made me want to be more aware of when I was engaging type 2 thinking and what triggered it, and if I can trigger it on my own. It also kind of reminded me of how lazy I am...and I guess how lazy we all are, in that we tend to follow the easiest path, the one that requires the least amount of work, which is usually the type 1 path. Heath has suggestions at the end of the book about recognizing and using this thinking instead of pretending that we can always overcome it...for example, changing our environment in the first place to avoid temptation instead of thinking that we'll just be able to have the will-power we need in the moment. If we make it easier for us to do the things we want to do without having to engage type 2 thinking, then it'll just be easier to do them! But we have to set ourselves up for success.
Basically - it's hard to be enlightened. Rationality isn't humankind's default, it's kind of just a spandrel that showed up when we learned to communicate with each other and count things...so assuming that we will do rational things in the future, or that other people will act rationally in any given situation, is giving ourselves way too much credit! Let's embrace our irrationality - not by just ceding to it but by planning for it.
Here is my favourite passage from the book, and a good intro to the tone of Fitzharris' writing - on Liston, a surgeon who practiced a time before anesthesia when speed was the most valuable asset one could have when performing surgery:“Liston's speed was both a gift and a curse. Once, he accidentally sliced off a patient's testicle along with the leg he was amputating. His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant's fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator's coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.”I love medical history. LOVE it. I love the body-horror of it all, the gross spectacle of it, but also how it makes me appreciate being alive when I am and imagining what it must have been like to be a person living then - my wariness of hospitals now has nothing on what someone must have felt back then when so many people who went in never came out. I like thinking about the things that we don't know about now that someone 100 years in the future will be thinking, man, I'm so glad I didn't live in the early 21st century when they didn't even know how to regrow limbs or treat cancer without poisoning themselves! How terrible!I also love the stories, like this one, about how we (collectively as society) gain knowledge about things and how hard the process is. How pushback occurs because of inertia and things that we just feel are true and economics and politics etc. This book talks about the competition between miasma and germ theory at the time. Miasma theory held that disease occurs spontaneously from unhygienic conditions, so there was more disease in big cities because everyone dumped their shit in the streets and there was little clean water and little fresh air and those conditions just caused diseases to occur. Germ theory held that tiny particles (which were sometimes called “animalcules” which is a really adorable word to me) could be passed from person to person through touch or through the air or other mediums like water or goods were what caused disease (for more on this you can also read [b: The Ghost Map 36086 The Ghost Map The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World Steven Johnson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1430524696s/36086.jpg 1008989] which talks about how John Snow proved that cholera was being transmitted through the water from a certain pump in London). So some people liked miasma theory because they felt the facts pointed that way, some because that's what they'd been taught and didn't feel the need to explore further than that, but also there were economic/political factors that caused people to support it. People who believed germ theory recommended that whenever there was an outbreak of disease in another country, Britain should put a temporary stop on imports to prevent the disease from spreading. Some politicians and businessmen supported miasma theory because that was the one that wouldn't halt trade and lose them money whenever there was a potential for outbreak. This is one thing that we can't look back on and think, “how barbaric” because it still happens now! What caused the water crisis in Flint and what's preventing it from being dealt with swiftly and carefully? Money, politics. Books like this one can really show us how much things have changed but also how much they stay the same (to our definite detriment).So! This book is recommended if you like reading about gross medical history, if you like learning about scientific process and progress, and if you like outraging yourself about how little compassion is involved in large-scale and long-term decision making.
I read a few chapters of this as an ARC and I am HOOKED. I'm so excited to finish reading this book, I love robots and pirates and lady protagonists and did I mention robots?
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Now that I've finished reading the whole book, I have some different ideas about it. I still love the robots and pirates and lady protagonists, but not as into some of the weird homophobic stuff. What got me was some of the background feeling stuff - the themes of autonomy and consent, what does it mean to be in a relationship with you're an indentured human, or an indentured bot, what does it mean/what is it like to be an autonomous bot, the really fascinating legislative changes that happened after bots were given personhood under the law (since people were unwilling to give up on indenturing bots, and bots were now considered people, the only way to consolidate that was to legalize indenturing humans too), the gendered ideas that humans have about bots that look certain ways, the ways that humans tend to anthropomorphize, bot-human relationships, etc. But something that I always at least hope about the future is that queer relationships will be more accepted rather than less - and there were some queer relationships depicted in this book that seemed totally fine but then one that just didn't sit right with me, and didn't feel right in the context of the book. Maybe if more time had been spent world building societal mores but as it was, it seemed weird.
Also the end of the book felt a little rushed and nicely tied up to me.