Hidden Valley Ranch: Inside the Mind of An American Family by Robert Kolker

Hidden Valley Ranch: Inside the Mind of An American Family by Robert Kolker

Read by Sean Pratt

13 hours, 8 minutes

Published April 2020 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

 

Publisher's Summary: 

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

My Thoughts: 

In the early 1990's, the University of Nebraska football team had a player whose mental health ended his playing career and eventually ended up with him being shot and paralyzed by police. At the time, the word was that he had schizophrenia (that is not the diagnosis they later gave him). By that time, I had two small boys and I spent some portion of their late teens and early twenties worrying about schizophrenia because of what I'd learned all of those years earlier, terrified that one of them might begin exhibiting signs in his early twenties. Fortunately, neither did. 

Don and Mimi Galvin were not so fortunate. Because of mental illness, one of their sons killed himself and then his girlfriend, one of them sexually assaulted their two daughters, two of them died after decades of taking medication. 

When their eldest, Don Jr., the golden child began exhibiting troubling signs of mental illness in the 1960's, the Galvins worked hard to hide his illness from the outside world. Mimi, in particular, worked hard to get him the help he needed. But help was hard to find then, as it continued to be as one and then another of the boys' mental health declined, to find the help they needed. There was very little knowledge of schizophrenia - no known cause (nature vs. nurture being an ongoing battle amongst those who did research the illness) and no effective medical treatments that didn't leave the patient a shadow of themselves. As that young football player had done, the Galvin boys repeatedly stopped taking the medication, convinced that it was not helping or that its help came at too high a cost. Through it all, Mimi continued to fight for her sick boys, at the expense of her healthy children.

Alongside the story of the Galvins, Kolker also gives readers some background on the history of schizophrenia research and treatment, introducing readers to scientists and doctors who, in an effort to prove the biological and genealogical cause of the disease, worked tirelessly to find answers. '

Eventually the two paths crossed. Because of the high incidence of the disease in the Galvin family (as well as hundreds of other families who also had high percentages of family members with the disease), the researchers were able to reach a great number of conclusions as to the biological cause of the disease and to work toward finding a medical treatment. Here's where our medical system has failed all of those who came after the Galvins - there is not a lot of money to be made in developing and marketing medications to treat schizophrenics and so pharmaceutical companies don't. 

As I read, this book reminded me very much of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, although the Galvins were not unwilling participants. And unlike that book, this one doesn't end with an "at least groundbreaking research resulted and so many lives have been saved." Kolker ends with us understanding that, despite everything that researchers have learned, there's still a long way to go in finding out how to treat patients with schizophrenia. 

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture by Jenny Odell

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture by Jenny Odell

Read by Kristen Sith

11 hours, 27 minutes

Published March 2023 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy” to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you don’t have time to spend?

In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.

This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time—inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales—that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.

Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save” time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.

My Thoughts: 

We tend to think of time as a constant, an inexorable movement forward, marked by the clock or calendar as we know it and we live our lives accordingly. It's six a.m. so it's time to get out of bed, it's 5 p.m. so it's time to leave work, the show starts at 7 p.m., your appointment is at 10 a.m. It's Monday so we have to go to work, it's Sunday so some of us will be going to church. We all work on the same clock and calendar so we can agree what time we should be places, what day we'll go to dinner with friends, when our library books are due.  

Except that we are also aware that even that way to mark time isn't always exact. It's 11 a.m. as I'm writing this in Nebraska, but it's 8 a.m. where my son lives. Easter falls on a different Sunday every year; the official Memorial Day will fall on a different day of the week every sixth year but the day we observe it will be a different date from year to year; Thanksgiving will always be the last Thursday of November but the date will change. Each of us ages slightly differently, even if we were born at the exact same time, place, and date. 

Odell wants us to be aware that there are a lot of other ways to mark time, that time, as we mark it, has been largely dictated by economic factors and can impact different races differently, and that even climate change is impacting time. 

We have, in our culture, 4 seasons. But, while the official start of each of those seasons may be the same date every year, the reality is that the seasons begin at only approximately the same time every year. Other cultures have entirely different seasons; they might consider that spring has arrived here because the temperature and plant growth say it has, even though a set date has not arrived. 

We sell our time to employers, in exchange for the things we need to live. Employers have evolved ever greater ways to get more work out of us for as little cost to them as possible. In Amazon fulfillment centers, every task has a set amount of time for it to be completed and every moment of a worker's day is tracked. UPS has an exacting route for their trucks, maximizing right turns and traffic lights. Very few employers look at ways to increase productivity by creating down time within the work day.

We've been convinced, by "experts" that there are ways we can more efficiently use our time outside of work, experts Odell calls "productivity bros." If you get up at five, instead of six, you can find time to exercise, for example. Never mind that you'll have to give up something on the other end of the day in order not to lose sleep. 

Even our so-called leisure time has become more structured and work like. This blog, for example. When I began it in 2013, I did it to track my reading and to connect with others. But the longer I did it, the more I got caught up in the idea that I needed to do things that would increase traffic to my blog; I felt like I needed to read at least two books a week so that I had plenty of reviews and have a new blog post up five-six times a week. My parents recognized it for the work it had become, but I insisted it was for fun because it was something I was choosing to do. Except that it wasn't fun any more; the blog had become a second job, a job that took up time I could have been doing things I'd have preferred to be doing. 

Odell presents so many different ways to view and think about time. So many, in fact, and so in depth, that it often became difficult for me to stay focused or understand how this all tied into the larger subject. What I was looking for, more than a way to see time differently, was a way to help myself quit marking time, find ways to ignore the clock, to fully relax and quite worrying so much about what needs to be done. I learned a lot in this book, but I didn't learn that. 

Book of Fire by Christy Lefteri

Book of Fire by Christy Lefteri

336 pages

Published January 2024 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

In present-day Greece, deep in an ancient forest, lives a family: Irini, a musician, who teaches children to read and play music; her husband, Tasso, who paints pictures of the forest, his greatest muse; and Chara, their young daughter, whose name means joy. On the fateful day that will forever alter the trajectory of their lives, flames chase fleeing birds across the sky. The wildfire that will consume their home, and their lives as they know it, races toward them. 

Months later, as the village tries to rebuild, Irini stumbles upon the man who started the fire, a land speculator who had intended only a small, controlled burn to clear forestland to build on but instead ignited a catastrophe. He is dying, although the cause is unclear, and in her anger at all he took from them, Irini makes a split-second decision that will haunt her. 

As the local police investigate the suspicious death, Tasso mourns his father, who has not been seen since before the fire. Tasso’s hands were burnt in the flames, leaving him unable to paint, and he struggles to cope with the overwhelming loss of his artistic voice and his beloved forest. Only his young daughter, who wants to repair the damage that’s been done, gives him hope for the future.

My Thoughts: 

I meant to get this written sooner, while the book was still fresh in my mind. Unfortunately, that didn't happen; and, since Netgalley won't let me highlight any more, it's hard to go back and grab specifics or refresh my memory. These are the highlights of what I recall:

• Lefteri utilizes dual storylines here, one first-person account of the family after the fire, the other Irini's third-person recounting of the fire and its immediate aftermath. I liked the concept but, as with so many dual storyline novels, one feels more compelling than the other. 
• The parts describing the spread of the fire and Irini's and Chara's time in the water waiting for rescue are truly frightening. The fear, the exhaustion, the fight to survive are all vividly portrayed. 
• The present day storyline often felt repetitive; I think things could have been cleaned up to make that storyline tighter. 
• I always appreciate a novel where the ending is not a forgone conclusion. I did like the way this one ended, with not everything tied up neatly. 
• I appreciated that the bad guy was given some balance. 
• I really enjoyed learning some history of Greece, reading about Irini's family's immigrant experience, spending some time with the locals, and the way Lefteri used climate change to craft the rest of the story. 

Ancestor Trouble (A Reckoning and A Reconciliation) by Maud Newton

Ancestor Trouble (A Reckoning and A Reconciliation) by Maud Newton

400 pages 

Published March 2022 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Maud’s father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was an educated man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the “purity” of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. He tried in vain to control Maud’s mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church in the family’s living room where she performed exorcisms. 

Her parents’ divorce, when it came, was a relief. Still, her position at the intersection of her family bloodlines inspired in Newton inspired an anxiety that she could not shake, a fear that she would replicate their damage. She saw similar anxieties in the lives of friends, in the works of writers and artists she admired. As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Newton researched her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and genocide—and sought family secrets through her DNA. But immersed in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. 

Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us. 

My Thoughts: 

Had I shared with you recently that I've been thinking about taking a break from blogging and focusing that time instead to genealogy? A number of things have been driving me that direction and this books is one of them. I don't have nearly the colorful family history that Newton does (a friend once commented that my childhood was like something out of a sixties television program) but I'm yearning to learn more about the reality of our families, not just their names and dates of death. Newton, on the other hand, had some (well, a lot) of questions to be answered in her research, not the least of which was to understand why she is the person she is. 

Newton's father routinely severely punished her for things like getting a B+ (he is no longer a part of her life). Newton's mother did nothing when Newton told her mother that her stepfather had raped her. Her granny warned her to watch for signs of mental illness in herself (Granny's own sister had spent most of her life in a mental institution after having danced naked in the streets). How could she be the product of these people Newton came to wonder. 

As Newton begins to research her family history, she discovers that it's not simply enough to know about her ancestors. She needs to know the "why" of how she became the person she is because of who they were. This leads her to research epigenetics (I keep coming across that study since I read Jamie Ford's The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, which introduced me to the idea), neuroscience, genograms, and spiritual practices. Newton ties a piece of her own personal ancestry and life with her research into each of these subjects making them more understandable for the lay person. 

You know you've read a book that's important when it doesn't just inspire and educate you, but when reviews of it show up on NPR and in the New York Times (and I highly recommend looking up those reviews because they are certainly more eloquent about this book than I am). 

Newton asks a lot of questions, many of which can't be answered. But this book certainly has me asking questions and hoping to find answers of my own. Although, as Newton found out, we won't necessarily like the answers we find when we begin looking into our ancestors. 

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

9 hours 40 minutes

Read by Roslayn Lander

Published 2005 by Random House

Publisher's Summary: 

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. 

Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.

My Thoughts: 

I loved the movie adaptation of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and was so happy to discover that the book was everything the movie was and more. For years I've been meaning to pick up more of his work, this one in particular, expecting much the same. I've been thinking about this book for a couple of weeks now and I'm still not sure if I got much of the same or nothing of the sort. 

Both books are an exploration of morals and a longing for the past. Both are quiet, character driven and explore personal relationships. Both are beautifully written; both explore the relationship between its main character and an institution. Both Kathi H., here, and Stevens, in Remains of the Day are carers of a sort. But whereas, The Remains of the Day is a work of historical fiction, Never Let Me Go is a work of a dystopian world. They could not have felt any more different to me. 

In Never Let Me Go we learn early on that Kathi is a "carer" for "donors," some of whom are her former classmates. Slowly Kathi takes us back to life at Hailsham, which seems like a perfectly ordinary boarding school with something of an emphasis on the arts. There are sports, cliques, teenagers becoming couples. But it doesn't take long to figure out that this is not, in fact, an ordinary boarding school. These children never seem to leave the premises. There are no visits from parents, there are no funds from home or new clothes to show off. It becomes clear that these children are being raised for a purpose.

"I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves -- about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside -- but hadn't yet understood what any of it meant."

Eventually, as they transition from school to their real purpose in life, we learn what that purpose is. Which doesn't entirely come as a surprise but the truth of their existence is even uglier. As he did in The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro keeps the ugly parts of life mostly in the background. But here they are harder to hide...and harder to read. 

One reviewer said that the book has hope. I didn't see that; I felt overwhelmed by the bleakness of Kathi's life and future. This is not a book readers can relate to and these are not characters readers can relate to but every reader can feel the sadness of a life lived for the singular purpose these characters live for. Perhaps at a different time in my life I might have enjoyed such a desolate book more, might have appreciated it for its lessons about mankind. I won't give up on Ishiguro; his writing continues to impress but this was not for me - not now anyway. 

 

The Door-Man by Peter M. Wheelwright

The Door-Man by Peter M. Wheelwright

388 Pages

Published February 2022 by Fomite

Publisher's Summary: 

In 1917, during the construction of a large reservoir in the Catskill hamlet of Gilboa, New York, a young paleontologist named Winifred Goldring identified fossils from an ancient forest flooded millions of years ago when the earth’s botanical explosion of oxygen opened a path for the evolution of humankind. However, the reservoir water was needed for NYC, and the fossils were buried once again during the flooding of the doomed town.

A mix of fact and fiction, The Door-Man follows three generations of interwoven families who share a deep wound from Gilboa’s last days. The story is told by Winifred’s grandson, a disaffected NYC doorman working near the Central Park Reservoir during its decommissioning in 1993.

The brief and provisional nature of one’s life on earth – and the nested histories of the places, people and events that give it meaning – engender a reckoning within the tangled roots and fragile bonds of family.

My Thoughts:

“I am only a door-man, one of many along Central Park West. No one suspects that it is my considered choice.”

Piedmont Livingston Kinsolver calls himself the third, although his father was not Piedmont, just Livingston, and his grandfather was not really Piedmont but Bramlett. And that is just the beginning of where the family tree that Wheelwright has included comes in handy. Within the first fifty pages I'd probably referenced that tree almost as many times, trying to keep track of the players and their relationships. Which ought to give you a good idea that this book is not one that readers will race through; you'll need to pay attention - to the characters, to the movements in time, to the history and the true facts, to the science. 

The oldest fossilized trees
in the world in present-day
Gilboa

Besides finding myself going again and again to that family tree, I also found myself going again and again to the internet to verify which of Wheelwright's details were fact and which were fiction. Was it true that in 1917 The Star-Spangled Banner was still, more than 100 years after it was written, still largely unknown? Yes, indeed - Woodrow Wilson had only the year before signed an executive order declaring it the national anthem. Did the city of New York flood the town of Gilboa, despite having better options for moving water from the mountains to the city, covering up evidence of the earliest plants and animals on the planet? Yes, it did. And that's where Wheelwright's novel took it's beginning. 

Now how to develop a story around that that is not just a work of historical fiction. Enter the multi-generational, sweeping history of those earliest plants to the end of the reservoir that caused them to be erased from view. As I was reading I kept thinking of Richard Powers' The Overstory, with its interlaced stories and emphasis on science. As I did with that one, I did sometimes find the science (and, more specifically, the places it takes Wheelwright once it goes there) a little distracting. But it's also important to know the science to understand why what happened was such a tragedy and why the flooding of Gilboa did to it's residents echoed through the generations. 

Wheelwright slowly reveals family secrets as he covers themes including eminent domain, natural history, family, power, and atonement. His settings are vivid, his characters interesting and unique. The Door-Man isn't, as I said, a quick read, but if you're willing to take the time, you'll enjoy getting immersed in the story. 

Thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours for including me in this tour. For other opinions, check out the full tour here. 

About Peter M. Wheelwright 

Peter is a writer, architect, and educator. He is Emeritus Professor at The New School, Parsons School of Design in New York City, where he taught design and wrote on matters of environmental philosophy, design theory, and social practices in the built and natural worlds. Peter comes from a family of writers with an abiding affection for the natural world. His uncle Peter Matthiessen was a three time National Book Award winner, and his brother Jeff Wheelwright is a writer of environmental non-fiction. Educated at Trinity College where he studied painting and sculpture, he went on to receive his Master in Architecture from Princeton University. As an architect, his design work has been widely published in both the national and international press. The Kaleidoscope House, a modernist dollhouse designed in collaboration with artist Laurie Simmons is in the Collection of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. You can find Peter on his website , Instagram, and Twitter.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

Read by Edoardo Ballerini

7 hours 51 minutes

Published September 2021 by Norton, W. W. and Company Inc. 

Publisher's Summary:

The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain…

With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

My Thoughts: 

Well, this one befuddles me. Not so much the book but why Oprah would have picked this book for her book club. Sure, there's plenty to discuss - again Powers looks at man's effect on his environment and unwillingness to acknowledge the damage he has done, as he did in The Overstory, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Powers also tackles the themes of loss; marriage; and parenting, especially parenting a child on the spectrum. And it's bound to get an emotional response from readers; there is so much here intended to provoke emotional reactions - anger, sadness, empathy. 

But that's just it - Powers is too obvious in this book, too clearly attempting to manipulate his readers. The educators are evil, the doctors who insist that Robin should be medicated are evil, the government leaders who control Theo's work funding are evil; and the man who developed the experimental treatment is a terrible person who, in Theo's mind, was having an affair with Robin's mother. Our hearts are meant to ache for Robin (and mine did; I'm not that hardhearted!) as he struggles with the loss of his mother and trying to assimilate with his school mates, with teachers and administrators who don't understand him and a father who is not much better at it. We're meant to sympathize with Theo as he tries to balance parenthood with work and his own pain. There is very little shading to any of the characters, very little chance to understand their point. 

Powers is too clearly attempting to manipulate his readers, except when he isn't - in those places where he ventures off into imagined planets that Theo has created as part of scientific research he's doing to help earn funding for a new space telescope. There are a lot of these expeditions to the simulated planets and while there was often a tie to the story with them, they pulled me out of the story entirely. 

I'm not alone in not caring for this one but there are others who applaud it. The Guardian calls those trips to the plants "myth-like passages" and says Robin is "as compelling a fictional creation" as the reviewer has encountered in a long time. So don't just take my word for it. Maybe look to see what the readers of Oprah's book club thought of this one if the publisher's summary sounds like something that interests you. 

Radium Girls: The Dark Side of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

Radium Girls: The Dark Side of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

Read by Angela Brazil

Published May 2017 by Sourcebooks

Publisher's Summary: 

The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.

Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" are the luckiest alive—until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.

But the factories that once offered golden opportunities are now ignoring all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women's cries of corruption. And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America's early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights that will echo for centuries to come.

My Thoughts: 

In New Jersey and Illinois two dial making companies had no trouble finding young women to work as dial painters in their studios. They paid very well for the precision work that was required and those wages allowed these young girls and their families to live lives they'd never been able to have before. Plus, the positions had the added benefit to the girls of giving them an extra glow, the same glow they were painting on the dials, that made them feel more attractive because the paint included the new wonder ingredient, radium. We know now how very dangerous too much radium can be but when these girls were painting dials, radium was thought to have healing properties. It was no wonder that no one thought a thing of these young women "lip pointing" their brushes to make the tips more precise. 

Before long, though, these young women (most were in their early 20's) began having unusual symptoms - terrible jaw, hip and back pain; teeth falling out and jaws disintegrating; wounds that wouldn't heal. Because no one knew that radium might be causing these problems, no doctor or dentist could initially identify what was happening. In fact, the first girl that died from radium poisoning was actually diagnosed with syphilis. It would take years before anyone really began to understand what was happening and to tie all of the women's problems to one source. 

Long before the dial companies shut down though, long before the practice of lip pointing was ended, officials of the companies knew radium was dangerous. Typically, the companies did nothing. They lied, they covered up, and they fought back when the young women began suing them. 

It's a heartbreaking to read about how these young women suffered and Moore doesn't hold back when describing the agony they were in as their bodies slowly broke down. Or the agony of fighting back against companies that who, even when they settled cases, paid only a pittance of what their medical care had cost and fought back against paying bills. Moore introduces readers to a lot of young women and their families and we come to know them well but companies, doctors and lawyers who covered up what was happening are equally vivid characters. Maybe the saddest thing about the whole situation is that companies continue to treat their employees much the same way. 

This is a story I'd never heard of before and it's one that certainly needed to be written. In one interview with Moore, she said that the finished product was much longer than she had expected when she started writing it. This she attributed to finding much more personal material than she had expected to find - diaries, letter, court transcripts. Those things certainly made the book more readable and relatable. But what I think made the book too long was not the addition of those thing, which were well worth adding, but the extra dramatic flourishes and suppositions that Moore includes. The book often devolves into melodrama which it didn't need and, for me, actually made the book feel less real. Periodically she's added things like "one would imagine she felt..." or "her family closed the door and suffered in private." I understand that narrative nonfiction adds embellishments but this felt a step beyond that to me and colored my impression of the book. Angela Brazil's reading further emphasized the drama. 

So, in the end, I would suggest that this is a story worth knowing and a book that really makes you understand the numbers of girls impacted, the agony they suffered, the battles they had to fight. It's worth reading; but maybe read it in print where you might more easily be able to ignore the flourishes. 

Four Mini-Reviews

Remember how I told you that, even thought my reading was way down, where I was really failing was in getting the reviews written? So in order to start the new year off with a clean slate, I'm going to have a second post on this last day of the year and do mini-reviews of the last four books I finished in 2021. 

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Read by Aoife McMahon 

Published September 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

11 Hours

Publisher's Summary:

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

My Thoughts:

I've been meaning to get to one of Rooney's books for a long time so when this one started getting buzz, I decided it was as good a place to start as any. And it won the Good Reads Choice Award for Fiction for 2021, an award chosen by people like myself. 

I gave up on it 70% in. I never give up on a book when I'm more than half way through it but I couldn't stand any more of any of these characters or the weird way that Rooney paced her story. There were long emails between Alice and Eileen where one or the other of them opined about the state of the world and then we were treated to long passages of the minutiae of their lives. And sex. Lots of sex. It might be a good book - it wasn't for me at this time. And while Aoife McMahon did a terrific job, maybe I would have enjoyed it more in print. I'll never find out because there are too many other books I'd rather pick up. 

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

Read by Edoardo Bellerini

Published September 2021 by W. W. Norton Company 

8 Hours

Publisher's Summary:

The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while singlehandedly raising his unusual nine-year-old son, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures of the endangered animals he loves. He is also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. 

 What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his troubled son is to put him on psychoactive drugs? What can he say when his boy comes to him wanting an explanation for a world that is clearly in love with its own destruction? With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing visions of life beyond and its account of a father and son's ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers's most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

My Thoughts:

This one is written by a Pulitzer Prize winner, a prize awarded not by readers like me. And I read and found enough in Powers' The Overstory to be intrigued to see how he would incorporate science into a story about interesting people this time. 

Like The Overstory, Kirkus Reviews and I agree about this one. While it can veer into planetary fantasy frequently, those pieces also serve to give readers insight into the relationship between father and son. And it's a marvelous relationship between a man who is deeply grieving the wife he adored and his challenging son who is equally lost without the person who understood him best. 

Powers makes his opinion of the previous administration, about climate change and what humans are doing to our planet, and his thoughts about our eagerness to medicate over finding better solutions clear. And yet this one did not feel quite a preachy. Maybe because I agree with him. Maybe because I cared so much about Theo and Robin. 

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

Read by William DeMeritt

Published June 2021 by Hachette Book Group

12 Hours

Publisher's Summary: 

In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry—freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys.

Parallel to their story runs a forbidden romance between two Confederate soldiers. The young men, recently returned from the war to the town of Old Ox, hold their trysts in the woods. But when their secret is discovered, the resulting chaos, including a murder, unleashes convulsive repercussions on the entire community. In the aftermath of so much turmoil, it is Isabelle who emerges as an unlikely leader, proffering a healing vision for the land and for the newly free citizens of Old Ox.

With candor and sympathy, debut novelist Nathan Harris creates an unforgettable cast of characters, depicting Georgia in the violent crucible of Reconstruction. Equal parts beauty and terror, as gripping as it is moving, The Sweetness of Water is an epic whose grandeur locates humanity and love amid the most harrowing circumstances.

My Thoughts:

Yep, 100% agree with the publisher on this one. These characters are unforgettable and Harris does a wonderful job of balancing the terror and beauty of this time, this place, and these people. While very bad things do happen, though, Harris balances that with hope and it made all the difference for me. I'm not sure why this one didn't get more press and acclaim. 

For the second time in one post, I have to admit to agreeing with Kirkus Reviews who found this book just as moving as I did. 

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

Read by Julia Whalen

Published October 2020 by Tom Dougherty Associates

Publisher's Summary: 

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

My Thoughts: 

If you look at this one on Goodreads, you'll find that you'll see a lot of one- and two-star reviews and then a lot of five-star reviews, not much in between. Here's the thing - I get both of those reactions. It's too long and probably Schwab spends too much time in the present and not enough time following Addie through the 300 years of her life. We learn that she spent time working as a spy during WWII but we know nothing her experiences doing that. We know that she traveled over time but never to a country where the population was anything other than predominately white. And we have to buy into the idea that she could fall for the the devil to whom she has promised her soul and who appears to her in a form she conceived (the ultimate bad boy). 

This one was, perhaps, the right book at the right time for me because I was willing for forgive Schwab most of that (except maybe perhaps the length). How hard would it be to survive if no one ever remembered you - you couldn't hold a job, couldn't rent an apartment. It's impossible to survive while never bending the rules yet, when she finally does meet the man who does remember her, how to justify all she's done? And how will their relationship survive? I found myself more than willing to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride. Julia Whelan's reading, as always, only served to enhance the experience. 

And that's a wrap for 2021 folks. No year-end statistics. Just an updated list at the top of this page of my favorite books of the year. 

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Published May 2021 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley

Publisher's Summary:

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

My Thoughts:

Andy Weir's written three books and I've read them all. That might seem odd until you think about how few science-fiction books I read. But Weir hooked me with his debut, The Martian, and he gave me more than enough in Artemis to keep me reading his work. 

Weir doesn't need to worry about what I think about this book; it's already a bestseller and is being made into a movie starring Ryan Gosling. But maybe he should because I'm not alone in feeling that this book had so much potential but just missed the mark so many times. 

Perhaps a different editor would have said "hey, this book is 100 pages too long," or "you've got this really sexist stuff in here that won't play well with a good part of your readers" or "there are a couple of gaping holes in this story." Weir's developed a bit of a formula now and part of that requires coming up with a lot of problems that his very clever lead character needs to solve. It seems to mean that some things that shouldn't need to become problems do just so that the lead character can solve them. If you've read or seen The Martian, you'll see the pattern. 

Don't get me wrong, I love the clever character who has to use all of his (or her) wits to survive. And I'm not opposed to reading a whole lot of science stuff to get there. And since I don't know a whole lot about science and this is largely speculative fiction, I don't really care if the science is even right (except that even I know that if you're going to move into zero g, you'd better have your seatbelt on; Ryland Grace doesn't seem to know that). And I enjoyed the back and forth between Ryland trying to survive and Ryland gradually remembering what happened that got him where he is. As much as I liked Ryland (and I did, even when I wanted to slap him for being stupid), he was not my favorite character. Rocky is by far and away my favorite character. Unlike any character I've ever seen in a book, Rocky is an insatiable learner, highly creative and intelligent, a great friend, and surprisingly emotionally sensitive. 

I'm crossing my fingers that when they wrote the screenplay, they winnowed out the parts that didn't make sense or that seemed over the top and left moviegoers with more than enough action and a terrific story. Because there really is a great story here and it did have me racing along, even as I shook my head. Weir has included some things that, literally, made me gasp in surprise and that's always a good thing, right? I Here's where I hope the movie hews to the book - the ending is surprising and unique and I'm afraid that Hollywood will do what Hollywood so often does and ruin the movie by changing the ending. 

In the end, I'm glad I read this one, even as frustrating as I so often found it. 

Cosmic Queries by Neil deGrasse Tyson - Guest Review

Cosmic Queries by Neil deGrasse Tyson 

Published 

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through TLC Book Tours, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

In this thought-provoking follow-up to his acclaimed StarTalk book, uber astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tackles the world’s most important philosophical questions about the universe with wit, wisdom, and cutting-edge science. 

For science geeks, space and physics nerds, and all who want to understand their place in the universe, this enlightening new book from Neil deGrasse Tyson offers a unique take on the mysteries and curiosities of the cosmos, building on rich material from his beloved StarTalk podcast. 

In these illuminating pages, illustrated with dazzling photos and revealing graphics, Tyson and co-author James Trefil, a renowned physicist and science popularizer, take on the big questions that humanity has been posing for millennia–How did life begin? What is our place in the universe? Are we alone?–and provide answers based on the most current data, observations, and theories. 

Populated with paradigm-shifting discoveries that help explain the building blocks of astrophysics, this relatable and entertaining book will engage and inspire readers of all ages, bring sophisticated concepts within reach, and offer a window into the complexities of the cosmos. 

For all who loved National Geographic’s StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, and Space Atlas, this new book will take them on more journeys into the wonders of the universe and beyond.

My Thoughts:

My apologies to the ladies at TLC Book Tours - this review was meant to be posted last Friday but between a crazy last couple of weeks at work and dealing with the aftermath of my mother's death, all too many things have fallen by the wayside and, unfortunately, this review was one of them.

This is another book that I knew immediately was meant for my husband to read. All of my guys love Tyson so I'm sure it's going to make the rounds in my family, particularly since my husband was such a fan. Without further review, here are his thoughts.

His Thoughts:

Cosmic Queries is exactly what you would expect.   It is a well-organized and well-written book that is a great walk down memory road for me, and, I am sure, for many that have geeked out on Astronomy and other sciences.  Tyson explains the cosmos in an understandable way for those who have had some science interest, exposure or classes but who have not majored in science.  He is one of the few scientists that can break it down in an understandable way and keep it very interesting.  

Like the National Geographic books reviewed here before this books is fun, informative and well edited.  As a child who was late in the pecking order, I was lucky to have been exposed to books, music, and the world by my older siblings.  One I recall was a little paper back book on astronomy and or the universe.  It had photos of the planets, Milky Way galaxy and a good deal of information about some of the same things in Cosmic Queries, which makes this book more special for me.  

Tyson spends a reasonable amount of time, but not too much, on great scientists like Aristotle, Newton, Galileo, Fermi, Hubble and many others to build science history, particularly that of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He touches on particle physics, chemistry and atomic structure, the elements, quarks and many other concepts that make for a great and interesting review for those of us who possibly have not studied or read up on these concepts since high school or college science classes.  

Toward the end of the book Tyson has a section on how it all began, mostly around the Big Bang, and on how will it possibly end.  He provides some possible theories on surprise endings like asteroids or other collisions, climate change and volcanos.  Some things that are all possible within or not long after our life times.  

As I have admitted before I am fairly attention deficit and books like this that cover a broad range of topics that I have always had an interest in continue to create a positive buzz in my brain.  

I have always enjoyed Neil deGrasse Tysons shows and his very approachable style to science. 

He has put together a quite interesting and enjoyable book that I will plan to keep around to reference and one I would highly recommend to anyone curious about science and especially astronomy or astrophysics.  

             *******************************************************************

Our thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours (and, again, our apologies for the delayed review) for including us on this tour. For other opinions about this book, check out the full tour here. 

About Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, host of the hit radio and Emmy-nominated TV show StarTalk, and the New York Times best-selling author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military. He lives in New York City.

Follow him on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

"During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore — in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us."  - Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Pull of The Stars by Emma Donoghue

The Pull of The Stars by Emma Donoghue

Published July 2020 by Little, Brown, and Company

Source: courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders — Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police , and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. 

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work. 

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

My Thoughts: 

I've enjoyed Donoghue's books in the past so didn't even look to see what this book was about before I started it and was surprised to find myself reading about a pandemic, even as we are living through one. In the Author's Notes at the end, Donoghue says that she had turned in the final edits of her book in March 2020, just as it became clear that this novel coronavirus was going to be a worldwide pandemic. It's not the only way that this book, set 100 years ago, is timely; it explores the ways in which politics affects our lives and the way poverty is exacerbated by the pandemic (or is it the other way around?). 

I was also surprised that this was a book set almost entirely in one room, harkening back to Donoghue's earlier work Room. Donoghue is certainly adept at creating a wide world in a small space and in creating stories and characters that showcase the strength of women, from the woman who has come in pregnant with her twelfth child to the female doctor who is working to try to save lives even as the authorities are trying to arrest her. 

At times, it felt a little bit like one of those adventure movies where if anything can go wrong, it will, what with every kind of tragedy playing out in that ward. And I was about two-thirds of the way through this book and still trying to figure out where Donoghue was going with this story when it finally occurred to me that she had already arrived there and all of those medical emergencies were there for a reason. At one point, a male orderly suggests that women shouldn't get the vote because they didn't fight in the war, didn't pay the "blood price." Donoghue makes it clear that women have always paid the blood price. In the end, I came away from this book knowing that I'd be thinking about these characters and what had happened in that ward for a long time. It would be hard not to, given that we're living through it right now. 

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Read by Bahni Turpin

Published September 2020 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 

Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary: 

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love.

My Thoughts:

Transcendent: adjective

• beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience
• (of God) existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe
• surpassing the ordinary; exceptional

Two years ago I read Gyasi's debut, Homegoing, and was so impressed with her writing and the story she told. I knew that I would read her next book and requested it from my library before it was even available. I was not alone - it took until November for me to get the book. It might have been because other people had also been impressed with her first book or because this one is gaining high praise from all quarters. For good reason. This book lives up to its title in every way. 

It's a complex novel that handles a lot of themes beautifully, never becoming overwhelmed by them. Gyasi's characters are complicated and wholly developed and I felt so deeply for them. Gyasi looks at the immigrant experience from the point of view of those who choose to stay and those who choose to return home. But this is not just an immigrant story. It's the story of parenting, the relationship between parents and children, the pressure we put on our children, marriage, addiction, mental health, faith, and science. 

Certainly these are not, on their surface, characters to whom I shouldn't necessarily be able to relate. But I can relate to the experience of being the mother of an addict and the constant fear that you are going to lose your child. Mercifully, I did not lose my child to a drug overdose as Gifty's mother did; but I can absolutely imagine finding myself reacting in the same way, being crippled with grief and depression. I also related to Gifty's struggle to reconcile her religious upbringing and faith with science. Even as Gifty is studying science and running an experiment she hopes will help people like Nana, she longs for the days when she could put herself in a higher beings hands. This conflict is one of the strengths of this book, of which there are many. 

If you've listened to any other books read by Bahni Turpin, you'll understand why she was the perfect choice to read this book. I'm always impressed with her work; you absolutely find yourself believing you are listening to the characters tell their stories. If you choose to read this book, I highly recommend the audiobook. I was about a third of the way through this book when I knew it would make a great choice for my book club and put it on our calendar. I recommend it for your book club as well. 

Inheritance by Dani Shapiro

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro
Read by Dani Shapiro
Published January 2019 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: audiobook checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:
In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had casually submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history—the life she had lived—crumbled beneath her.

Inheritance is a book about secrets. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in, a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

Dani Shapiro’s memoir unfolds at a breakneck pace—part mystery, part real-time investigation, part rumination on the ineffable combination of memory, history, biology, and experience that makes us who we are. Inheritance is a devastating and haunting interrogation of the meaning of kinship and identity, written with stunning intensity and precision.


My Thoughts:
Can you possibly imagine being 54 years old and finding out that you aren't who you thought you were?

Raised as an Orthodox Jew and incredible proud of her paternal family's history, as a pale, blue-eyed blonde, Shapiro grew up feeling like she was looking for something. But even when she found out that she had no biological link to her half-sister, her father's daughter from a previous marriage, Shapiro still couldn't accept that she didn't look like her beloved Shapiros because she wasn't, biologically speaking, one of them. But a random conversation between her mother and one of Shapiro's friends years prior, suddenly made sense to Shapiro.

Her mother had admitted then that Shapiro had been conceived in Philadelphia but Shapiro had never been able to get anything more out of her mother. Suddenly Shapiro understood that her parents' fertility problem had pushed them to seek medical help at the Farris Institute for Parenthood. But Shapiro couldn't just go to the Institute for answers; it had been shut down a number of years earlier.

Because of this, Shapiro launched herself into research into artificial insemination and she spends a good part of this book looking at the ethical and legal ramifications of artificial insemination. But Shapiro was less worried about the ethical issues when it came to finding out more about where she came from. She found herself desperate to form some kind of relationship with the man who she discovered donated the sperm that resulted in her existence. Which, of course, brings up the question of what obligation he had to her. He had had not expectation, for more than 50 years, that he would ever be faced with contact from a child who resulted from his anonymous donation.

Meanwhile Shapiro was struggling with how she should feel about her parents. What did they know about her not being her father's daughter, or at the very least the chance that he might not be her biological father? Answers to that question where harder to find. Further, Shapiro agonized over feeling fatherless. If the man she had thought was her father was not her biological father and the man who was didn't want a connection with her, where did that leave her?

I found this book interesting on so many levels - the science, the ethics, the idea of what makes a family - but what really drew me in and held my interest was the personal story. I was a daddy's girl growing up and I can't imagine, at nearly the same age as Shapiro was when she found out about her paternity, finding out that he was not my biological father. In the end, I think I'd land exactly where Shapiro landed - the man who raised her, who she adored, he was her father.

Midnight In Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

Midnight In Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham
Published February 2019 by Simon and Schuster
Source: ebook checked out from my local library

Publisher’s Summary:
April 25, 1986 in Chernobyl was a turning point in world history. The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.

Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles—at the time equivalent to $18 billion—Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies.

The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of Reactor No.4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told—until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland.

My Thoughts:
Recently HBO aired a mini-series called Chernobyl. We didn’t catch all of it but enough of it to make me interested in learning more so I turned to the library to see what was available. As it turned out, this book had only recently been published so I figured I’d grab up the newest book on the subject. Then I waited for weeks to get it. By the time I finally got it, and saw that it was almost 600 pages long, I began to doubt myself.

Two weeks later, I am surprisingly happy to tell you that I have a pretty damn good idea of how nuclear reactors work. Now there's a sentence I never expected to be saying (er, typing). Not only do I have a pretty good idea about how the reactors work, I have a really good idea about all of the ways they can fail. And I found it all of that science fascinating. I love, love when an author can do that for me (and a little annoyed that it couldn't have been made more interesting for me when I was in school!).

But, as you'll have surmised by the summary, this is not just a book about how a nuclear reactor failed. It's a book about how the Cold War lead to a rush to move nuclear weapon technology into energy production, how it lead to a race to build the reactors despite evidence of the dangers being built into the reactors, and how it lead to an unwillingness to admit failure. It's also a book about the crushing bureaucracy that not only contributed to the failure of Reactor Number Four but also lead to a massive coverup of the failure, inept attempts at containing the disaster, and disastrous care of the human beings impacted.

It's a long one that I thought I might never finish. I was highlighting so many things, including names I was certain I would need to be able to remember later. But Higginbotham is good about reminding readers who all of players are as he reintroduces them again and again. And, eventually, I came to realize that this is a library book; there's not much need to highlight when I won't be able to go back later and refresh myself on what I learned.

Higginbotham includes quite a few photos which I always enough in a nonfiction book, as well as an epilogue that follows up on the players who survived more than thirty years after the incident. As far as I can tell (and as far as he was able, given that much of the evidence is still hidden, labelled as top secret), this book is incredibly well researched. But now I need to go back to the HBO mini-series which, I now realize, took liberties to make the show more dramatic.

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
Read by: Hope Jahren
Published: April 2016 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: audiobook checked out from my local library

Publisher’s Summary:
Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also a celebration of the lifelong curiosity, humility, and passion that drive every scientist. In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered play in her father’s college laboratory. She tells us how she found a sanctuary in science, learning to perform lab work “with both the heart and the hands.” She introduces us to Bill, her brilliant, eccentric lab manager. And she extends the mantle of scientist to each one of her readers, inviting us to join her in observing and protecting our environment. Warm, luminous, compulsively readable, Lab Girl vividly demonstrates the mountains that we can move when love and work come together.
 
My Thoughts:
Finally – a book I feel like merits being on all of the best-of lists the year it was published! This is a book that is beautifully written, painfully open and honest, makes science come alive, and is one of the best read books I’ve to which I've listened.

Jahren is telling so many stories in the book – what it’s like to try to do scientific research in an age where there is shockingly little money for it, what it’s like to try to rise as a scientist when you’re female, her life outside of being a scientist including her battle with mental illness and a very dangerous pregnancy, and the story of the wonderful friendship she and Bill have had for decades.

When Jahren became convinced that she couldn’t become a doctor, she decided to major in English literature. It shows in her often poetic writing, never more so than when she includes passages from David Copperfield to illustrate points she is making in the chapter about her time working in the pharmacy of a hospital.

Oh, my lord, if you don't read this book for any other reason, you really do need to read it for the relationship that Jahren has with Bill. They have such a close bond that if her now husband would have had a problem with Bill, that would have been a deal breaker. They "get" each other in ways that are both poignant and so very, very funny.

Did I mention that the book is often hilarious? Jahren finds the humor in ridiculous situations but she also uses humor as a shield against pain. From her relationship with her mother to her bipolar disorder, from her pregnancy to her battle against men in her profession, Jahren is brutally honest about what she has been through and her ability, or inability, to handle these times.

Jahren’s passion for science shines throughout the book but she never gets dragged down by it. She finds a way to make plant life relatable to life’s events that is original and captivating. And Jahren as the reader of her own book is absolutely marvelous - she knows how to make a book come alive, how to make readers feel her pain and her passion.




















https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-scientists-uncommon-bond-with-her-odd-lab-partner-for-life/2016/04/15/12850ff2-f29b-11e5-a61f-e9c95c06edca_story.html?utm_term=.117f758ae6b9