Henrietta Lacks was thirty-one years old when she entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore early in 1951. She was Catholic, the mother of five children, and African-American. Hopkins was one of the nation’s most prestigious medical schools—and the only hospital in the area that admitted...
Read More
When Britain’s Crown Prince Edward strode through the Gateway of India in Bombay late in 1921, the subcontinent was seething with unrest. Thousands of loyalists turned out to gain a glimpse of the glamorous royal. But the city as a whole was quiet. Civil disobedience championed by Mohandas...
Read More
And the prize for the nuttiest and most far-fetched explanation for alien abductions by UFOs goes to . . . Jeremy Robinson, for The Others. In a story that involves a rural Arizona sheriff, an Uber driver who isn’t an Uber driver, squads of mercenaries, black helicopters, human traffickers,...
Read More
Thoughts while reading A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, by Gregory Clark. @@@@ (4 out of 5). This is yet another effort to answer the same profound question addressed in Guns, Germs, and Steel: why are some parts of the world so much richer than others? Clark reduces the bigger question to one that’s far more focused: why did the Industrial Revolution occur in Europe, and specifically England, and not somewhere else in the world? His answer will surprise you: beginning in the late Middle Ages rich people in England had more than twice the number of children surviving at death as the poorest people, so that over the centuries from 1200 to 1800 “bourgeois values,” the attitudes and behaviors that had made people rich, gradually took hold throughout society.
Read More
On as many as a dozen occasions in the course of the twentieth century, the United States Congress attempted to write the rules for immigration. Twice the result was major legislation signed by the President. The first was in 1924, with the passage of a racist bill that strangled the flow of...
Read More
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.