Book recommendations
Posted by KJB at Tuesday, December 19, 2006 10:52 AM
Categories: Public
(This paragraph added 01 July 2008) The original idea was to keep updating [this] table. That was too unwieldy so lately I've just been adding comments. Scroll down to see more recent books. /kjb
Books we've read (see more below)
Title (Author)
| Comment
| Added by
| Date added
|
The One Percent Doctrine (Suskind)
| A critical though un-footnoted history of the Bush administration's approach to war. Very thought-provoking.
| KJB
| 20 Dec 2006
|
Foundation (Asimov)
| A (the?) classic SF novel; it's our current family read-out-loud book
| KJB
| 5 Jan 2007
|
The Great Influenza (Barry)
| I loved this (my family's tired of hearing about it) — originally the author meant to write about American medicine at a defining moment; it's turned more timely with bird flu
| KJB
| 5 Jan 2007
|
The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present (Torrey, Miller)
| I am still skeptical, but wow! this book has a lot of really great anecdotes. My favorite: In May, 1828, the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum opened. "Not a single patient was admitted for the first seven months, despite articles praising it and advertisements for patients in newspapers in Charleston and Columbia" (p. 210). The South Carolina state population was over half a million in 1818. By contrast, in modern St. Louis City we have under ½ million residents, but I'm sure we could fill the place in a few weeks.
| KJB
| 5 Jan 2007
|
Saints (Card)
| I think this is The Great LDS Novel (so far) but some of my good friends disagree.
| KJB | 5 Jan 2007
|
Patent It Yourself (Pressman)
| Thank you to Mark Mendel for recommending this. Warning: the book has no plot, no characters, etc....
| KJB
| 5 Jan 2007
|
| Heris Serrano (Elizabeth Moon) | Space opera light reading that I actually liked. A little too much of horses and written-for-girls.
| KJB
| 6 Apr 2007
|
lots more
| scroll down for more, mostly submitted by Kevin
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Kevin Black wrote:
More books I've read recently:
The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
A book about Capgras syndrome, behavioral neurology in general, and a thinly disguised or maybe just renamed Oliver Sacks. Didn't like the ending but it was well written and is the closest thing I've found to the genre of what I'm trying to write. Still different.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. Viking Press, 1962.
Never really wanted to read this but being a psychiatrist I guess I figured I had to eventually. Fortunately this place has no real resemblance to anywhere I've worked. For that matter, most the patients have little resemblance to most of the patients I see. Insightful about relatively healthy people.
A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. (UK): Warne, 1905
Delightful book we are reading aloud as a family on Ariana's recommendation.
Kevin Black wrote:
Kevin Black wrote:
The Madman's Tale, by John Katzenbach. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004.
Hm. Well, it is a book where the Good Guys are trying to find a Jack the Ripper type, but set within an insane asylum from the 1970s.
Pros: a gripping page-turner, and the author manages to talk about killings and maimings and whatnot without lingering over the gore. The character development is good and the characters are nuanced. I liked the two aides.
Cons: the protagonist and the two other main characters on his side actually are fairly believable, but the other folks who are described in any detail are often too sane for the place. (However, the main character manages to write a coherent story when really crazy, and that's just nuts. No pun intended.) Plus, although the psychiatrist is not the stereotypical Evil Psychiatrist and the character has some balance, he is definitely not an ad for psychiatry. Sigh. Also the book has the social worker giving people shots, and the pharmacology is way off base.
The book doesn't teach much that is both meaningful and true about the serious psychiatric illnesses. Of course that is not its aim. It is about the story, and to some extent about the main characters.
Monday, April 28, 2008 11:46 AM
Kevin Black wrote:
The Boy Detective Fails, by Joe Meno. Chicago: Punk Planet Books, 2006.
[Note: These last several books are selected from a stack of books recommended by a helpful librarian at the Tesson Ferry branch of the St. Louis County library when I asked for books that might be close to my intended topic.]
This is a very odd book. It is odd in format. One chapter is blank under the chapter heading except for this sentence: "It is embarrassing to admit, but Chapter Fourteen has been stolen. We truly apologize for this." There are messages for the reader to decipher with the Boy Detective Decoder Ring which is printed on the inside back cover. There is another long message spread out over the footer of each page with a clue in the front material.
It is also odd in content. There are characters right out of a Dick Tracy comic book, like the strongest man in the world, the evil professor (think Moriarty, but now largely ineffectual due to dementia), and even the protagonist, who reminds you a lot--until his sister commits suicide--of Encyclopedia Brown. In a world that is mostly boringly normal, there are ray guns that make people disappear and disintegration bombs that make whole bus stations disappear. There are very unlikely plot turns.
But there are also people. The title character is neurotic but somewhat lovable. All of his buddies and even some of his enemies draw our compassion.
There are also a few good quotes. "Billy lowers his pencil for a moment and wonders: 'Without death, there is hardly any threat strong enough to truly appreciate human life.' He thinks: 'I am as good as dead--too afraid to live, only waiting, never taking a risk--I am as good as dead already'" (p. 262).
"... finally, I come to this conclusion--everybody is unhappy for the same reason. Somewhere in their scrawny little brains, they all know they're already dead. They're working some two-bit job, they're married to someone who ended up a bigger disappointment than they could have ever dreamed, they owe bills they can't pay--so I figure what these people need is a new start, a whole new beginning. That's what we're really selling here, Billy: a cheap version of hope. ... some reason to believe what's going to happen next is going to be better than what they've already seen" (pp. 281-282).
"The boy detective thinks, 'The only thing all men have in common with one another is their inherent capacity to make mistakes.' He reasons, 'But there is wonder in the attempt, knowing we are all destined to fall short, but forgoing reason and fear time and time again so deliberately.' He takes a deep breath, grasps the trusty flashlight, and hurries back into the night."
I suppose even the quotes are odd in that some of these sound a lot like echoes of more famous prose.
Anyway, overall I liked this book, but the weirdness was too much for me to really love it.
man, i miss going to the pool!!! you are so amazing!!!
