skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This is a book written by a women who has dealt with suicide both personally and professionally. Because of this, it is not only a scientifically accurate look at what is known about the reasons for suicide but is also a deeply personal look at the reasons behind suicide and the common misconceptions by the public about suicide.
Firstly the book looks at the relationship between mental illness and suicide and how prescription drugs influence the statistics in this area. The book also looks at case studies of suicide and how it has often struck unexpectedly. Although the book obviously cannot gift us with an insight into how to detect suicide, it does deal with the mental illnesses and the stigma that until recently was coupled with suicide. Even the medical profession, it seems at least in part has a shroud of suicide and the victim is often thought of at best as selfish or sinful. Jamison deals with these stereotypes showing that while suicide has a hugely detrimental effect on friends and family, it cannot be understood in a simple manner of thinking.
The book does focus moreso on suicide among young people but this is not a problem as Jamison explains this early on and recommends more research into the still frighteningly high prevalence of suicide in older people. It also shows the uses of neurotransmitters in the brain and explains studies that have linked these (or a lack of these to suicide).
This book was written right before the end of the 20th century. Therefore, Jamison expresses doubt that SSRIs and other anti-depressants and mood stablisers can cause suicide. Unfortunately, there has now been a link, she also fails to address the problem of over-prescribing dealt with in other books although this is understandable as it does not directly relate to suicide.
I would highly recommend this book. It deals well the the concept of suicide and shows the damage it inflicts widely on society.
This book written by the travel writer who brought us adventures from around the world examines our own world as a whole, its surroundings and how it functions. Unlike the textbooks with colourful diagrams that most of us will have read at some point or other during school, he weaves a colourful, interesting and humourous picture of the world which would not exist as we know it if we changed it just a little, tiny, teeny bit. In other words, Bryson makes some of the most amazing and complicated findings in modern science understandable for those of us who can't be bothered reading Einstein's complicated theorems or the like.
The wealth of information in this book is simply astounding, I found that many facts I knew from taking science in high school, I did not know about the discovery of. Bryson brings up both the famous and the not-so-famous names as he explores each sector of discovery. He shows not only this expanse of information but also an obvious interest in what he is writing about and a dedication to understanding what many physicists would not be able to explain to you in normal English.
This is the third time I've read this book in about as many years, it never gets old and I always find myself remembering something I had previously forgotten. Unlike some of its explaining-science counterparts (including Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters and Hawking's A Brief History of Time), it brings some humour into both science and the scientists who have uncovered some of the greatest mysteries. It also doesn't just cover physics, but a wide range of disciplines and the names which govern their discoveries, as well as the names which are never included despite their great discoveries.
Highly recommended to all and especially those of us who are geeks like myself and thrive off the sheer amount on knowledge in this book.
Perhaps not up to the hype I'd heard about it. This book was an entertaining tale of a 16-year-old boy involved in a boat crash which kills his entire family, the whole crew and a zoo full of animals with the exception of a zebra with a broken leg, a female orang-utan, a hyena and a Bengal tiger.
An author's note at the beginning of this book describes this event as at least based in truth and the book finished with a confusing interview, enlightening the reader that perhaps we will never know. Either way it's a good story.
One of the primary themes in this book is that of religion as a road to comprehending reality. It's explored throughout in a variety of ways as the main character Pi has practiced up to four religions at one time and part of the reason he continues to survive is because of his religious understanding of what is happening around him coupled with the extraordinary situation he finds himself in. The graphic descriptions of the demise of various animals within the book had me cringing and Pi, a vegetarian finds himself grabbing fish and turtles out of the water in order to feed himself and the tiger.
This story was meant to make the reader believe in God, why this is I am still not sure. While Martel makes decent use of a deeply spiritual character in the book, it is not clear how a less spiritual person is meant to gain a belief because a "miracle" has happened.
A decent read that churns your stomach in many parts.
This book contains a series of connected short stories all centred around a house in Massachusetts. In the first story we meet the builder of the house who goes off to sea with his sons who are killed when they all drown. A blackbird, the son's pet returns to the house and blackbirds continue to be symbolic throughout the book of the history of the house and the tragedy that befell its first owners. The house is also home to a ravaging amount of fruit trees and as it becomes weathered and less lived in over the years, the book follows the inhabitants and the various things they do to the house which turn up later in the book under the gaze of a different person.
Hoffman definitely had a gift with prose and this is probably the best book I have read by her. Partially because without over-exposing its many character, themes and symbols of the house are kept alive throughout the book. The way all the stories which could also be read separately, are connected is ingenius and the house becomes a magical place with a vivid history. The reader can picture the different things which happen to the house over the years and it is this, in my opinion that makes the book such a gift to its readers. I read it extremely quickly.
Widely speaking the book shows how every place has a history and how the 'spirit' of previous inhabitants can remain and can shape a livelihood. The house remains msotly neglected throughout the book and all the characters are confronted with a sense of loneliness, sadness and acceptance of their lot.
I would highly recommend this book.
After having read a fair few Picoult books (she is my guilty pleasure), I can conclude that this one is not much different from any other one I have read. The book deals with a contentious social issue, that of mercy killing or euthanasia. As usual, the book is also centred around two main characters who have relationship problems, as well as a court trial that happens to go luckily, it features 'true love and the characters are meaningless and not at all complete.
This sounds terribly negative, Jodi Picoult is a celebrated author of contemporary novels, I say novels rather than literature because personally I don't think she is an exceptional writer or that she brings anything original to her profession. I believe the main reason why she is so popular is because she writes about interesting things; for example some of my favourite books by her include: a falsely accused sex offender, school shootings, life with a person who has severe disabilities and all of them, every single one feature a person in love who does not treat his/her partner well or cheats on them.
Picoult obviously has a lot of ideas, books by her continue to come out. Handle with Care being the latest example. This book showed nothing new to me, the excerpts of a journal at the beginning of chapters were not interesting and the discussion of euthanasia held nothing that peaked my interest. Perhaps my favourite character in this book was (slightly) Mia, a character who couldn't stay anywhere and had seemed to be all over the world. The book did not go much into her character though and went more into the exceptionally walk-all-over-me character, Allie and her husband who obviously had affection but not love for her. The background about Scotland was interesting but nto overly informative.
Maybe I have finally gotten over my Picoult addiction?
(An absence of a picture of the book cover meant I just found a picture of Trinity exploding).
This book looks at the story behind the creation and detonation of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos. Beginning with the scientific realisation by scientists such as Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. The project was first set up as the result of a perceived threat of the same discovery by Nazi Germany in the early 1940s. Nuclear physicists and engineers from all over the USA and the UK were drawn out of jobs and drawn to the desert of Los Alamos.
The book details firstly the various elements that were designated as required to build an atomic bomb and the desert became a sort of think tank filled with some of the world's best scientists created to stave off the threat of Germany. Lamont details the different departments that were aimed at finding and creating the various parts of the bomb. The whole project was practiced under a shroud of secrecy and Lamont also detailed how parts of the research were passed on to Russia by another physicist, Fuchs.
Parts of the book leading up to the explosion of Trinity read like a thriller, I could feel myself hanging on to the edge of the seat even though I obviously already knew the result. The latter part of the book also provided interesting details. Firstly of Oppenheimer's realisation of the destruction further work could do and his refusal to work on the hydrogen bomb (the H-bomb) and how Oppenheimer, a quiet man interested in poetry and with a great gift for nuclear physics would feel about being called the father of the atomic bomb.
It also contained useful information about the aftermath, mainly the continuing battles between different countries to hold the most powerful bomb in a sort of nuclear standoff. More information about the devastation it wreaked all over Japan with injuries that still exist today would have been useful.
The book surely renewed my interests in science and also in the capability of humans to separate themselves from the destruction they are creating. The book is an interesting, thrilling and informative read.
This book was set in a time (the early 1980s) where home birth was still largely frowned upon. It struck interest with me at first as I was a home birth in 1988 where according to my mother, the situation was much the same. She actually had to persuade our family doctor to accept it and the midwife she had was one of the few in Wellington who would do a home birth.
Midwives written in the perspective of the daughter of a lay midwife, Sibyl Danforth who performs most of her births at home and is taken to court for involuntary manslaughter when she is forced to perform a c-section in terrible conditions and later accused of doing this while the woman was still alive, killing her. We are provided throughout with excerpts from Sibyl's notebooks which show her criticisms of "doctor speak" and put across her opinion as a full advocate of home birth. Her daughter, Connie, the narrator is looking back at this period of her life, having now become an OB/GYN and recalling the trial that changed her family's life when she was just 14.
We are drawn into Connie's fear for her mother and more widely for her environment early on as she documents the days after the fateful night when she discovers her mother is going to be criminally charged. The early life of her mother and father is also shown throughout, always outside the mainstream, yet they bring up Connie sensibly and by 14 she seems to be a reasonably mature girl.
I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as Trans-sister Radio, another book by the same author but I think it was definitely a good read and an interesting insight into both the criminal justice system and the process of birth. I would highly recommend it.
This book by Irishman John Boyne documents a short period in the life of a young boy, Bruno who moves to a place he knows only as Out-with. He is surprised when he looks out his bedroom window and discovers that behind the huge barbed wire fence, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people and all of them are wearing striped pyjamas. For Bruno, everything changed when the "Fury" (Fuhrer) came to dinner, since then his family has moved from Berlin to Out-with (Auschwitz), a place he thinks might be in Poland. Bruno wants to be an adventurer when he grows up and on one of his adventurers he meets a boy who is his age on the other side of the fence. His new friend astonishes him in many ways.
This book was heartbreaking, I read it in an afternoon. It's a reasonably short novel that could easily be read by a child but probably shouldn't be. It is written from Bruno's perspective and the lack of wider understanding he has about where he is and why Shmuel is so much thinner than him and has no change of pyjamas. His questions of his father, an army man never come to anything and he doesn't understand why his father refers to the people behind the fence as "not really people, not like you and me." Shmuel also has both a lot of information that Bruno does, but a lack of understanding about what it means and why things are this way.
This book seems to stand as a fable and at the same time a story of the beauty of innocence combined with the devastation of the capability of human evil. The story finishes with a sentence that forces you to confront your own reality in this day and age where fences like the one shared by Shmuel and Bruno exist all over the world.
Although there have been doubts that a 9-year-old son of a Nazi soldier would not know about the Holocaust or Hitler, the point of this book is not to show a 9-year-old's capabilities or understanding in any way but to combine the beauty of a young child's innocence with the horror of things like the Holocaust. I would highly recommend this book to all.
After reading this book, I can definitively say it went over and above my expectations and is in my view, the best book of the ones I have read by this author. It documents the life of Tully, an independent teenager growing up in a poverty-stricken area with a lifetime of abuse and neglect behind her.
The writing in this book is not exquisite Woolf-esque prose but it matches Tully's character; blunt, to the point and it puts across the situation. Tully lives through the suicide of a childhood friend, Jennifer and summons all her strength to embark on a social work degree. The story is turbulent, through the misery of Tully's young life and the resulting confusion as well as a continuing sense of wrongness in her adult life.
In many ways Tully left me distraught. The amount of times I was reduced to tears was evened out but simply laughing at her manner and her rugged determination to right the wrongs that had been done to her through her work with foster children. We are often reminded of the years that Tully used her dancing talents and although these are never outwardly discussed in detail, we do learn about her dancing past through the sexual power she continues to hold over her male counterparts.
When Jennifer's true love returns to town, Tully wants to hate him. It is obvious from the beginning, however, that he (Jack) holds the magnetism which obsessed Jennifer and later another friend, Shakie. It is likely that Tully would have gone the same way if not for her stoic temperament, where her life had taught her to deal with anything else.
The ending of this book devastated me but I could see why it happened. I would definitely recommend this book over and above The Bronze Horseman series.
This novel stands as one of the more epic science fiction adventures equalling the likes of Asimov's Foundation series. I've never read anything else by this author but my father told me that Eon is a must-read.
When a large asteroid goes in orbit around earth, some of the best scientists on offer are sent to investigate what begins to be referred to throughout the book as 'the stone' (and its inhabitants are thus referred to as stoners). The book opens as a theoretical physicist, Patricia is taken to the stone; plucked from a myriad of people with similar talents but none with the specialisation she soon learns is vital to her mission. The asteroid holds many secrets which are exposed to Patricia one by one. The reason why she has been called to the stone soon becomes evident when she sees a seemingly endless corridor stretching away into infinity.
One of the recurring themes in this book is the lack of agreement between the USSR and the USA. While Soviet scientists are allowed on the stone, they are not privy to any information and have virtually no high security clearances. What becomes clear throughout the book is that nuclear destruction on earth is imminent and the plot centres around the end of a large portion of mankind.
The book is filled with aspects of a thriller, as well as aspects more related to the science of the infinite corridor. Patricia's real purpose on the stone becomes clear to her when she begins to find articles written by her twenty years in the future. The novel continues to a devastating conclusion, while at the same time the Soviets and the Americans are forced to make amends.
A grear science fiction thriller which I would recommend to all.
This is the first book I have read by this author, being a general fan of science fiction and less so fantasy, I enjoyed it a lot. It begins with a child wailing after a serious natural disaster on her planet, but she is not wailing like a normal child does. Only telepaths can hear her wrenching cries and it is made clear to the reader from the beginning of the book that the Rowan (named after her hometown) is a "Talent" which immediately leaves her destined for a life learning to fine tune her talents. She is immediately noticed as one of the most powerful talents to come through Altair (the human colony world where she lives).
As the Rowan grows up and learns to use her talents under the watchful eye of the harsh Siglen, she feels incredibly lonely. A small electronic toy called a "Purza" is her best childhood friend and later a large cat. As she gets older, the Rowan tries to find out more about her past and looks towards a lonely future, before deciding to do something about it and there her life branches out.
I really enjoyed the Rowan's character, her stubborn will and her determination to not remain alone like the rest of the "primes" had before her made her paticularly likeable. It perhaps pissed me off a bit that she went on to have kids instead of becoming the most awesome prime in the universe (a spot which her husband got) but it was a good story. Recommend to any fantasy/sci fi fans.
