The Questioning Librarian

It's almost too obvious to be worth pointing out, but healthcare impacts everyone. And it seems like there's one thing everyone can agree on. Healthcare is expensive, whether we're talking about drug prices or insurance premiums. It wasn't always like this. The story of how healthcare got this way is the subject of Elisabeth Rosenthal's book An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back . I'm always interested in current events, and with the battles over healthcare on the national stage, this book seemed particularly timely. It turned out that this was the most important book I've read all year. I read a lot of non-fiction, but this is the first book in a long time that made me truly, absolutely angry. And there is quite a lot to be angry about. Rosenthal charts how multiple players in the healthcare industry figure out all manner of ways to take in as much money as possible. Listing example after mind-numbing...

The past few years have seen a veritable flurry of renewed interest in the idea of bringing extinct species back into our world. Multiple books, articles, and even a few TED talks have been released, each approaching the topic from different angles, or focusing on different candidate species. One of the newest of these caught my attention, not only for its approach to the topic, but for the almost haunting art that graces its cover. Rise of the Necrofauna by Britt Wray, looks at de-extinction from perspectives that aren't heard as often in the ongoing discussion, and stands out from the others for that very reason. Wray, a science communicator, is ideally suited to the task of writing a book like this. The science of resurrecting extinct species is there, of course, but written in a way that's understandable to a non-scientist like myself. The "how" of de-extinction is fascinating, however many obstacles and improbabilities still stand in the way of bringing ba...

Since the week before it was to be published, Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House  has been, by far, the most-talked about book in the country. The furor, prompted by an angry denunciation-by-tweet from the President, a cease and desist letter from his lawyers, and salacious details from the book making their way into the press, immediately catapulted it to bestseller status. Being a political junkie, of course I couldn't resist giving it a read. While the book sold out almost immediately in print, I was lucky enough to borrow the digital audiobook from my local public library. I rushed through it in just a few days - not only because of how engrossing it was, but also knowing that there were a lot of people waiting to read it after I was done. As enjoyable a read as Fire and Fury was, the deep irony of the book is that it would likely have received little attention had it not been for the attacks by the Trump Administration. In attempting to st...

One of the joys of being a Middle Earth enthusiast is that, over forty years after the death of J.R.R. Tolkien, new works from his papers continue to be published - a feat remarkable for any author. No matter how regularly this happens, news of a new Tolkien book still manages to surprise as well as delight. My own joy at hearing of the forthcoming publication of Beren and Luthien , edited by Tolkien's son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien, left me quite literally jumping up and down with excitement, to the mild bemusement and possible chagrin of my co-workers. The tale of Beren and Luthien was considered by Tolkien to be one of the most important in his mythology. Beren, a mortal man, encounters and falls in love with the immortal elf Luthien, though their union was forbidden by her father. To win his approval, the two embark on a dangerous quest to retrieve one of the Silmarils, jewels prized by the elves, from the very fortress of their great enemy. The story was o...

Anyone who knows me for more than ten minutes knows of my deep and abiding fondness for dinosaurs. It's a holdover from that phase most children go through, re-ignited during a summer class on the extinct beasts during college. Yet the drawback of being an adult who loves dinosaurs is readily apparent when you visit the shelves of your local library or bookstore. Most dinosaur books published are aimed at a far younger audience than myself, and the books for adults are often more technical works. Imagine my delight in seeing the newest book by John Pickrell waiting to be cataloged at my library! I placed a request for the book as quickly as I could pull out my smart phone, and I was not disappointed! Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew , is an excellent overview of many of the fascinating and bizarre new discoveries, and rediscoveries, of the past decade. A journalist and editor by trade, Pickrell is passionate about dinosaurs, ...

I've long been fascinated by the occupants of the White House, along with the history of slavery in the United States. Given that, a book like Robert Strauss' new biography of James Buchanan,  Worst. President. Ever.,  was going to be a must-read regardless, even if it hadn't been given such a catchy title.  Plenty of ink has been spilled about great men who've held the highest office in the United States. Any reader interested in learning any imaginable minutia about the lives of Lincoln, Washington, and the Roosevelts have hundreds of books to choose from, including multi-volume doorstoppers like Edmund Morris' three volume biography of Teddy Roosevelt, coming in at over two thousand pages. But with forty-four presidents having taken the reins in our two hundred forty year history, inevitably not all come out looking so great. While the current vogue is to label either George W. Bush or Barack Obama as the "Worst President Ever," depending on ...

Science writer Mary Roach is never one to shy away from parts of science that verge on the absurd, as anyone who has read any of her books surely knows. I'd read two of her previous books, and been enchanted enough by Roach's unique combination of endless curiosity and a wry sense of humor that I rushed to lay my hands on her newest book. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War will not fail in living up to the expectations that fans of her work will bring. Those who have never read her before will be hard-pressed to put down a book that I finished in a few short days.  The real joy of reading something by Mary Roach is her talent for seeking out strange areas of science that a reader might never have known about. As an investigator, she answers questions you never knew you had. Her newest work   is no exception. We discover, for instance, how the military tests the ability of a fighter jet to survive a mid-air collision with a large bird--by firing a dead chicken...

It's a rare gift to be able to accessibly present real science to the public. It's even rarer to find someone who does so with an enthusiasm and humor that Mary Roach brings to the table. I picked up a copy of Packing for Mars  on a whim. I'd never heard of the author before, but the premise sounded interesting. Humans evolved to survive the conditions on Earth; what happens, then, when we go into space, a place without air, food, water, or anything else we need? This thought fascinated Roach so much that she spent two years finding out, traveling and interviewing and researching all possible aspects of it. This isn't the glory you see on television, she writes. Far more interesting than the glamour shots of the moon landing are the mundanities that make it all possible. To illustrate her point, she begins with the flag planting ceremony from the moon landing. Months of preparation went into ensuring that a flag would go with the Apollo astronauts; since there is n...

I've always been interested in history, but in high school I found American history to be incredibly boring. It was often presented as a black and white affair, completely scrubbed of any nuance. It was only after discovering the true complexity of our history that I began to find it fascinating, and there are few who portray this complexity as well as historian Joseph Ellis. This meant that his newest book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution , was an immediate must-read. Ellis, the author of numerous other books on U.S. history, takes on the story of how we came to have our Constitution. This development was far from inevitable, he asserts, and would have been an unlikely outcome after the Revolutionary War had it not been for the efforts of four individuals. Washington, future Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Monroe all worked both publicly and behind the scenes to ensure that the Constitution came into being.  Bo...

I was intrigued when I came across a review of a forthcoming book that sought to reconcile the seemingly contradictory legacies of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A few months later, I borrowed a copy and was enthralled by what the author had to say. Greg Grandin, author of well-received books like Fordlandia and Empire of Necessity , tackles the thorny issue of one of the United States' most notorious diplomats in Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman .  Drawing on newly declassified documents, Grandin's portrayal of Kissinger is far from complimentary. While giving him credit for his role in helping to normalize relations with China, and in brokering an arms-reduction treaty with the Soviet Union, the majority of the work zeroes in on acts that were an outgrowth of Kissinger's own philosophy of history, as outlined in his undergraduate thesis. Decline, Kissinger wrote, is not inevitable in a great power, s...

A few weeks ago, I was stuck in the airport, my flight delayed by five hours. While I tend not to read many ebooks myself, on that Friday, however, I was very glad to have remote access to my library's online collection to ease the boredom of the wait and the subsequent flight. Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars was a book that I had meant to read a while ago but never gotten around to, and it proved an engrossing read. Just over a century ago when the nations of Europe declared war on one another, much of the populace broke out into spontaneous celebration. Cheering crowds gathered before the royal palaces in Germany, Russia, and Britain. It was a war that many in Europe had expected for years, war's outbreak an event that had been both feared and longed for. But not everyone was cheering, and it is the dissenters to the war that Hochschild focuses much of his attention on. While men like Rudyard Kipling celebrated the war as heroic, others like Bertrand Russell sp...

Writing in 1928, the economist John Maynard Keynes made the assertion that the progress of technology, and the automation of work, would lead to a point in time where workers would put in about fifteen hours per week, with three hour work days being a normal part of society. Keynes was hardly the only thinker to predict a future of leisure for humanity, where we were freed from the necessity of excessive toil by the machines we created. Yet this future failed to materialize, and it seems that we have even less leisure time than we used to. Why is this? Sociologist Craig Lambert asserts in his new book Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day , that part of the answer is the rise of "shadow work."  The author chooses not to focus on the increasing amount of time Americans are putting in at work, nor an economic system that requires many poorer workers to spread their time across two or three different jobs, but instead on the hidden trends that erode wh...

For anyone interested in human evolution as I am, and the enduring question of why modern humans survived and Neandertals did not, the new book by anthropologist and retired Penn State professor Pat Shipman is an essential read . While the last few years have seen a number of excellent books on the question published, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction ,   brings a new perspective to a diverse array of evidence from ecology, paleoanthropology, and beyond. Shipman begins with her assertion that modern humans are best viewed as the most successful invasive species that our planet has ever seen. Using the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park as an example, she relates the science of what happens to an ecosystem when a new top predator is introduced. Not only does this new species increase competition for limited resources, these invaders often deliberately target their closest competitors, as wolves did with coyotes in Ye...

My first job as a librarian was in the city of Uniontown, the birthplace of George C. Marshall. Reminders of the general's presence were everywhere, from the plaza dedicated to his memory to the portraits that rested in the library, including one hanging directly across from my desk. Two full shelves were dedicated to various biographies of Marshall, all of them laudatory, including one whose very title declared Marshall "A Hero for Our Time." It was then with great interest that I came across a new biography by historians Debi and Irwin Unger, which promised to paint a more balanced picture of the general's life and achievements. While not denying his successes, the authors are quick to point out Marshall's many flaws. While he deserves acclaim for overseeing the military buildup in the war, the training of American soldiers was grotesquely inadequate. Lauded as an exceptional judge of character, the Ungers assert that the real record speaks otherwise. His...

Having been a great fan of Half the Sky , I was very excited when I found out that Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn were coming out with another book, this time focused on how more effective charities can make a real difference around the world. My high expectations were certainly not disappointed, and the authors penned a wide-ranging book that talks about topics from how to better target your charitable giving, how charities can be more effective, and how a multitude of different approaches can effectively help solve many of the seemingly intractable problems around the world. Sometimes we seem to be confronted with problems that are so massive that we believe solutions to be impossible. How can we tackle disease, rampant poverty and illiteracy, sex trafficking, and other problems that affect millions around the world? The very scale of the problems seems to make solutions elusive. But this would be a mistaken perspective. These problems are not only solvable, but they a...

It is remarkable the uses to which the creativity of our species is turned. The same cognitive abilities that create the iPhone and The Odyssey  summon up sarin gas and cluster bombs. It also turns itself to finding a myriad of ways to make alcohol, and this is on display in Amy Stewart's The Drunken Botanist , a natural history that represents a near-exhaustive catalog of all the plants we use to create the drinks that many of us love. If a plant is palatable and non-toxic, someone, somewhere has tried to ferment it.  While there is little of depth in this work, the sheer breadth is remarkable. Starting with the usual suspects we are accustomed to in our booze, from barley and grapes to rye and potatoes, Stewart proceeds to take us on a whirlwind journey through some of the lesser known plants that make an appearance in some of the alcohol we love--and some we may not even consider trying, like sorghum beer, wine made from the nuts of the monkey puzzle tree, or tobac...

There are some books that are downright painful to peruse, books you feel like you should just stop reading at one point, because to keep going on is a bit too much. But, like watching the proverbial train wreck, no matter what you might wish, you simply cannot look away. While the subtitle of the book is "Two Parties and a Funeral--plus plenty of valet parking!-in America's Gilded Capital," it might well be subtitled "It's Even Worse Than You Thought." Leibovich's take-down of Washington D.C.'s political culture would be hard-pressed to be more dispiriting if it tried to be. In spite of Leibovich's humor, even a cynic like myself was even more jaded after reading this book. Truly, no one who garners a mention in the work comes off looking good, from Harry Reid and Barack Obama to Tim Russert and David Gregory.  "This Town," as it is sometimes referred to with a mixture of admiration and disgust, has always been a haven for the...

I admit that I had every intention of skipping this particular book; just reading about it put up a variety of red flags for me, and with so many other books to read I would have been happy to give it a pass. However, I received this as a gift for Christmas, and felt an obligation to read it. I was correct in my misgivings about the book. In fact, George Washington's Secret Six  was even more dreadful than I had anticipated. First, a word about the authors. Neither of the two men who co-wrote the book have any background in history. Brian Kilmeade is a well-known television personality, appearing on the Fox & Friends show on Fox News. Both he and Don Yaeger have a background in sports writing, which is not to say one has to be an historian to write an excellent book on a historical topic. Many non-historians have written great books about historical topics, but Kilmeade and Yaeger are not likely to be counted among them. In their amateurish hands, a story that should b...

A few weeks ago in a nearby Barnes & Noble, I intended to be conservative in my spending. After all, I have plenty of books I already own and haven't read, and working in a library means I have access to hundreds more I might want to read. Seeing Donald Prothero's new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future immediately overcame my resistance. Prothero, a geologist by training, has written a range of books, including a number that are highly regarded, including his 2007 book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, a thorough debunking of creationist arguments about geology and fossils. Reality Check  touches again on creationism, but the larger thrust of the work is an attack on a variety of un-scientific rubbish that has a stranglehold on the minds of many and threatens our very future. From climate change denial and creationism to anti-vaccine activists and those who deny the reality of the finite nature of fossils fuels, Prothero tackl...

In pulling together the non-fiction order for my library, I was browsing a number of new titles when I came across one very intriguing book. After it arrived at our library, I took a closer look at what I judged would either be a fascinating work or an overblown bit of malarky. Fortunately for me, as well as a number of patrons who have checked it out after me, it was the former rather than the latter. The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler is a striking work of excellent scholarship charting the actions that a number of the major Hollywood movie studios took to ensure that their films would still be shown in Germany after the rise of the Nazis.  While "collaboration" might be too strong a word, the studios were certainly willing to accommodate the objections, and potential objections, that German censors made about certain films. Using material that survives in German archives, Ben Urwand traces the evolution of the relationship between the film executi...