Two of the best and most interesting books I’ve read in the last year–Lost in Shangri-La and Frozen in Time –are both tales of harrowing and dangerous rescues set during World War II. Both involve the rescue of survivors of crashed airplanes–from the one of the last unexplored jungles of the world and the other from […]
Fear on the rise in our literature
April 6, 2013 by
Could we be using fewer words associated with happiness and joy and more associated with fear in recent decades? With Google digitization of hundreds of years of literature, British anthropologists are mapping the rise and fall of “emotion” words through history, says an NPR story. This effort began simply with lists of “emotion” words: 146 […]
Review | The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
April 5, 2013 by
In the author’s note to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee notes that “Cancer is not one disease, but many diseases.” It anticipates Mukherjee’s history, a look at cancer starting in the ages and proceeding forward to the modern-day. It’s a 4,000 year history, and Mukherjee tells it well. The tale, […]
Review | Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
April 4, 2013 by
By all accounts, anything written by David Graeber is about as far from typical “conservative” fare that you might expect to find featured on this site. Graeber is an anthropologist and anarchist, an early member of the Occupy Wall Stree movement. He’s so “out there” that even Yale decided not to renew his contract as an assistant […]
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