During the 2004 Democratic Convention Barack Obama burst onto the US national political scene with a speech that included this line: “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country [...]
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I have mentioned Nancy Yanes Hoffman’s Writing Doctor’s Blog several times in the past. She has graciously allowed me to quote from her recent review of WHEN DOCTORS BECOME PATIENTS by Robert Klitzman.
When Harcourt bought CHANGE OF HEART: The Bypass Experience, my book interviewing 1100 veterans of coronary bypass surgery, I was elated. Flush [...]
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If you love horror with lots of gore and violence, Scott Sigler’s book Infected: A Novel will be worth checking out. It has been available as a free podcast for some time, but today mark’s its hard cover debut. I am joining the podcasting community in buying my copy today (which I intend to [...]
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How does a green intern become a “real” doctor? I can tell you from personal experience that it is a very gradual process made up of many steps. Some of them are small and later forgotten, while others stay in one’s mind years after the details of the events have faded. For me, one such [...]
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I bought a DVD of the recent documentary, Flock of Dodos, after hearing director Randy Olson interviewed on Skepticality. What sets this film apart is both its sense of humor and its balance. Olson allows people on both sides of the evolution versus intelligent design controversy to speak for themselves. While he makes his position [...]
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Although I am a huge fan of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly/Serenity, I have never really gotten into fan fiction, but I am making an exception for the new audio drama, Buffy Between the Lines, which debuted earlier this month. The story is set between the end of season 5 and [...]
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Those of you familiar with Orson Scott Card’s long-running Ender series know that he has an unusual interest in history and how it shapes political events. In his latest novel, Empire, the assassination of the US president and vice-president lead to a civil war between the extreme right wing and the extreme left wing. The [...]
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by Rory Stewart
Rory Stewart is a Scottsman who walked across Afghanistan shortly after the US invasion in 2002. I listened to the audio version, which he reads himself. Like The Kite Runner, another excellent book about Afghanistan, this book is best in audio because he pronounces all those words that I would be clueless [...]
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The Children of Men by PD James was actually published back in 1993 and the story is set in 2021. The basic premise is that no human babies have been born since 1995 (for 25 years). This is an interesting premise, but the book was disappointing. Obviously such an situation would would have many [...]
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This was one of the most memorable novels I have read in the last few years.The narrator, Jacob, is “ninety or ninety-three” and lives in a nursing home. The arrival of the circus next store leads him to reflect on his experiences working on a circus during the depression. I have never been to the [...]
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