What are you currently reading?

Started by facehugger, April 07, 2007, 12:36:10 AM

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Anne

Quote from: SonicMan on September 25, 2007, 07:14:08 AM
The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery (2006) by Wendy Moore - story of the British (born in Scotland) anatomist & surgeon, John Hunter - CLICK on the image, if interested, for more details -  :)


The Knife Man is a great book.  Thanks to GMG being down, I have finished it already.

Sonic Man, keep 'em coming.  I'm catching up to you.  LOL!

SonicMan46

Quote from: Anne on October 02, 2007, 05:56:31 PM
The Knife Man is a great book.  Thanks to GMG being down, I have finished it already.

Sonic Man, keep 'em coming.  I'm catching up to you.  LOL!

Anne - glad you loved the book!  :D  I still have not finished it (reading several others including a BIG one on Windows VISTA - just got a new laptop - a necessity!) - all of the chapters are great, but loved the one on the 'Irish Giant' - being a physician, myself, I'm sure that I could have easily related to (and adored) John Hunter!  Dave

Anne

I think the feet of the "Irish Giant" are on the front cover.

On AOL this week there was a picture of a current giant (might have been 8 ft tall) in a crowd in China.  I have seen his picture before.  Have you?


SonicMan46

Quote from: Anne on October 02, 2007, 06:50:42 PM
I think the feet of the "Irish Giant" are on the front cover.

On AOL this week there was a picture of a current giant (might have been 8 ft tall) in a crowd in China.  I have seen his picture before.  Have you?

Still in my office - will need to check the front cover of the book tonight; assume you mean the Chinese Giant shown below (left)?  Yes, I've seen him in the news a number of times!  :o

Another interesting 'giant' is Sun Ming Ming, a 7'9" NBA player - he had a residual pituitary tumor that was treated at Wake Forest University Med Ctr (where I'm a Professor of Radiology) w/ the miraculous 'Gamma Knife' - check out the news story HERE:D

 

carlos

"WALLIS, Secret lives of the the Duchess of Windsor", Charles Higham,
1988. IMO the definitive story of that women and Edward.
What a couple!. He was an egotist,corrupt,stupid and masochist
bisexual. She was a professional prostitute, a nazi, a sadist and
one of the most evil women in the history.
Every other people but those two, would have been hanged for
treason. She got pregnant by Ribbenttrop. >:( >:( >:(
Piantale a la leche hermano, que eso arruina el corazón! (from a tango's letter)

Anne

#605
Yes, I was referring to the giant on the left.

That was a very interesting story about Sun Ming Ming.  Thanks for posting it.

BTW I hadn't noticed it before but The Knife Man received 5 stars at Amazon.  I'd give it 5 stars too.

Lady Chatterley

Hateship,Friendship,Courtship,Loveship,Marriage,Short Stories by Alice Munro.

uffeviking

I always have been wondering about the title of this thread and avoided reading and posting. If what I am reading is not good, why would I continue reading it or even mention it on a forum?

OK, first try: Die Rättin - The Rat - by Günter Grass. About Noah, a rat turd and the survival of rats through all the world's historic events.

sidoze



enjoying this--if you can say that about this sort of literature--even more than Borowski (which I thought was superb).

bwv 1080

Just finished William Bernstein's The Birth of Plenty, which is a well written popular history of what is really the greatest story in human history - how the West got wealthy.  Consider that per world capita GDP growth was essentially zero from the birth of Christ to the 18th century, the idea that most people can have a life beyond wretched poverty is a quite recent one.

The whole first chapter is here

http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/404/CH1.HTM

QuoteCHAPTER ONE
    A Hypothesis of Wealth

                The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
                —Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party

It's all too tempting to lament the state of the world, particularly when you focus on the melodramas of mankind—violent conflicts, large-scale malfeasance and failure, and the latest installments in the age-old racial and religious hatreds that permeate the human story.

A paragon of such fashionable pessimism has been journalist Anthony Lewis, who, at the end of a long and distinguished career, was asked whether the world had gotten to be a better place since he had begun covering it a half century earlier:

I have lost my faith in the ideal of progress. I mean that in the sense that it was used at the beginning of the twentieth century, that mankind is getting wiser and better and all—how, how can you think that after Rwanda and Bosnia and a dozen other places where these horrors have occurred?1

Mr. Lewis' problem is that his subjective criterion—that mankind has not achieved moral perfection as defined in Ivy League universities and the editorial suites of the New York Times—sets the bar too high. Mr. Lewis seems unaware that we can measure the welfare of mankind; in fact, we can do it superbly. Contrary to his gloomy impressions, the second half of the twentieth century was far less murderous than the first. Further, the proportion of the world's population subjected to totalitarianism, genocide, starvation, war, and pestilence has been steadily decreasing over the past two centuries, with most of the improvement coming in the half century that so depressed Mr. Lewis.

Consider that from 1950 to 1999, average life expectancy in the developed world increased from 66 years to 78 years; in the developing world, it increased from 44 years to 64 years. The nearly universal Western outcome of living to old age, rather than resulting from the rare stroke of luck, may be the greatest accomplishment of the past fifty years. Or consider that over the same period, the world's real per capita gross domestic product (GDP)—the amount of goods and services produced by the average person, adjusted for inflation—nearly tripled. Or that by the year 2000, real per capita GDP in Mexico was significantly greater than that of the world leader in 1900, Great Britain. And if you're not impressed with mankind's material progress in the last fifty years, as measured in dollars and cents, you should at least note that almost any measure of social progress you wish to examine—infant mortality, literacy and mortality rates, or educational levels—has dramatically improved in all but a few still-benighted corners of the planet.2

val

Stephen Jay GOULD:  "Wonderful Life"

A fascinating book, denying that the theory of evolution implies any notion of progress. Gould develops this argument latter, in his last work, "Structure of the Theory of Evolution".

Kullervo

Quote from: sidoze on October 03, 2007, 04:43:33 PM


enjoying this--if you can say that about this sort of literature--even more than Borowski (which I thought was superb).

Like the new avatar. :)

sidoze

me too. i will try to watch it again this weekend. I still can't believe how amazing it is.

Lilas Pastia

Quote from: Corey on October 02, 2007, 04:19:27 PM


A great novel, and Mann's entry for the Nobel sweepstakes. He was to elaborate on his favourite themes (at much greater lengths) in The Magic Mountain, but it's an excellent entry point in Mann's world.

Florestan



Leo Perutz - The Swedish Cavalier

I've read only a few pages so far and it looks quite interesting and well-written.



Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Kullervo

Quote from: Lilas Pastia on October 05, 2007, 05:01:02 PM
A great novel, and Mann's entry for the Nobel sweepstakes. He was to elaborate on his favourite themes (at much greater lengths) in The Magic Mountain, but it's an excellent entry point in Mann's world.

Thanks for the recommendation. I've already read some of his short stories (Little Herr Friedemann and Death in Venice, which is one of my absolute favorites now).

Danny

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor.  An excellent collection of short stories so far.

Lady Chatterley

Eats,Shoots and Leaves. Very funny it is too.

AnthonyAthletic

P J Tracy

Just finishing their second book, about to read Dead Run (3rd).

Usual Serial Killer stuff, decent yarns, good characters and twists to boot  ;)


"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying"      (Arthur C. Clarke)

longears

Quote from: Danny on October 06, 2007, 12:07:02 PM
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor.  An excellent collection of short stories so far.

The best.  Might I suggest Ray Carver next?