Stay Vivid

 Hello Bright People,  Book 17: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women (5/10) Premise: Factory workers in the early 1900's work with Radium not knowing it's dangers, and the legal and medical ramifications.  It is almost impossible to get Radium in 2021. At least according to 5 minutes of Googling. You can get an old watch hand that was painted with radium but that's basically it unless you are working in the science or medical fields. However in the early 1900's after the Curies' discovered the element there was a huge craze for this radioactive element. People would use it as lotion, consume it, and as is the focus of this story, use it to make watch faces and dials glow.  Radium girls would use a paint brush to use a mixture of radium and other components to make the 'paint' for the watch faces. However these paint brushes would start to splay so the girls would lick them to get them to a sharp point again. "Lip, dip, paint...

 Hello Wonderful People,  Book 16: Humankind: A Hopeful History (9/10) Premise: Humans are much more kind then we give ourselves credit for, and many horrific things we've heard, are either carefully trimmed or completely false.  Rutger Bregman brings a breath of fresh air to the world of Social Sciences. So lets dive right in. " Lord of the Flies " is often considered a realistic, however the one time Bregman could find that young boys actually were marooned on an island for an extended period of time the exact opposite happened. The boys who were stuck on Ata island were kind, helped each other, and dealt with arguing in a way to prevent fighting.  The Stanford Prison experiment,  that horrendous show of how humans can quickly devolve when people get the smallest bit of authority. A staged play more than an experiment according to the students who participated, the guards forced to behave poorly, the prisoners acting for the experiment. The creator of the expe...

 Hello Horror Fans,  Book 15: The Institute (8/10) Premise: An Ex-Cop following his intuition, a young boy genius, and an hidden organization who kidnaps children for an unknown reason.   The story line of this book is not very different than many other YA novels out there. It heavily falls into the mystery/thriller categories and skirts around horror. Stephen King is one of the best world builders out there in my opinion. I often get drawn into his books, especially the longer novels. King doesn't over do description or metaphors, he knows the line to draw to make you feel like you are there without having you read pages upon pages of descriptions of mundane things.  I really enjoyed this book, but I have the same gripe as I did with "Under the Dome", to a much lesser extent. The story is pedal to the metal the entire way through, and then it feels like King ran out of steam and the story just fizzles out. The difference is "Under the Dome" is the story sharply...

 Hello Nature Lovers,  Book 14: The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things - Stories from Science and Observation. (7/10) Premise: How changes in nature create a ripple affect to the ecosystem around it, and how humans often do not realize how they are affecting the environment when they introduce or remove a species.  Peter Wohlleben takes care of a forest in Germany, and also spends a ton of time looking into what make the ecosystem tick. According to Wohlleben " We don't really understand how the clockwork of nature functions, and as long as we don't, we shouldn't try to fix it". A large portion of this book is set on the domino effect of how humans interacting with certain things can have large effects we could never have dreamed of.     Wohlleben starts this book by talking about one of the most common stories in how human inadvertently affect nature. How removing the wolves from Yellow Stone park ch...

 Hello Renters and Homeowners,  Book 13: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (9/10) Premise: Follow 8 Families, Landlords and Renters around the City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, through new apartments, evictions, and homelessness.  The people in this book do not share a certain age range, ethnicity, economic background, or academic background. They range from just 18 to well past retirement age. From people with careers to those who live off the government. It's diverse in it's cast, but heavily focus's on landlords who find it common to evict tenets, and tenets who are getting evicted. The author, Matthew Desmond, also scatters in numerous references to social, ecological, and racial studies on how they effect tenets who struggle just to pay rent. Milwaukee was (and most likely still is) a racially divided city in many ways with people choosing to stay around people of their own ethnicity rather than look for places to stay in other parts of town. Sometimes thi...

 Hello Healthy Humans,  Book 12: Fevers, Feuds, And Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History (6.5/10) Premise: An on the ground account of fighting the Ebola epidemic of 2014, and a history of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia.  Paul Farmer has spent more than 30 years working to combat viral outbreaks and help in medical oasis's. In the first half of the book Farmer gives his first hand account of the ravages of Ebola, it's affects on individuals he treated, and many people he met along the way. Farmer like other boot on the ground doctors see's the ravages of Ebola, along with a slew doctors, nurses, and medical professionals catch and die from Ebola simply because of lack of proper equipment to safely treat the patients. Spending most of his time in-between Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. This section falls heavily under Fevers This book reminded me a lot of the reverse of The Idealist By Nina Munk, who was also working in Africa around the same time. In the Ideal...

 Hello Hockey Fans,  Book 11: Tough Guy: My Life on the Edge (8/10) Premise: The (mostly) autobiography of Bob Probert, famous NHL enforcer. From his youth to his death.  Bob (Robert) Probert [ 'pro'-'BURT' pro: 'o' in pro is  pronounced  as 'o' in "pros"]  has gone down in history as one of the most famous enforcers in NHL History. In this story Probert sits down and discusses his career, family, fame, and addiction. While reading the book it feels more like you're sitting on a front porch talking to him over a few beers then flipping through the pages of a book. The style is very conversational which in many ways makes the reader feel more forgiving for some of the crimes and other immoral acts he committed.  From a hockey fans (guilty) point of view this book was a fascinating first hand account of the golden days and eventual decline of the enforcer (sometimes called 'Goons') in the National Hockey League. An enforcer was put on...