Nature is Beautiful That Way

The motto of the academic health system in my community is, “In Science Lives Hope.” Walter Isaacson’s book, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, affirms that assertion. Isaacson said that the three great revolutions of modern times are the discoveries of the three fundamental kernels of our

Find the Beautiful

Bill Bryson’s book, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, provided lots of interesting stories—anecdotal and historical—about a number of Britain’s small towns as he drove, walked and rode from the southern coast of the island to its northern tip. He said, “One of the things that I really, really like

What America Might Look Like

A Promised Land, the most recent of Barack Obama’s multiple memoirs, naturally provided lots of inside perspectives on familiar aspects and episodes from his background, campaigns and terms as President. The last event he described was the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and the lack of personal satisfaction he might have expected it

Far Less Attention

In his 1999 book, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Michael Hiltzik said that “a certain quality [was] possessed by [the Palo Alto Research Center] in its extraordinary early years”: Magic. And it was the source of multiple seminal technologies including the laser printer, Ethernet and object-oriented programming. Malcolm

Networks of Ideas

Steven Johnson’s book, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, and its companion PBS and BBC series, examined the largely unplanned roles played in our lives by: Glass—”A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress.” Cold—”Our mastery of cold is helping to reorganize settlement patterns all

The Invention of Surgery

For 1,500 years, medical practice in the Western and Arab worlds, such as it was, was dominated by the doctrines of two ancient Greeks: Hippocrates and Galen, who explained the inner workings of the body with the theory of the four humors. But in his book, The Invention of Surgery: A History of Modern Medicine:

Remarkably Cheerful and Well Adjusted

More than ten years ago, Swedish journalist and writer Stieg Larsson made a splash with his book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It was the first of three books—known as the Millennium trilogy—which have sold over 70 million copies. “The books,” according to Charles McGrath of The New York Times Magazine, “introduce us to

A Commitment to Freedom

Russell Shorto, senior scholar at the New Netherland Institute, writes and talks about America’s Dutch roots. The Island at the Center of the World is his history of Dutch Manhattan, “the founding colony that shaped America.” He said that his book, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, is about a place and

Tut, Tut, Looks Like Rain

Weather forecasts have been a given for so long—in newspapers, on radio and television, on mobile devices—that it’s hard to imagine daily life without them. But “in 1800 the weather remained a mystery,” said Peter Moore. In his book, The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future, Moore described how—between 1800 and

Be simply yourself

Both of my sons have their birthdays this season, so pondering their lives is normal for me at this time. In his biography of Ulysses Grant, Ron Chernow said when Grant’s second son, Buck, entered Harvard University, the President shared “as close to a statement of his philosophy as Grant ever came up with for