OSBR #52: Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
The first half of this book will help you understand how the illusion that your conscious brain is the seat of decision-making actually works; the second half of this book […]
OSBR #51: Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzanipa
After a fascinating overview of quantum theory and split-brain studies, Gazzaniga slides into a series of conclusions, many of which are unsupported or even disproved by the same research he […]
OSBR #48: Women’s Anatomy of Arousal: Secret Maps to Buried Treasure by Sheri Winston
I should have known by the subtitle that whatever information I got from this book would be buried in a multitude of tone-deaf (and sometimes conflicting) analogies written in an […]
OSBR #45: Vagina: A Cultural History by Naomi Wolf
As Wolf piled unsupportable assertions on top of interesting facts, I wished she’d been better able to discern the difference between her feelings and, well, science.
OSBR #43: The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking medicine’s deepest mystery by George Johnson
The only thing “unlocked” in this book that combines basic cancer information with a bland re-telling of his ex-wife’s cancer journey is my curiosity about why she divorced him.
OSBR #40: Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan
The story of a white Seattleite who took it upon himself to record every piece of American Indian tradition (including over 40,000 photographs, 10,000 songs, language guides and ceremonies) that […]
OSBR #33: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their journey by Isabel Fonseca
With vivid descriptions that had me reading sentences out loud, Fonseca’s anthropologically-activist book situates itself in particularly violent, post-Soviet period to explore the culture and history of the Romani people […]
OSBR #32: Whipping Girl: A transexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity by Julia Serano
I loved the Part I of this book, in which Serano builds a passionate and cogent theory of transexuality, the feminine, sexism and cis-sexism via an academic review of the […]
OSBR #30: Unaccountable: What hospitals won’t tell you and how transparency can revolutionaize healthcare by Marty Makary, MD
If hospitals gathered and made public data on things like infection rates, accidents, and whether nurses think that there is a spirit of teamwork, most of us would refuse to […]
OSBR #27: Bringing up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman
The hell with “freedom fries” – if I ever get pregnant, I’m moving to France, where people are reasonable.