Read Harder Challenge: Solar System, Professor and the Madman, Lives They Left Behind

Reviews by Ambrea

I have three more books to add to my list for the Read Harder Challenge:

1.      Read a nonfiction book about science.

2.      Read a book originally published in the decade you were born.

3.      Read a book with a main character that has a mental illness.

First on my list is How to Read the Solar System:  A Guide to the Stars and Planets by Chris North and Paul Abel, who host The Sky at Night on BBC.  I’m actually really glad I finished this book, because it offered me insight into the solar system that I simply didn’t have prior to reading North and Abel’s collaborative book.  While it is a bit dry and quite dense, I should point out that How to Read the Solar System is not a bad book.

I mean, I was sometimes very bored with the book when the authors went into great detail about how amateur astronomers should find a specific location in space—like how to find a particular moon by Jupiter, or which filter to use in order to observe the sun (helpful, if I understood where one might find such filters.  Or if my telescope worked properly), or pinpointing the exact degree to which one might adjust a telescope to find Venus—and I found myself losing interest.  Quickly.

I’m not saying it wasn’t a good book.  I learned something interesting about each of the planets and all the different heavenly bodies that inhabit space, which was an important aspect of reading this book.  For instance, I learned that Io, one of Jupiter’s many moons, has tectonic activity (specifically cryovolcanic activity, since it’s an icy wasteland); sound waves travel faster through plasma, which gives scientists the opportunity to measure the internal activity of the sun (since it’s made up of plasma); and meteor showers are essentially the debris left behind by comets, like a dust storm that the Earth passes through during its orbit.

I enjoyed actually learning something new, even if it’s not quite as useful as one might hope.  Like I said, it’s not a bad book.  Just a little dry and dense and, dare I say it, pedantic.  It’s not something I would read twice, but it’s a vast well of information that’s sure to hold appeal for readers who greatly enjoy science, astronomy, technology, and even mathematics.  It’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re curious about the solar system and the explorations humankind has made.  More importantly, it gets points in my book for having an index, so I was able to easily look up the most intriguing bits of information.

Next, I looked at The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, which was more in line with my purview.  Titled The Surgeon of Crowthorne when it was originally published in Britain, Winchester’s book underwent a slight change when it migrated over to the United States, becoming The Professor and the Madman—which was accompanied by the glorious subtitle, A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.  I mean, how could I not be the tiniest bit enticed?

The Professor and the Madman is a story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (otherwise known as the OED), specifically one of the most prolific contributors in its history:  Dr. William Chester Minor.  Minor was a surgeon during the American Civil War, who traveled to England and, eventually, found himself convicted of murder and put into a sanitarium; however, during his stint at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, he stumbled across a call for contributors to the OED.  After contacting Professor James Murray, who oversaw the entire project, he began to offer definitions, quotations, and etymology slips for the OED.  He send thousands of paper slips to Oxford, before his death in 1920, and he quickly became one of their most productive contributors.

As crazy as it might seem, it’s all very true.

Like Eric Larson—who has written Devil in the White City, Dead Wake, and Thunderstruck—Winchester has a narrative quality to his work that makes it appealing without compromising the facts of history.  Winchester pulls from a variety of resources, including medical documents from Broadmoor, correspondence between Professor Murray and Dr. Minor and others involved in the OED, as well as several historical texts.  He uses information to benefit the story, supplying an electrifying narrative while, simultaneously, feeding its readers the true and unaltered facts.  It’s all very, very good, and I highly recommend it.

As for my final book, I read The Lives They Left Behind:  Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic by Darby Penney and Peter Stastny.  Although I suspect this final category, which recommends reading a book with a main character who has a mental illness, is referring to a fictional novel rather than a nonfiction narrative, I decided to run with ambiguous wording and read something not about one character with a mental illness, but ten.

The Lives They Left Behind explores the lives of Willard State Hospital patients who were admitted to the hospital during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.  Penney and Stastny provide an in-depth look at some of the permanent residents at Willard, as well as offer a glimpse at the big picture of mental/psychiatric care during its most formative years.  The book also provides photographs and illustrations that further illuminate the care patients received, and what sort of trials they went through with their mental illness—or perceived mental illness.

Altogether, I found it to be a fascinating book.  It’s an examination of psychiatric care that provides history and statistics, which can prove to be a bit dull, but it also connects on an emotional level and delivers nuggets of truth that are sometimes like a punch in the gut.  It’s a tough read sometimes.  For instance, I had a hard time reading about the electroshock therapy that often caused patients to have convulsions, or the medications which were prescribed that often did more harm than good—or, worse, how some patients were treated even if they didn’t suffer from a psychiatric disease.

Patients, like Ethel Smalls or Margaret Dunleavy, were most likely suffering from other conditions rather than a mental disorder.  Ethel Smalls likely suffered from PTSD after losing her children and spending years on the receiving end of her husband’s temper, enduring years of abuse that left her in a fragile state.  Likewise, Margaret Dunleavy was hospitalized after an uncharacteristic outburst due to a personal tragedy and chronic, debilitating pain.  Neither woman displayed the usual characteristics of a mental disorder, rather they were hospitalized because they were inconvenient.  It’s a heartbreaking fact that gives the book an undercurrent of tragedy that shocked me.

Nevermore: First Ladies, Appalachians, Still Alice, Lives Left Behind, and One Second After

This week, our Nevermore readers decided to revisit First Ladies:  Presidential Histories on the Lives of 45 Iconic American Women by Susan Swain.  Based on a yearlong C-SPAN history series, which featured interviews with fifty of the nation’s most prominent histories and biographers, First Ladies offers an intimate and insightful look at the lives of the presidential ladies.  It looks deeply into their lives, scrutinizing the social expectations they faced and the changes they made, and provides a close-up historical look at some of the most fascinating women in the country.  Our Nevermore reader said it was a fascinating book.  He liked that it gave him unexpected insight into the lives of these women—such as how Eleanor Roosevelt established the precedent of first ladies having a cause to support, or how Mary Todd Lincoln was confined to an asylum for a number of years, or how Ida Saxton McKinley was subject to epileptic fits and her husband would carry a handkerchief to cover her face—and he highly recommended it to other readers.

Next, our readers discussed Mountains of the Heart:  A Natural History of the Appalachians by Scott Weidensaul.  Weidensaul, who has spent a number of years as a naturalist, studied the geology, ecology, climate, evolution, and history of the Appalachian Mountains.  His book offers unrivaled insight into history and significance of Appalachia—and its people.  Reading the 20^th anniversary edition of Weidensaul’s work, our Nevermore reader greatly enjoyed reading Mountains of the Heart—and he even went out and bought his own copy.  One of the best qualities of this book, he said, was that Weidensaul falls in love with Appalachia.  He pours out his love for the mountains onto the page, telling readers about the qualities that make the area so extraordinary.  It’s obvious the author loves his work and loves the local area, and it’s a refreshing experience.

Our Nevermore group also looked at Still Alice, a novel by Lisa Genova.  Alice Howland is a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics.  She’s proud of the life, the reputation, the family she’s managed to build; however, when Alice finds herself becoming disoriented and incredibly forgetful, she discovers she has Alzheimer’s disease—a diagnosis that will change her life forever.  Our reader said Still Alice was a heartbreakingly beautiful novel.  “It’s very good, very moving,” she said, because it offers insight into the progression of a disease that affects millions of individuals and families.  It’s a tragic story that’s sometimes difficult to read, on emotional level, but it’s a wonderful novel with a poignant story that’s sure to make an impact.

Additionally, our Nevermore readers looked at The Lives They Left Behind:  Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic by Darby Penney and Peter Stastny.  Willard Psychiatric Center in New York—alternatively known as Willard Asylum and Willard State Hospital—closed its doors after more than a century in use.  More than 50,000 patients were admitted to Willard since its creation in 1869, and nearly half of the individuals who stepped through their doors died there.  In this poignant, jarring biography, Stastny and Penney explore the lives of Willard’s patients, examining the suitcases that were found when Willard closed in 1995 and offering insight into the lives of patients who were devastatingly stripped of their identities after their subsequent admission to the hospital.  Our reader found The Lives They Left Behind to be a fascinating book, because it offered such a wealth of information and, more importantly, portraits of patients, offering an in-depth social history of the patients who sometimes spent their entire lives at Willard.  She continued, saying it was a great book for anyone interested in the history of psychiatry and the medical/mental health profession.

Last, Nevermore explored One Second After by William R. Forstchen, a local author from Asheville, North Carolina.  John Matherson is content with his life:  he has a job he enjoys, two wonderful daughters, and a community that could rival a Norman Rockwell painting.  And then power mysteriously goes out—along with phones, internet service, and every technology-reliant device.  An Electro Magnetic Pulse, an EMP, has put the lights out across the entire country, leaving the United States in the dark.  That leaves John with some tough decisions to make for his family, especially since his youngest daughter, Jennifer, is a Type 1 diabetic and his community is on the precipice of disaster.  Our reader was pleasantly surprised by Forstchen’s novel, calling it a very interesting survival story.  Although she’d only finished approximately half of One Second After—and she wasn’t entirely sure where the story would lead—she was excited to read more.