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 19th and
20th 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.
