Book Review: Malcolm Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point

Over the Thanksgiving break, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point.  When his original Tipping Point book celebrated its 25th birthday, the author decided to revisit some of those stories and correct some things he got wrong.  Instead, he wrote about some entirely new topics, several of which may be of interest to Health Science Librarians, including:

• How the Opioid Epidemic disproportionately affected certain areas of the US, and why?
• How a certain (very few) Prescribers are more susceptible to the undue influence of drug sales reps?
• Why parents with children in Waldorf schools are more likely NOT to get their kids vaccinated?
• How the local culture of a place affects behavior?
• Is teen suicide contagious?   And what factors can protect against it?

He covered a lot more than this short list -- In fact, it's amazing what he ties together.  This is just what I'm remembering off the top of my head a week later.

I borrowed the audiobook from my local public library and listened to it through the Libby App.  It was free, and they let me check it out for 21 days, rather than the previous default of just 7 days.  

How to Love Your Daughter [book review]

 Thank you to Robert Koehler for this book review. Listen to a sample of the audiobook here. 

Book review: The Wall

 Thank you to Robert Koehler for this book review. 

Book review: Brotherless Night

Thank you to Mini Prasad for this book review. Robert Koehler shared his review of this title in January 2024. 

Book review: Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

 Thank you to Robert Koehler for this book review. 

Book Review: All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days : The True Story Of The American Woman At The Heart Of The German Resistance To Hitler / Rebecca Donner

All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days : The True Story Of The American Woman At The Heart Of The German Resistance To Hitler 

by Rebecca Donner

Book Review by Robert Koehler, 

Medical Librarian at Unity Point Health-Meriter

Milwaukee-born Mildred Harnack (nee Fish) met Arvid Harnack in 1926 when both were students at the University of Wisconsin.  Arvid was a German student studying on a fellowship in Madison.  After a brief engagement, they married, and in 1928, Mildred moved to Germany to live with her husband.  Based in Berlin, she spent a number of years working as a professor and translator, and, along with Arvid, involved herself in political activism.  With the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, they began to recruit other like-minded individuals into an underground resistance group.  Led by Mildred and her husband, they remained active from 1932 to 1942 when its members were finally rounded up and arrested by the Gestapo.

Over the years, the group distributed pamphlets urging resistance against the Nazi government, gathered intelligence to share with the American and Russian spy agencies, and helped Jews to escape Germany.  To do so, members of the group (including Arvid) took jobs in different German agencies where they stole information to help bring down the regime.  Mildred did the same by tutoring German soldiers needing to learn English for their duties.  During this time, she also actively provided information to the American embassy in Berlin.  

Rebecca Donner is the great-great-niece of Mildred, and because of this connection, she had access to her family letters.  To flesh out the story of Mildred’s activities in Germany, Donner hunted down the letters, notes and memoirs from the collaborators working in the Resistance group.  She also plumbed the archival records of the German, Russian, and U.S. governments.  And what a fantastic story she tells, one of great courage against overwhelming odds of discovery.  After the members were arrested in 1942, they underwent torture and were later put on trial, with most receiving death sentences.  Mildred was beheaded by guillotine in 1943.  

Mildred Harnack’s story is not well known in this country.  One reason for this is that the United States government took pains to bury it, under the impression that both Mildred and her husband were Communist agents.  Donner includes individual photographs of the members of the group taken after their arrest.  While haunting, they are a testimony to their bravery in a country where opposing the Nazis was more than likely a death sentence.  This book not only acknowledges Mildred’s Resistance activities, but honors them.

Book review: Papyrus : The Invention Of Books In The Ancient World by Irene Vallejo

 Thank you to Robert Koehler for this book review of Papyrus : The Invention Of Books In The Ancient World by Irene Vallejo.

Book review: American Sirens : The Incredible Story Of The Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics

Thank you to Robert Koehler for submitting this book review. 

American Sirens : The Incredible Story Of The Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics  by Kevin Hazzard

Before the early 1970s, there were few ambulance companies in this country, and almost none that featured trained personnel.  If someone had an emergency, most often the call was answered by the police, who had no medical training.  They would simply put the individual, unsupervised, into an unequipped ambulance and race off to the nearest hospital.  One well known physician, a Pittsburgh anesthesiologist renowned for developing CPR, decided that what this country needed were trained paramedics who could deliver care immediately when summoned to a medical emergency.

This physician, Peter Safar, had one problem, though; no one in Pittsburgh’s government was interested in his proposal, preferring the cheaper status quo.  Undeterred, in 1967 he approached Freedom House, an organization set up to help meet the medical needs of the city’s Black community, and convinced them to help him recruit Black men whom he could educate to become the country’s first paramedics.  Once fully trained, these sixty-some individuals became members of Freedom House Ambulance Service, working in Pittsburgh’s predominately Black Hill area.

In Kevin Hazzard’s engaging page turner, American Sirens, he profiles a number of the individuals who received their training under Safar, and the continued racism they faced while providing services in the years before Freedom House Ambulance Service was finally disbanded and blended into a city-wide service employing the blueprint perfected by these trained paramedics.  Also featured is Nancy Caroline, the young physician who became the Medical Director of Freedom House’s program.  She would later write a textbook, Emergency Care In The Streets, that became the go-to reference used in developing EMS programs across the country.  American Sirens is a captivating read about how these pioneers transformed health care in the United States.

Book review

Thanks to WHSLA member Robert Koehler for writing this book review:

The Lover’s Dictionary / David Levithan

The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan constructs a couple’s romance in the form of a dictionary.  Each defined word relates to the narrator describing his lover and their relationship together.  The definitions are fairly concise, often just a paragraph, rarely longer than a page, and yet by the end of the novel the reader has a clear mental picture of the couple.  

Through the use of the definitions, the mundane elements and the transcendent moments of the couple’s relationship are highlighted.  In a nonlinear fashion, it presents how the couple meet through a dating app and their eventual decision to join two separate lives into one.  Ultimately, each word the narrator chooses represents the negotiations that take place to overcome pitfalls which all couples face.  In this dictionary, love is a rocky road where living happily ever after is never a straight and easy path to follow.

This is a unique novel that wowed me from beginning to end.  The narrator’s A to Z definitions present a very personal story, but one that is universal as well.  It is a book short enough to be read in a single sitting.  But the reader may find themselves pondering how each word invokes thoughtful consideration on their own experiences in the matter of love, so it can take days to leisurely digest.  It is a novel worth savoring one definition at a time.

Book Review: The Master and Margarita

 Mikhail Bulgakov, a well-known Russian author, began his novel, The Master and Margarita, in 1928 but did not complete the manuscript until 1940.  Even then, knowing it would offend censors in Stalin’s Russia, the author chose to keep the book under wraps, not wanting to run afoul of a backlash from the government.  It was finally smuggled out to the West and published after the author’s death in 1966.  Since then, it has been acknowledged as one of best novels of the 20th century.  

That accolade is well deserved.  It is an enchanting book that describes what happens when Satan, in the disguise of a character named Wolan, visits Moscow with his minions in the 1930s.  What follows is easily guessed, with all hell breaking loose.  The story has two parallel tracks, describing the havoc caused by Satan’s appearance in Moscow along with a description of Pontius Pilate’s decision to allow the crucifixion of Jesus.  Remarkably, the author is able to unify the two tales into a satisfactory whole.

While it might sound like a gloomy read, the opposite is true.  Humor abounds as Bulgakov delights in the devilry taking place, which highlights the close interaction between good and evil.  Religious beliefs put to the side, the reader cannot help but be amused by the chaos caused by Satan’s return to modern times, as he either seduces the story’s characters or wreaks havoc on their disbelief.  The Master and Margarita remains a must-read here in a world where Satan still seems to be in charge of the discourse.

Robert Koehler

MasterandMargaritaFirstEdition - The Master and Margarita - Wikipedia

The Ghost Map : The Story Of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–And How It Changed Science, Cities, And The Modern World by Steven Johnson [book review]

The Ghost Map is a riveting account of London’s cholera epidemic of 1854.  In setting the stage of the outbreak, Steven Johnson describes what the largest city in the world at that time would have smelled like to its inhabitants.  Lacking proper sewage systems, access to clean water, and with garbage and waste dumped into cesspools outside homes or into basements, he invokes the overpowering stench of London’s neighborhoods.  At the time of the outbreak, most officials and scientists believed the cause of the cholera outbreak was attributed to “miasma,” a disease caused by air-borne transmission.

There was one physician living in the area, though, who believed that the spread of cholera was water-borne.  During the outbreak, John Snow set out to prove his theory, mapping where those who fell ill were getting their drinking water, finally focusing on a single well in the affected neighborhoods.  At the same time, a young clergyman living in the area, Henry Whitehead, also began to investigate the epidemic’s cause.  It would take some years before their findings were accepted by the wider scientific community, but ultimately their detailed “ghost maps” of the epidemic proved the evidence showing that drinking water was indeed the smoking gun in the disease’s transmission.

Johnson addresses the histories about the spread of disease and how often medical science is blinded by established beliefs.  But due to the detailed maps that Snow and Whitehead created during that particular outbreak, future epidemiologists gained a valuable tool still in use today.  Thanks to these two men (and a few other scientists across the globe), their findings ensured the growth of large cities in which the transmission of disease has been mostly controlled.  While published in 2006 before our current COVID pandemic, Johnson does address the likelihood of future infectious disease outbreaks, providing suggestions on how the scientific community should deal with them.  In the author’s user-friendly prose, this book makes for an informative and fascinating read as we again grapple with the issue of infectious disease in a world where it pays no heed to countries’ boundaries. 

- book review by Robert Koehler

Member book review: "Love" by Roddy Doyle

Love / Roddy Doyle

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624776/love-by-roddy-doyle/

In Roddy Doyle’s latest novel, two men in their late 50’s reconnect to spend an evening talking in various Dublin pubs.  Fueled by alcohol consumption, four letter words are regularly exchanged.  Even so, with awkwardness and evasiveness, these childhood friends, after decades apart, begin to reveal their lives’ truths beneath the generalities.  One of them, Joe, has recently left his wife for a woman both men were enchanted with back in their bachelor days.  Always the dominant member of the pair, he commands the conversation, even if he seems at a loss to fully explain why he left his wife for a woman he barely knows.

Davy is the friend listening, and the novel is presented from his perspective.  In flashbacks interspersed through the conversation, we learn about how he met his wife Faye, and their longtime relationship.  Like Joe, he has secrets that the novel is slow to reveal.  But while Joe seems incapable of articulating his late mid-life crisis, Davy appreciates what life has presented him with, even if his marriage is far from perfect.
 
At times, the repetitive aspects of the two men’s conversation seem a detriment.  But like any clever poker player, Doyle knows how to hold the cards close to the chest.  In the novel’s final section, a shift in its focus changes everything, and the secrets hinted at throughout are cleverly woven into the story to complete it.  Doyle deftly delivers a finishing punch that makes the reader sit up and applaud a job well done.
  
Robert Koehler, Medical Librarian
UnityPoint Health-Meriter