Book: Replaceable You

 Book: Replaceable You

Author: Mary Roach

Pages: 288

This is my 172nd read for the year

What Amazon Says:

The boyd is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer.  For centuries, medicine has reached for what's available - sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products.  Today we're attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers.  How are we doing?  Are we there yet?  This book explores the remarkable advances and difficul questions prompted by the human body's failings.  When and how does a person decide they's be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb?  Can a donated heart be made to beat forever?  Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina?  Roach dives in with her characteristic verve and infectious wit.  Her travels take her to the OR at a legendary burn unit in Boston, a "superclea" xeno-pigsty in China, and a stem cell "hair nursery" in the San Diego tech hub.  She talks with researchers and surgeons, amputees and osteomates, printers of kidneys and designers of wearable organs.  She spends time in a working iron lung from the 1950s, stays up all night with recovery techs as they disassemble and reassemble a tissue done, and travels across Mongolia with the cataract surgeons of Orbis International.

Fantastic book.  Mary Roach is the best of both world in the non-fiction space.  Funny and informative.  She is smart, and the information is well researched.  

Stars: 5

Book: Needful Things

 Book: Needful Things

Author: Stephen King

Pages: 816

This is my 171st read for the year

What Amazon Says:

The town of Castle Rock, Maine has seen its fair share of oddities over the years, but nothing is as peculiar as the little curio shop that's just opened for business here.  Its mysterious proprietor, Leland Gaunt, seems to have something for everyone out on display at Needful Things.  Interesting items that run the gamut from worthless to priceless.  Nothing has a price tag in this place, buteverything is certainly for sale.  The heart's desire for any resident of Castle Rock can easily be found among the curiosities - in exchange for a little money and - at the specific request of Leland Gaunt - a whole lot of menace against their fellow neighbors.  Everyone in town seems willing to make a deal at Needful Things, but the devil is in the details.  And no one takes heed of the little sign hanging on the wall:  Caveat emtor.  In other words, let the buer beware.

Stars: 4.5

Book: Covid 19: Stopping the Next Pandemic

 Book: Covid 19: Stopping The Next Pandemic

Author: Debora MacKenzie

Pages: 304

This is my 170th read for the year

What Amazon Says:

Over the last 30 years ofepidemics and pandemics, we learned every lesson needed to stop this coronavirus outbreak in its tracks.  We heeded almost none of them.  The result is a pandemic on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes.  In this captivating, authoritative, and eye-opening book, science journalist Debora MacKenzie lays out the full story of how and why it happened:  the previous viruses that should have prepared us, the shocking public health failures that paved the way, the failure to contain the outbreak, and most importantly, what we must do to prevent future pandemics.  Demobra MacKenzie has been reporting on emerging diseases for more than 3 decades, and she draws on that exerience to explain how COVID-19 went from a potentially manageable outbreak to a global pandemic.  Offering a compelling history of the most significant recent outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, H1N1, Zika, and Ebola, she gives a crash course in Epidemiology 101- how viruses spread and how pandemics end - and outline the lessons we failed to learn from each past criss.  In vivid detail, she takes us through the arrival and spread of COVID-19 - making clear the steps that governments knew that could have taken to prevent or at least prepare for this.  Looking forward, MacKenzie makes a bold, optimistic argumet: this pandemic might finally galvanize the world to take viruses seriously.  Fighting this pandemic and preventing the next one will take political action of all kinds, globally, from governments, the scientific community, and individuals - but it is possible.  No one has yet brought together out knowledge of COVID-=19 in a comprehensive, informative, and accessible way.  But that story can already be todl, and Debora MacKEnzie's urgent telling is required reading for these times and beyond.  It is too early to say where the COVID-19 pandemic will go, but it is past time to talk about what went wrong and how we can do better.

Stars: 4