Recent Books -- The Body Keeps the Score, Unbearable Lightness, Fingerpost, Random Acts of Medicine, Imagine a City
15 September 2023
- The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. Fascinating book on the effects of trauma and how to work with trauma. I did not realize how ineffective talk therapy and pharmaceuticals were, and how important other types of therapy involving movement, acting, etc could be.
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. I wanted to like this, a number of friends like it, and with the author’s passing, it seemed like the time to try it. I am sure it is my failing that I couldn’t get into it. Characters are weird and unrelatable.
- An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. I should love this book? I mean I like mysteries and I like clever structures and I like unreliable narrators. But I just couldn’t ever care about the story or the characters.
- Random Acts of Medicine by Anupam B. Jena, Christopher Worsham. The authors want to write the “Freakonomics” of medicine but too much exposition and not enough data.
- Imagine a City: A Pilot’s Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker. Interesting wander through many of the major cities of the globe, and through the author’s life as he traversed them. I have this image of airplane pilots as being very engineerish, but this author is very poetic and thoughtful.
