Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love (1999) Dava Sobel I read this a long time ago. Possibly soon after it came out. So when I needed some non-fiction bedtime reading, I decided to read it again. This book is based upon Galileo’s “124 surviving letters from the once-voluminous correspondence he carried […]
Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes All the Difference (2010) Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu Let’s start this with a truth: Desmond Tutu is an amazing human being. Like his good friend, the Dalai Lama, he has lived through things that those of us in the developed world cannot even imagine yet has remained […]
The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Wisdom And Wit in the Wild West (2006) Steve Sheinkin I completely and totally got this one a whim, because I love folklore, which is what much of this is based upon. Imagine the Wild West. Now imagine a Rabbi there, keeping the peace and […]
Food Matters (2009) Mark Bittman I really like Mark Bittman’s cookbooks. His How to Cook Everything is well written, clear and concise. So when I heard he’d written something of a food manifesto a la Michael Pollan, I was very curious to see what he had to say. First, if you’re a vegetarian or vegan […]
A Short History of Myth (2005) Karen Armstrong I love Karen Armstrong’s writing and her books on religion. I picked up A Short History of Myth several years ago, and then never got around to reading it. Having spent a couple years trying to get through Heredotus (I’m still only 2/3rds of the way through) […]
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (2007) Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein My dad got me this book for Christmas, and I’d been reading a few pages at a time before bed, but last night I didn’t know what I wanted to read so decided to finish this book […]
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005) Mary Roach As much as I enjoyed Stiff, I found Spook disappointing. As a scientific look at life after death, excluding the last couple chapters, it read more as a debunking than a presentation. Of course that’s partially because several chapters deal with things like ectoplasm exuding from mediums, […]
An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life The Dalai Lama Unlike the previous book I read by the Dalai Lama, this book only took me about nine months to read. They’re not long books, I just tend to set them aside for something else, and then have to go back an re-read portions to […]
Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis I realized that I’d actually finished this book several months ago, but managed to forget that I had done so. Take that as you will. Mere Christianity puts forth some interesting arguments, but I find that although they may have been convincing at the time C.C. Lewis wrote them, I found […]
The Ethics of Star Trek Judith Barad with Ed Robertson This book was definitely a disappointment. I’ve read The Physics of Star Trek and The Metaphysics of Star Trek both of which I found interesting. Perhaps because of this I had high hopes for this book. I was, unfortunately, disappointed. The authors used specific episodes […]
Denial of the Soul (1997) M. Scott Peck My introduction to M. Scott Peck was the abridged audio version of this book, purchased when I regularly listened to books on tape at work, and preferred non-fiction to fiction. I listened to it several times, but when I chose physician assisted suicide as my topic for […]
People of the Lie (1983) M. Scott Peck I’m taking Legal/Ethical Issues in Public Health, and this is one of the books my professor has brought up several times, so I thought I’d read it. Parts of the book I like, other parts I was less sure about, and sometimes even disagreed with. I was […]
The God of Old by James L. Kugel This was one of my “½read before bed” books that although good, took quite awhile to finish, since some nights I felt like I could barely read a page before I fell asleep. But then that is why I read history books and non-fiction before bed, precisely […]