6/12/2023 0 Comments Bad pharma book![]() ![]() ![]() Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. We like to imagine that regulators let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve hopeless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients.Īll these problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they're too complex to capture in a sound bite. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by industry. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature surrounding a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that it's based on evidence and the results of fair tests. ![]()
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![]() In another sense, we face this kind of choice again and again because, for us, it is never final." Origins "The final choice is never offered to us in the real world. I wept at the end – to see Taran confronted with such a brutally difficult decision." After seven years "the characters were as close to me as my own family. ![]() He did cry afterward, as the exchange implies many readers have done. ![]() It was not an easy book to write, but at least I was building on a foundation that I had already made. Thirty years later, Alexander explained to Scholastic students: "The High King was the final logical development of the first four books in the Prydain Chronicles. Finally Taran must decide whether to be High King. ![]() In the concluding volume Taran and companions join the rest of Prydain in a great effort to defeat Arawn directly. The series follows the adventures of Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper, as he nears manhood while helping to resist the forces of Arawn Death-Lord. It was awarded the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1969. ![]() The High King (1968) is a high fantasy novel by American writer Lloyd Alexander, the fifth and last of The Chronicles of Prydain. ![]() 6/12/2023 0 Comments Carry the ocean by heidi cullinan![]() ![]() Plus he has savant like knowledge about everything and the author frequently abuses the autistic stereotype to “infodump” on the reader via Emmett. ![]() You know the regular complaint that all autistic characters are white boys who love trains, computers and maths and speak like robots? Well Emmett is exactly that stereotype. The book opens with painting Emmett as the ultimate autistic stereotype. The problem for me is the tone and stereotypes throughout the whole book. Objectively looking at it, I think that it is probably an average gay romance novel. Perhaps my expectations were a bit high and that is what made it seem worse to me than it really was. Which made the disappointment I felt reading it even worse. ![]() It is not often you get an autistic main character in a fiction book and it’s even less often you get a gay, autistic main character. ![]() 6/12/2023 0 Comments The demon haunted![]() ![]() The best part, in my opinion, was the rationale: at some point we did not fully understand something and formed a hypothesis based on available knowledge of the time. Not much has changed, but the examples used hold a lot of value for addressing the detractors of science and logic applied to complex thoughts such as where did something come from or why does something exist. The topics Sagan went into were centered around conspiracy theories of the time -UFOs, Extraterrestrial Life Forms, and Religious explanations of the natural world. Just the section above from Sagan was worth the price of the book. It was timeless in its approach to detractors of scientific reasoning. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified.If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work, including the premise, not just most of them.Quantify if whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. ![]() Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because its yours.Arguments from authority carry little weight.Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts.The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise, or starting point, and whether that premise is true. ![]() 6/11/2023 0 Comments Maugham the moon and sixpence![]() After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965. ![]() He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.ĭuring World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service. ![]() Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays. His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. ![]() He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style. William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. ![]() ![]() ![]() The mystery has several red herrings and clues. I do like some of the supporting characters, but this is the kinda book where you really grow attached to the core characters and like to focus on them. Her characters are memorable, especially Grannie, Winona Mae, and Sheriff Colton. Her new love interest, though not much has happened, is the sheriff. And to make matters worse, the one person seen arguing with the groom before he's murdered is Winona Mae's ex-boyfriend, Hank. This time, it's someone at the wedding they're holding for the town. ![]() They're beginning to turn the family business around, but another murder happens on their property. In Pulp Friction, Winona Mae, our mid-20s heroine, runs an apple orchard and cider shop with her grandma in Virginia. Lindsey delivers a great story in the follow-up book, and today I'm sharing my thoughts on it. When this one became available via NetGalley, I requested it because I enjoyed the characters and wanted to revisit them. I've read a few other books by this author (published under pseudonyms) as well as the first in this series. Pulp Friction is the second book in the Cider Shop Mystery series written by Julie Anne Lindsey. ![]() 6/11/2023 0 Comments Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The effect is heightened by the fact that the book is initially presented to us as a crime novel or detective novel, a genre that especially relies on the kind of story that progresses, that answers the questions it implicitly poses. The reader puzzled by this strategy might usefully regard it as the explicit reversal of the conventional expectations of what a novel will offer us. If we were to abandon the notion that plots must be unilinear and that the reader’s relationship to the plot must be mediated by “well-rounded” characters, one of whom serves as a protagonist with whom we may “identify,” we might perhaps come to appreciate the different kind of structure and more dispersed focus on multiple characters Ridgway employs in Hawthorn and Child. Some readers expecting a conventionally linear narrative might certainly find that this book consistently defies expectations of sequential continuity and character development, but this does not mean it provides no story (it may provide too much) and no characters (there might be too many to keep track of). ![]() In its way, Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child is a compelling read. ![]() 6/10/2023 0 Comments Lincoln author gore![]() ![]() Hay wants to be an actor but is too homely and would like to be a. Vidal also favors a rebel sympathizer, David Herold, who is Hay's age and, coincidentally, favors the same whore at Sal Austin's. ![]() Lincoln "Hellcat" and the President "The Ancient." Throughout the novel, Hay becomes more perceptive about Lincoln's complex personality, which helps deepen the reader's understanding as well. Young, inexperienced Presidential secretary John Hay is a particular favorite for describing events in the Cabinet room and the living quarters of the White House. Smooth segues facilitate multiple perspectives. Instead, he bounces from character to character to borrow their point of view. Rarely, however, does he lay out facts anonymously, even about something as trivial as the weather or scenery. Gore Vidal tells his fictional story of Abraham Lincoln in the third person, past tense without any intermediary narrator. ![]() ![]() The character of Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt exemplifies human “free will” – people can do anything by sheer determination and the harder the task, the better. “The Alienist,” by Caleb Carr, follows the 1896 hunt for a serial killer through the enclaves of society and the Lower East Side hell of New York as the city is transforming from a local port into an international business center. A sense of Destiny resonates throughout both, as the characters acknowledge that change and human nature are life’s only constants. Both contrast the chasms between society’s elite and uneducated poor. Characters face an emerging modern world with attitudes formed in the old. Both novels bridge two ages, the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist,” and Mariano Azuela’s “The Underdogs” use historical fiction to illustrate different eras and cultures, but both express the idea that human nature is constant. The reader absorbs the feeling of the times, not just data. Dry names, dates and places are placed in an engaging story. Novels and History: The Alienist and The Underdogs Novels present history in ways text books cannot.Assignment 2 - Novels and History The Alienist & Underdogs ![]() ![]() Violent conflict rent the city state and she found herself imprisoned and threatened by her family’s enemies before finally being released and married off to the handsome Prince Henry of France. In her latest historical fiction, Jeanne Kalogridis tells Catherine’s story-that of a tender young girl, destined to be a pawn in Machiavellian games.īorn into one of Florence’s most powerful families, Catherine was soon left a fabulously rich heiress by the early deaths of her parents. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Catherine de Medici is one of the most maligned monarchs in history. ![]() ![]() but all too well.Ĭonfidante of Nostradamus, scheming mother-in-law to Mary, Queen of Scots, and architect of the bloody St. From Jeanne Kalogridis, the bestselling author of I, Mona Lisa and The Borgia Bride, comes a new novel that tells the passionate story of a queen who loved not wisely. ![]() |