RaveThe Wall Street JournalSobel’s book deftly explores the science of chemistry and the history of radium, while also following the remarkable thread of Marie Curie’s achievements—which came at a high personal cost ... What sets Ms. Sobel’s biography apart isn’t the timeline or the events of her subject’s life; it’s those women of science whose lives intersected with Curie’s, a cast of brilliant researchers and thinkers that the author skillfully weaves into her narrative.
Caleb Carr
RaveThe Wall Street JournalDevastating and beautiful, by turns a fascinating book of animal psychology and a personal memoir of unrelenting trauma, it dares us to take a journey into love and pain ... Written in poetic, mournful, and delicate prose, My Beloved Monster is a love story and a requiem.
Charan Ranganath
RaveThe Wall Street JournalClever, insightful and humorous, Why We Remember reveals the mechanism of memory through the use of unexpected metaphors.
Kenneth Miller
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalTwo narratives at once: a sweeping journey of discovery about dreams, sleep and the terra incognita of unconsciousness; and a wake-up call about the dangers of chronic exhaustion. It’s time, Mr. Miller tells us, to take our sleep back.
Jaime Green
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMs. Green’s book, alive with the color and drama of science fiction as well as scientific fact, helps us grasp that process of imagining ... As Ms. Green takes us on a tour through science-fiction worlds... she wants us to see our own blind spots.
Christopher C Gorham
RaveThe Wall Street JournalAn incredible catalog of adventure; we follow the well-dressed Rosenberg as she out-curses labor leaders and outwits big business. The Confidante provides a record of the most important events of the 20th century ... The book’s title can be slightly misleading. Rosenberg was certainly FDR’s confidante, but she was much more ... I found myself engrossed and amazed by the \'sparrow of a woman\' and her endless energy.
Hayley Campbell
RaveThe Wall Street JournalMs. Campbell’s book is more than a written narrative, it is a map across uneven and untraveled land. Her story lingers the way a mortuary’s perfume sticks to the roof of your mouth. This is a book you will carry with you ... I have never read a book like this one. Ms. Campbell, a London-based journalist and author, answers questions I never thought to ask ... There are moments of grisly, if fascinating, reality...But with such images comes surprising tenderness as well; moments of hope, or longing, of life after the ruins ... despite the episodic nature of the text, there remains an indelible story here, a journey. The author changes along the way, and so do we ... It’s this raw, unguarded honesty that takes her book beyond many others of similar subject ... At times humorous and always informative, this humanity sets All the Living and the Dead apart.
Sam Knight
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThe author’s prose delights, offering perfect pictures ... It also moves quickly between time periods and individuals, which can make the reader’s journey difficult to plot.
Meghan O'Rourke
PositiveWall Street JournalThe Invisible Kingdom is thus not a straightforward accountcharting the usual stages fromdisease onset to medical intervention to ultimate recovery—the hallmarks of many illness narratives ... The Invisible Kingdom, like chronic illness itself, doesn’t end in a cure and doesn’t offer magic bullets for those who are suffering. What it does provide, powerfully, is a reminder to \'those of us at the edge of medical knowledge\' that \'we live in the gap together\' ... She provides an account that many will be able to relate to—a ray of light into those isolated cocoons of darkness that, at one time or another, may afflict us all.
Sidarta Ribeiro
RaveThe Wall Street JournalHow can we explain the nature, recurrence and meaning of dreams? ... Mr. Ribeiro seeks to answer these questions with a sweeping account as tangled and chaotic—and fascinating—as the dreams themselves ... The Oracle of Night is not, however, an attempt to demystify the act of dreaming. Instead, it reinfuses the dreamscape with beauty, mystery and significance. And it begins with Mr. Ribeiro’s own story; he was that dreaming boy ... Despite its well-sourced scientific discussions and the collective weight of its historical case studies, the strength of The Oracle of Night lies in its poetic and visceral retelling of dreams ... Daunting in its breadth and encyclopedic in structure, The Oracle of Night contains a narrative thread that leads the reader from its inception to close.
Suzanne O'Sullivan
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... at once poignant, surprising and sometimes horrifying ... Unraveling the mystery behind such strange occurrences requires more than neurological expertise—it needs careful handling, a deep and empathic understanding of how society and culture, experience and expectation, work in tandem with our neural pathways and bodily responses to produce physiological disorders. Dr. O’Sullivan uncovers these complex mechanisms while painting a picture of psychosomatic suffering that removes its associated stigma, and she asks us to think about illness in new ways ... Functional neurological and psychosomatic disorders are subject to fierce debate, and sufferers already raw from repeated denial of their experience are often the collateral damage. Dr. O’Sullivan wades into this conflict with extraordinary tact. What we underestimate, she tells us, is the power of the brain to disorder the body ... offers a brilliant, nuanced and thoughtful look at the lived experience of illness while asking important questions about the relationship between body and mind. Dr. O’Sullivan’s rich prose weaves a tapestry as hauntingly beautiful as it is scientifically valid ... At the heart of this tour de force is the question, deceptively simple but so difficult to answer: What do we mean by illness? Should medicine—biologically minded, diagnosis-privileging Western medicine—alone be allowed to decide?
Sam Kean
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... this book is more than a gathering of amusing vignettes. As each chapter compounds, it becomes more difficult to condemn and smirk without seeing the systemic ways that early sins have crept into the heart of science and medicine today ... Mr. Kean ends his book with a glimmer of hope but also an appendix on the future, with its potential for new scientific and medical crimes against humanity.
Emily Midorikawa
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... a large and variously peopled world of rights conventions, séances and legal proceedings, where suffragists, abolitionists, spiritualists and charlatans mixed in and out of drawing rooms. This is the great strength of Out of the Shadows; it offers up a tapestry of complex characters with conflicted motivations, woven together with the color of ghostly apparitions (and angry mobs) ... Ms. Midorikawa leaves the reader to draw final conclusions. Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is the book’s presentation of these women as being both seen and heard. They are not mere embellishments of the parlor, nor are they, like the spirits they claimed to summon, mere disembodied voices in the night. Each of them stood before a public world where women had not yet gained basic human rights and demanded the spotlight. And this is visionary indeed.
