Educated by Tara Westover – Book Review and Musings
Educated is a memoir written by a young woman who was brought up in rural Idaho by fundamentalist/survivalist Mormons. She was the youngest of 7 children. Her family was theoretically home-schooling her, but the teaching was erratic and she mostly learned how to help her parents with their jobs – her father in the junkyard, her…
Taxi Driver Wisdom
It is a beautiful weekend in the Washington area and all around the country. A group of friends from our Lady Docs circle and I decided months ago that we would spend a weekend together in a little town in the horse country of Virginia as our first gathering for 2018. Similar to January 20th of last year,…
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
One of the jobs of a practicing internist is to help patients improving health through lifestyle changes such as diet, exercise and sleep. This can be quite challenging for me, so the fact that fascinating book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business delves into the neuroscience behind our daily routines, was…
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder – a book review and observations
I read about this book in a review in the Washington Post and got it as soon as I could. In light of the recent election, I felt confused and helpless. I wanted to know how to understand everything that is happening and what can I do, as one individual to find out where the…
Carrots as Medicine
When my patients tell me that their blood pressure has been running high, the first thing I ask them is what they have been eating. After a careful discussion, it often becomes clear that the blood pressure increased after a meal high in sodium. We then focus on the diet, rather than medications alone, to…
“Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance
“Hillbilly Elegy” has been on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. The author is a 31 year old Yale law school graduate who grew up in “Rust Belt” Ohio, but whose roots are from Appalachian Kentucky. He explains the culture and circumstances of poor working class whites. As he puts it, “Americans call…
The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer is Winnable–and How We Can Get There By Vincent T. DeVita, Jr. M.D
The first book review I wrote for this website focused on The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. I absolutely loved that book. Critics agreed, since it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. It is hard to top such a sweeping drama in terms of the breadth and depth of cancer research. Therefore, this book…
Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
When I saw the subtitle of this book, I immediately felt hope. It is good to think of the opportunity that lies with midlife. Often being in this time of life brings stress with aging parents, growing children and health issues. So often the word “midlife” goes along with the word “crisis”. Not so in this book. The author, a…
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, in 2015
This book is written as a letter from the author, an African-American journalist to his teenaged son, in this era of frequent discussions about racial relations and the recent killings of black people, by law enforcement officers. The book is a gift, a gift to his son, as the author explains his view of the…
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Published by Corcovado, 2016
My good friend from medical school forwarded me an article called Before I Go published in the Spring 2015 Stanford Medicine magazine. It was written so beautifully by a young neurosurgeon that it made me tear up. Dr. Kalanithi majored in English and biology at Stanford and then got a master’s in English literature before attending Yale School of Medicine. This…