Ah, fall. That time of year when every young man’s fancy turns to football, the upcoming hockey season, and the safety of the nation’s blood supply.
Say what?
It’s true. We’re having yet another blood supply scare. They seem like they’re coming annually now. HIV, Hepatitus C, Mad Cow, and now West Nile virus has been found in the nation’s blood supply. If that hasn’t sufficiently scared you, you ought to check out ‘Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce’.
Nick Hornby, the master of the light and ironic, has a very different creature in his new book, “How to be good”. It can’t really be enjoyed as a light comedy such as “High Fidelity”, as it’s implications are far too deep.
In this book, his characters careen between action and inaction, battered by bourgeois guilt. If you’ve ever walked by a homeless person and said to yourself, “What would happen if I took this person home?”, you should enjoy this book.
I recently ran a scavenger hunt for my company retreat. It was a lot of fun, but because I only had a few hours to let the teams solve the clues, I wasn’t able to do the really hard ones that require a full set of encyclopedias. Here are the books that I would have used, had I been able to make this so hard it required serious research.
Diamond: Journey to the heart of an obsession is a history of the diamond trade by Matthew Hart. Armed with a unique willingness to criticize diamond behemoth De Beers, Hart provides an entertaining look into the history of diamond mining, trading, and craftmanship.
Blind Man’s Bluff is the exciting and previously untold history of undersea warfare in the American Navy. This book is an excellent read, and it’s become one of my two touchstones for well-told history. As America’s undersea program comes under the spotlight during the recent accident off the coast of Hawaii, it’s an appropriate time to look at how we got where we are, and consider in context the fact that accidents don’t happen more often than this.
I picked up Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce, before my honeymoon. I had intended to read it in Cuba, but there really wasn’t space in our luggage with all the other books I brought. So it sat on deck for months until I got around to it.
I’ve recently finished The Merger: The Conglomeration of International Organized Crime, which profiles the history of organized crime in the last 30 years as it became global, and the failure of the best law enforcement agencies in the world to stop them.
Until recently, I didn’t even know that the manuscript The Conquest of New Spain, even existed. I picked up the book in a bookstore in Cancun, Mexico, on my way back from Cuba, thinking that it would make a good addition to my recent love of carefully focused history books.