Candide

This is one of those books that so many people must have read in high school, so many people that were not me of course. For I lived in the best of all possible worlds, at the time, wherein I spent my days and nights doing far more enjoyable things than reading a bit of literature …

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus

King Arthur could have done it but he failed. Not only did he not acquire the grail as he and his knights originally set out to do but he allowed the terrifying and long lived Rabies to persist well past his fictitious reign. It is really a shame that when presented with the cure he …

Hallucinations

In asking some friends what book I should read next, while considering this work of Oliver Sacks,  a relative of mine urged me to read Hallucinations in the following statement: I vote for HALLUCINATIONS! Pro tip: HALLUCINATIONS in real life suck. Don't listen to people who say it depends on the situation/people/source of hallucination. They're lying. …

You Are Not So Smart and You are now Less Dumb

David McRaney's blog You Are Not So Smart, which chronicled his interest in cognitive and social psychology, became a best selling book by the same name. As he continued in his obsession he produced an excellent podcast with production quality comparable to Freakonomics and This American Life. In 2013 he released another book with covering …

Dubliners

A collection of character sketches of people that lived in Dublin at the dawn of the 20th century, though the stories were designed as a collection which means they are not merely gathered together from disparate publications as some collections are, but were crafted together with the collection in mind. As one proceeds through the …

Dracula: The Book

An early 19th century discussion group composed of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, May Shelley, Claire Claremont, and John Polidori read ghost stories together, and under the challenge put forward by Byron they began to write their own scary stories. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein and Polidori wrote a novella about a vampire which was the seed from …

When Prophecy Fails

A review/summary of When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schacter Belief is a resilient thing and often we wonder how some people can believe the things that they do (this puzzling wonder mostly stems from the fact that they believe differently than we do). Some belief systems are based on or …