Bibliokitty

The Radium Girls is a nonfiction account of the incredibly horrifying story of the radium-dial factory workers in the United States. Their job was to paint watches, clocks and military dials with a luminous substance made from radium, but what they did not know is that radium is a dangerous element that would eventually kill them. I had heard of the Radium Girls before reading this book, but Kate Moore’s book really hits home the mistreatment of these women by the companies they worked for, medical professionals, and even their own communities.

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The Devil in the White City is a well reviewed historical non-fiction book, which is why I decided to read it. It is about the construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a serial killer who used the fair to lure people, mainly young women, to their deaths. I realized not far into the book that it is not for me, which is too bad because Larson wrote the book in a novelistic style that incorporates direct quotes from historical records, which made it more interesting and easier to read, but it turns out that true crime is just not my thing.

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I purchased The Witches while I was in Salem, MA from a bookstore called Wicked Good Books, which has a special section reserved for books about the Salem witch trials. A cute historical town overrun by tourists, it is sad how modern Salem has monetized a tragic piece of American history where twenty innocent people were executed on suspicion of witchcraft and hundreds more languished in prison. I have always been fascinated by the Salem witch trials. What caused a group of girls to writhe and contort their bodies and claim that they were being attacked by witches? Why did the group of men who presided over the trials give in to the hysteria and essentially murder a bunch of innocent people? The Witches is a fascinating and detailed nonfiction account of the Salem witch trials that does its best to answer both questions with the limited resources passed down from history.

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I thought I would enjoy Sapiens, but I was not as engaged by it as I was by Humans: A Brief History of How We F***ed It All Up by Tom Phillips. You cannot blame Yuval Noah Harari for this because he does do a good job of telling a comprehensive, but also succinct history of humanity, and he does have an engaging narrative voice. But I found Sapiens to be a bit of a slog to get through, especially when it came to certain subjects like the evolution of mathematics, science and capitalism. What can I say, I am more of a humanities girl. My biggest take away from Sapiens, though, is that Sapiens should not have evolved, and that we have been destroying this planet we call home since pretty much the very beginning of our existence.

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If you have not seen it yet, I highly recommend you watch the TV miniseries Dopesick. It is about the opioid crisis in the US and how it was started by one family, the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma which is the maker of Oxycontin. Dopesick the TV show is based on Dopesick the book by Beth Macy. I decided to read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Empire of Pain instead because it came out just last year and has been well received, and its focus is on the Sackler family rather than the opioid crisis in general. I was curious to know what has made the Sackler family so ruthlessly greedy that they do not care at all that they have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone since Oxycontin was introduced in 1996.

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It took me a long time (yes, two weeks is a long time for me) to finish reading The Light of Days for two reasons:

1. I have been very tired this December. I do most of my reading before bedtime, and lately I have barely made it through one chapter before I fall asleep on the couch with the cats.
2. This book can, at times, be difficult to read. There are some passages in this book that depict the most inhumane, depraved human behaviour I have ever heard about, that it was nauseating for me to read. I almost did not finish reading The Light of Days because of this.

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Catch and Kill ticks another box off my Indigo 2021 Reading Challenge list for the category “A book about a true crime”. I do not usually read true crime, and even after reading Catch and Kill, I am not interested in continuing to read true crime. I did like reading Catch and Kill, though. Farrow has written his investigation and exposé of Harvey Weinstein like an espionage novel, except that it is a true story. I do not know if this is how true crime books are usually written, but I found it easy to read and enjoy in its novelistic format.

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I am not the kind of person that reads “self-help” books. So how did I end up reading Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle? Well, I am working my way through the 2021 Indigo Reading Challenge and one of the categories is a “book to assist in self-discovery & self-care”. Burnout was one of the suggested reads for this category and since I battle stress, anxiety, and depression on a daily basis, I thought it would be a good read for me. I found this book to be very interesting. It reinforces my discussions with my psychologist and made me realize that there are other things in my life that cause stress and anxiety that I should address.

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