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What are you currently reading?
Is it cold in here?:
More like saying it's your ethical obligation to ruin your life if you see a safety problem.
EDIT: "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", by Rebecca Skroot. Painful so far. Ms. Lacks died at 31 of metastatic cervical cancer. It was 1951, and America was still so bitterly segregated that the hospital had separate morgues for white and "colored". Whites literally would not be caught dead next to an African-American.
Lazy travel writers begin articles with "___ is a land of contradictions". It's lazy because every place is a land of contradictions. This was painfully true of America at the time. Someone progressive managed to bring the work of mass-culturing HeLa cells for the first time to a black institution, providing experience and meaningful mainstream work to young black scientists and technicians. The institution was Tuskegee, yes, THAT Tuskegee.
EDIT: Finished it. Ouch. This was all in living memory. US doctors doing things that would have gotten them hanged at Nuremberg.
What made the most impression on me was the educational deprivation of the Lacks family. What does "informed consent" mean from someone who doesn't know what a cell is? Plenty of material in the book for a thread in Discuss.
pwhodges:
Both good reads which I approve of (as if that matters!).
I'm currently on a Haruki Murakami kick. I was given Kafka on the Shore a few years ago, and have read it several times with increasing enjoyment each time, so now I'm reading Sputnik Sweetheart, and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is waiting in line.
DrPhibes:
I finished "A Young People's History - United States - Class Struggle to the War on Terror" Quiete a long name for an awesome fun and short history book. Only 220 pages but it gives the perspective of people, young included but not only. Some serious questions about the government are made and I think the writer does test the limits of your confidence in the government after reading this.
Is it cold in here?:
_Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader_, by Bradley Martin.
An attempt at a history of the Kim dynasty, striving mightily to avoid the cartoonish treatment of them that their propaganda encourages, and to figure out what kind of people they were and are.
Martin is reasonably skeptical and has interviewed many defectors, trying to cross-check their stories to resist exaggeration.
High points so far: defectors still seem to revere the Kims, at least Kim Il-Sung. Kim Jong-Il told someone with a hidden tape recorder that he thought the people were only pretending to worship him. North Koreans competed fiercely and paid large bribes to experience the relative prosperity and freedom of Siberian labor camps. Kim Il-Sung, based on the testimony of people who knew him as a guerilla fighter but who were interviewed outside his jurisdiction, seems to have been intelligent and charismatic, though cursed with ego problems. Kim Jong-Il comes across as a spoiled little shit who consolidated power by flattering his father with an elaborate personality cult, which has continued to inhibit change and growth.
LTK:
Tomorrow I have to take the train back to my apartment. On friday we got a whole three inches of snow, and the resulting apocalyptic effect this has on the railway gives me the opportunity to read One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest while I wait.
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