The Radish

          Well I (Shreyas) am actually not sure since I'm only part of the way through the book, so I don't know whether the pathogen actually came from somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy or not. What I do know however is that I will not stop reading until I finish. There are many things that make The Andromeda Strain  by Michael Crichton and published in 1969 very interesting and fun to read for anyone.          The book has a unique plot, one which I have not seen in other science fiction movies. In the story, humans are visited by aliens. The aliens aren't the classic short big headed humanoids, but are microscopic pathogens from a different planet. The book opens with a lieutenant that is investigating the small city of Piedmont, Arizona. He arrives at a grisly scene, nearly all 48 of the town's members dead, shortly before dying himself.  Extremely detailed thermal satellite images show the same scene. Then the au...

  The most interesting thing about Threads by Ami Polonsky to me was the way in which the story was formatted and how it connects to the themes in the book. Each chapter flips between the perspective of Clara, a twelve-year-old girl living in America, and Yuming, a girl around the same age living in China. Yuming has been kidnapped and forced to work in a sweatshop for several months when she writes a note, pleading for help, and sticks it in a purse on the assembly line. Clara finds the note one day at the mall and becomes dead set on saving Yuming. The story unfolds from two different perspectives: Yuming scrambling to escape from the factory and her kidnapper Mr. Zhang, and Clara scrambling to locate this strange factory and save her. As the story progresses and Clara and Yuming’s narratives start to become more and more intertwined, you come to really appreciate the way the book is structured. The back and forth chapters are especially interesting when you add in the element o...

       Homage to Catalonia was written in 1936 by George Orwell, the same person who wrote the more popular books Animal Farm and 1984 . It's a first person account of his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War while fighting against the fascists. The book is made extremely interesting by the vivid descriptions Orwell makes of everywhere he travels too. The main reason I believe that everyone should give this book a chance is because of the unique blend of autobiography and historical observations.           " Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and halfempty" What really draws you into Homage to Catalonia is the way George Orwell describes the cities and countryside of Spain. The descriptions are excellent and drive home that this isn...

  “There are more algae in the oceans than stars in all the galaxies” (Kassinger xi)       In school, I remember learning that there are trillions of stars, more numerous than all the grains of sand on Earth. In  Slime , Ruth Kassinger shows countless ways in which algae are greater (in number and significance) than I could ever imagine. I find it remarkable how something that exists all around us goes unnoticed. We tend to think of algae as something gross and slimy (like the title of this book references) on the surface of a pond, or boring and insignificant.  Slime  obliterates these ideas. This book covers many different strange and intriguing aspects of algae, including how some evolved into plants, the roles they play in ecosystems, and all the ways we use them without knowing.       In the first section, the author personifies algae in a story about how they came to be and how they reached land (transforming into plants)...