The Radish

                      In this blog post I will be reviewing the book Timeline  by (yes him again) Michael Crichton. This is the third book that I have read by the same author, and given the quality of the other two books I had no doubt that this one (although not from the same series) would not disappoint. I'm slightly more than halfway through the book and it definitely seems like something I look forward to finishing.                         The book is about a group of graduate students at Yale studying medieval history, specifically that of England and France in the fourteenth century. They discover a bifocal lens buried in the ground, but quickly dismiss it as contamination from their own backpacks and move on. Then they find a mysterious note with a date, 4/7/1357, and only two words: HELP ME (Crichton, 91). The handwriting looks exa...

      If I were to give you one reason to read Night by Elie Wiesel I would tell you this, it was good enough to receive a Nobel prize so it must be good enough for 100 pages of your time. Night is an autobiographical tale of a Holocaust survivor as he recalls his journey from Auschwitz to freedom.         The book begins in 1945 where we find out about  Eliezer (Elie) who is only 15 at the time. Not even 5 pages in and Elie as well as everyone else in his community is deported, and no-one knows where they'll be going. At first many people are optimistic and tell each other that they are being sent to work in factories as the fighting draws closer. Soon they are crammed into cattle cars and begin a long journey without food and water. Along the way one of the people in his car begins screaming for days on end that she can see flames.      Once they arrive at the concentration camp the story goes from day to day m...

Kathryn Phillips Sixteen-year-old Hetty’s life at Raxter School for Girls, a boarding school on a small island off the coast of Maine, hasn’t been the same since a deadly virus called the Tox has reigned terror on the school and put the island under strict quarantine. A year in, most of the girls are used to their new life. But when her best friend, Byatt, disappears from the infirmary after a flare up of the Tox, Hetty knows something isn’t right. Along with her classmate Reese, Hetty launches a secret investigation into who took Byatt, where the Tox really came from, and who on the island is hiding ulterior motives. The reason I loved Wilder Girls by Rory Power was the world building. The interesting concept combined with Power’s frank, thoughtful descriptions pull you into the world of the Tox. One example of this is the wildlife on the island, which has become vicious and deadly since the Tox. On the first page, a coyote is described as, “Something. Way out in the white-dark. Betw...

      So, as the title implies this will hopefully be my last blog about fairy tales, or at least I have run out of fairy tale books at this point. The story today is truly an odd one, with seemingly nothing to say to the reader. The tale is The Tinderbox, a slightly horrifying and pointless tale about knights, dogs, and the fairy tale staple, marriage. The story begins with a soldier returning from a war, and while walking encounters a witch. The witch tells the knight "'You are a real soldier! You shall have as much money as you want" (335 Andersen). The witch informs him of the riches to be found under a hollow tree that the witch points to. Inside is a dog with saucepan-sized eyes over a box with copper riches, then one with a dog with millstone-sized eyes over silver riches, and the final dog with eyes as big as the round tower over gold riches. To obtain these riches the dogs must be placed on the witch's apron and then he can gather the riches. In exchange, the...

  Aya Surheyao "The infinite tapestry of life is but a semblance with a black hole at its heart" (Lane 193).        Today, we often assume that most scientific exploration has already happened. We know that mysteries still exist and yet we fail to grasp their scale. In  The Vital Question , Nick Lane explores the unknowns of evolutionary biology. He describes the chasm between eukaryotes (like us) and prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea). With amusing anecdotes and the input of many other experts, Lane lays out the origins of complex life from itty bitty compounds in ocean vents to full-fledged eukaryotes with nuclei, distinct sexes, and some with bio homework of their own. Keep in mind that this book leans towards the denser side of nonfiction, and for the sake of this post, I won't go too in-depth.       Throughout the book, Lane bursts with enthusiasm for the concepts he describes and engages meaningfully with the reader. From the first...