en-US Tue, 20 Jun 2023 14:14:09 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 54785556 Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley trace the history and the future of quarantine methods and tactics.

Quarantine is such a simple, profound, and effective idea that it's almost hard to realize that it is in fact an idea--a concept that needed to be discovered, figured out, refined, and, of course, applied. We are now all too aware of how it is applied, but we know far less about how the idea came to be--and where it may yet go.

Until Proven Safe tracks the idea of quarantine around the globe, through time and space, chasing the story from the lazarettos and quarantine islands of Venice--built before communicable diseases were really understood--to the hallways of the CDC, NASA, and the cutting-edge labs and conference rooms where the future technology of quarantine is being developed. The result is a tour of an idea that could not be more urgent or relevant, a book full of stories, people, and insights that is as compelling as it is definitive.]]> 416 Nicola Twilley 0374126585 Eric 3 3.92 2021
author: Nicola Twilley
name: Eric
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/10/17
date added: 2023/06/20
shelves: never-finished, design-architecture, non-fiction
review:
Intriguing research premise, but too on the nose for these times and not philosophical or probing enough to make me stick with it. I’ll pick it back up when we’re a bit more past these plague years.
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From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 193 Julian Barnes Eric 1 never-finished, fiction 3.51 1984
author: Julian Barnes
name: Eric
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1984
rating: 1
read at: 2012/09/22
date added: 2017/06/29
shelves: never-finished, fiction
review:
This postmodern trickery might have played well when this novel was released, but I found it mostly insufferable from the very beginning, barely getting halfway through before putting it down for good.
]]> 28381 Dead Souls, Russia's first major novel, is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy.

In his introduction to this new translation, Robert A. Maguire discusses Gogol's life and literary career, his depiction of Russian society, and the language and narrative techniques employed in Dead Souls. This edition also includes a chronology, further reading, appendices, a glossary, map and notes.]]> 464 Nikolai Gogol 0140448071 Eric 2 never-finished Dead Souls never grabbed me and I finally put it down about 2/3 the way through. I'm sure that in the time of its publication the social satire was razor sharp, but it's a tough sell in 21st century America. I was hoping for the universality of such Russian greats as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but ole' Nikolai just didn't deliver.]]> 4.00 1842
author: Nikolai Gogol
name: Eric
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1842
rating: 2
read at: 2012/08/05
date added: 2012/08/16
shelves: never-finished
review:
I'd heard Gogol's name referenced in so many different cultural settings lately, it seemed time to check out the actual writing. I've heard that his short stories are great and maybe I'll give them a whirl someday, but Dead Souls never grabbed me and I finally put it down about 2/3 the way through. I'm sure that in the time of its publication the social satire was razor sharp, but it's a tough sell in 21st century America. I was hoping for the universality of such Russian greats as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but ole' Nikolai just didn't deliver.
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Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.]]> 304 Maggie Nelson 0393072150 Eric 2 4.23 2011
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Eric
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2012/07/30
date added: 2012/07/30
shelves: art-photography, non-fiction, never-finished
review:
I just couldn't get through this. The book raises some interesting issues, but is a bit too academic and impressed with itself, to the point where I began to lose sight of the book's larger points amidst all the intellectual posturing. Which is unfortunate because the points being raised—violence in art, censorship, etc.—deserve a wider audience.
]]> 2982466 Arthur & George, Julian Barnes gives us a memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.

If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,� how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty, an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for and against and with God, and at the bloodline whose archivist, following his parents� death, he has become—another realm of mystery, wherein a drawer of mementos and his own memories (not to mention those of his philosopher brother) often fail to connect. There are other ancestors, too: the writers—“most of them dead, and quite a few of them French"—who are his daily companions, supplemented by composers and theologians and scientists whose similar explorations are woven into this account with an exhilarating breadth of intellect and felicity of spirit.

Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.]]> 243 Julian Barnes 0307269639 Eric 3 non-fiction, never-finished 3.83 2008
author: Julian Barnes
name: Eric
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2010/11/29
date added: 2010/11/29
shelves: non-fiction, never-finished
review:
I'm actually not finished with this book--as much as I liked it, Barnes' philosophical musings on death were beginning to cause me some existential anxiety. I will go back to the book at some point, though, as it's too good to put away only half-devoured.
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