I've loved science-fiction since my teens. Since then, I've read dozens of sci-fi books, and Project Hail Mary is by far now my favorite. At heart, it is a buddy story set in space: warmth, adventure, and togetherness suffuse the pages. As a psychiatrist-clinical neuroscience researcher, I found the science parts interesting, though some tech nical aspects were beyond my understanding. Never mind - they can easily be skipped. Altogether, this is a most delightful read.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through…
Abraham Verghese is best known as a novelist, writing epics such as Cutting for Stone. He is also a physician, and medicine plays a large part in his fiction. The Tennis Partner is different: it is a frank memoir about a very difficult period in his life. It is about himself as a professor of internal medicine and one of his students who shared his love of tennis. At work, Verghese was the master; on the tennis court, the student was the master. As a psychiatrist, I admire the way Verghese tells us about his journey in both roles, his efforts to save his student from addiction while adjusting to his own difficult divorce, and how he handles tragedy when it comes. I heard his voice speaking to me through the writing, and was sad when I came to the last page. .
In January 1994, Abraham Verghese, an indian doctor in a Texan teaching hospital, was called to the morgue to identify the body of his close friend, student and tennis partner David Smith. David had killed himself because he could not deal with his addiction to intravenously injected cocaine. This book is Verghese's tribute to his dead friend; it is also an attempt to understand and explain drug addiction. Being both doctor and friend, Verghese offers us a unique insight into addiction, describing with clinical detachment the horrific physical symptoms of abuse, revealing how the stress of the medical profession leads…
As a psychiatrist-novelist, I thought it would be interesting to re-read a book I had first read as a teenager -now, to look at it from a writerly point of view, and as an adult. The story remains original and well-told., This time, though, I paid more attention to the social context Bradbury was aiming to show, something that barely caught my attention the first time round. Interesting: a sci-fi classic with a message to think about now as much as when it was written.
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.
Over 1 million copies sold in the UK.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
