Books

Research conducted by Serge Renaud of the University of Bordeaux discovered that although the French smoke and eat more dietary fat than Americans, they suffer half the mortality rate from coronary disease. Renaud argued that the French’s regular red wine consumption accounted for the difference.

This spring I decided to take a zoomed book class offered by Alliance Française Seattle. The assigned...

Books may not have the answers we seek to confronting and understanding racism and anti-black violence. But maybe they can help.

All of the Existentialists are philosophers of life who refuse to spin systems of ideals, insisting instead, like the American Pragmatists, that philosophies are only truly tested in lived experience.

Looking for insights on our current circumstances from other times and writers? Here is a basket full of books that speak to our time from the past.

Disasters are “extraordinarily generative,” Solnit contends. From them emerge new ways of seeing the world and one another. Fruitless preoccupations suddenly fade away. Hitherto un-imagined possibilities emerge.

The onset and turbulent passage of Seattle’ influenza epidemic matches our present experience, and its history may serve as a route-guide. The "Spanish" Flu orphaned Emmett Watson and Mary McCarthy who, arguably, became writers as a result.

Here’s my question. Have we not been demanding social distancing, admittedly of a different type, for some time now? Another word for “social distancing” is “polarization.”

The Names of the Dead Kevin Wignall  Abandoned by his CIA colleagues when...

They laid rail in blistering desert heat and spent brutal winters digging and blasting tunnels in the treacherous Sierra Nevada Mountains. And they were segregated, mocked, beaten, robbed, and murdered.