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This week’s question was what is propylparaben? Propylparaben is used in food and pharmaceutical products as a preservative, fungicide, and mold preventer. It is approved by the FDA and is mildly toxic if swallowed in excessive quantities. It is an allergen and could cause allergic reaction.
With enthralling suspense, Johnson chronicles Snow's day-by-day efforts, as he risks his own life to prove how the epidemic is being spread.The Ghost Map takes place in the summer of 1854. A devastating cholera outbreak seizes London just as it is emerging as a modern city: more than 2 million people packed into a ten-mile circumference, a hub of travel and commerce, teeming with people from all over the world, continually pushing the limits of infrastructure that's outdated as soon as it's updated. Dr. John Snow-whose ideas about contagion had been dismissed by the scientific community-is spurred to intense action when the people in his neighborhood begin dying.
When he creates the map that traces the pattern of outbreak back to its source, Dr. Snow didn't just solve the most pressing medical riddle of his time. He ultimately established a precedent for the way modern city-dwellers, city planners, physicians, and public officials think about the spread of disease and the development of the modern urban environment.
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit is a collection of essays on the topic of feminism and women’s experience of the world. It starts with the essay Men Explain Things to Me which you may have run into before. This essay explores the silencing of women in one way or another a topic that runs throughout the essays in the book. I read the book because I had heard of but never read the title essay and was interested in doing so. The book as a whole was thought provoking if a bit depressing. Depressing for the bleakness of the facts that support her arguments and the fact that, to use her own image, on the road to gender equality we have barely begun.
The question was can you name a venomous North American mammal? There are 2, neither is life-threateningly venomous and both are shrews. One is the shorttail shrew found in the eastern half of the United States, the other is the common shrew found in mountainous, swampy areas throughout North America.
Donna Andrews has long been an author I turn to when I am looking for a light-hearted mystery populated with mildly eccentric characters. Her latest, The Nightingale Before Christmas, fulfills all expectations. Here Meg is supervising the production of a designer show case house in her local town. Keeping the designers in line is, to use a hackneyed cliché, like herding cats. Things are complicated as the opening looms by the murder of one of the participating designers. Will Meg figure out who killed the much hated Clay? Will they get the show house open in time? Will Meg find time for her unusually heavy burden of social activities? Read the book to find out.
If you’re looking for a hard-boiled detective who’s also an actual fairy princess (not I might add any Disneyesque variety of that phenomena) then you need look no further then Alexis Hall’s Kate Kane. In Iron & Velvet (her first outing) Kate is hired by a vampire prince to investigate the murder of a werewolf. Kate, who apparently has a knack for drawing conclusions from unsupported inferences, manages to clear up this original murder, as well as another that crops up along the way.
The question for
the week was who is Aaron Klug? Aaron
Klug is a South African/British Chemist & Molecular Biologist who won the
1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the 3-dimensional structures of
viruses.
Ben H. Winters concludes his Last Policeman series with
World of Trouble. As you may recall from reviews of the earlier
entries in the series (The Last Policeman & Countdown City) the setting of this series involves a comet that
is about to make impact with Earth --- an extinction level comet. In this book we have reached the last couple
of days before impact. Our hero is still
coping with the disaster by trying to be a policeman. In this book he’s looking for his sister who
has disappeared. The setting of these
books and the resulting world they depict remain incredibly sad in this book
and the series ends with this book because the world ends with this book.
In War Dogs by Greg Bear we follow the transformative adventure of one skyrine (or space marine) as he battles unknown enemies on Mars. The book was very slow to grab my attention. If I hadn’t been stranded somewhere with nothing else to read I would probably never have finished it. As it was I read it long enough to get intrigued by the underlying mystery and wound up finishing the book.