March 2014

Boring choices this month though one may be useful and the other will raise your blood pressure:

Yonatan:

The White Coat Investor: A Doctor's Guide To Personal Finance And Investing

Dahle MD, James M

I know that you are a careful planner and both of you believe in saving. This book was written for all income levels of doctors from residents up to practising physicians. I know  you have a financial advisor but another perspective can't be bad.

Noam:

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Fink, Sheri

As you live in NO, I think that this book is important. Your Mother is  reading it now and it is making her angry, which means it must be a good book. The absolute inability of the richest country in the world to think through a problem quickly and get help to its citizens within hours instead of days is a stain on the history of the US. If this had happened elsewhere, it is safe to say that people would be in jail but all we got was "well done Brownie!" The physicians involved had to make choices normally reserved for military situations during a battle. An improtant book.

February 2014

February 2014.

Yoni, Noam and Mark: Gary Shteyngart 
Little Failure: A memoir.

I loved his previous two books. We were driving down to NOLA to visit Noam and Catie when we were listening to his interview on Fresh Air (well worth finding the podcast BTW). This is very slightly embellished autobiography. It is,of course, his personal story but so much of it will resonate with us  that you should find it immediately appealing.
Immigrants and the children of immigrants: MOT : middle school crisis : fears and therapy : Parents demanding educational excellence, I think you both get the point by now.

If you want to read the novels let me know, I enjoyed them both.

January 2014

Noam: What a plant knows.

This is an introduction to the increasingly popular and interesting science of plant senses, the book explains how plants react to stimuli and whether they are really "feeling" which is as much a philosophical question as a biological one. They tried to call this field plant neurobiology, but as plants lack an organized Neurological system, the real neurobiologist got upset. A remarkable introduction and so much of this has been found out in the past 20 years. If you want more of this you need to get into some real cutting edge science, but I was stunned to find out that there are 16 different photoreceptors in Arabadopsis, and that plants do have memory. In addition the BRAC gene found in breast cancer is also present in plants and a mutation in the gene that in humans causes deafness but stopping teh growth of sensory hairs in the ear canal, in plants stops root hair growth

Yonatan:  Dark Star Alan Furst

I know you loved the first one in the series. You know I love reading books in a series so here is number 2. Let me know how long we should go between installments.

December 2013

Yoni and Noam,

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel 

by Avi Shavit.

Forgive me for sending you both the same book but I just finished it and I could not put it down. It has had incredible reviews, and it is a remarkable view of a remarkable country.
This is Israel, written by a liberal Israeli who has access to both the rich and famous and the poor and dispossessed. It is a nuanced story, way beyond the crap put out by the Jewish establishment and the crap put out by the Arab fellow-travellers.
This includes both the critical history and the author's view of the future. This is subtle, sometimes contradictory but wonderful complex stuff and yet very readable.
By the time you finish this book you will have a much greater understanding of the situation in  Israel than you could get from anywhere else.

November 2013

It is Two for one Month (books with appeal to boys and girls)

For Yoni, The Goldfinch: Donna Tart. I have yet to read this..But, I am listening to the serialization on the BBC, I will read it, honest.
Anyway it is an exciting fast paced but literary novel and I think it will appeal to both of you, so it is a toofer.

Noam:
 The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans : Lawrence N Powell. No, of course I haven't read it but it has very high reviews and is an accesible , yet scholarly work on the founding and growth of your new home town.

October 2013

Yoni: Alan Furst: Night Soldiers.
This guy is very popular now, and rightly so. I just finished a book of his set in Paris immediately prior to the second world war. This is the first in the series. Set mostly in Paris and roaming through Middle Europe. People work for both sides, they try and do the right thing which may mean they end up working with the bad guys every now and then, I think that you really will enjoy this.
p.s. I also sent you the new Jhumpa Lahiri book, that is for Daci.


Noam: Jarrod Diamond: Guns Germs and Steel. I have read this and you will enjoy this very much. How geography and inventions and of course microbiology have changed the course of human events. That's not to say that great leaders have no role but apparently geography and a number of critical quantum leaps in technology perform the real historical movements.

September 2013

Yonatan: Alexander Fleming, The man and the myth.
Yoni, first an apology. I had to buy this second hand from the UK it might take a week to arrive.
This will make you the king of ID for a while. This well thought out book describes the "accident" that led to the discovery of penicillin and takes an approach which proves that it cannot of been an accident but a well thought out set of experiments. It goes on to describe the great showman that Fleming was taking the Nobel prize and all...

Noam: Shaman: At his request

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/28/214525930/shaman-takes-readers-back-to-the-dawn-of-humankind