Living on the frontlines

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea , by Barbara Demick, is one of my favorite books this year. Perhaps it’s my history as a cold-war kid that made it particularly interesting to me. The world has changed so much since I was a child during the Cold War. Then, it seemed as though half the world was shrouded in mystery, much like North Korea is today. My dad was an Air Force pilot, and after my parents got divorced, my mom got a job with the Army teaching military kids – thus during the last part of the Cold War my life was pretty entwined with the military. Our mission – I always saw myself as part of it somehow – was to stop the Russians should they ever attack. They were the “Evil Empire.”   I remember being 12 years old and laying on my bed in the heat of the Kansas summer listening to Radio Moscow on my shortwave radio. I’d been told that everything I heard was propaganda, yet still, somehow it humanized the people on the other side of the world – the ones who...

This is a fantastic book – definitely five spoons on the spoon scale. It’s the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who might have been lost to history were it not for her very special cells, the hard work of author Rebecca Skiloot and the help of the Lacks family. Mrs. Lacks was a cervical cancer patient at John’s Hopkins hospital in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors took a dime-sized biopsy of her cancer tumor. It was then passed along to researchers at the hospital who were working on the problem of how to grow cells indefinitely in a lab. Like most scientific endeavors, there was a huge failure rate, but the scientists stuck with it. Then, along came Henrietta’s cells. Her cells became known to science as HeLa cells. They’ve been to the moon and sent around the world. According to the book, if we were able to weigh all of the HeLa cells in existence today, they’d be about 50 million metric tons – about the same as 100 Empire State buildings. Before anyone e-mails ...

During the past five years I haven’t been much of an avid reader. When I was in college I ate up books. I marked them up, wrote notes or reactions in the margins and highlighted them to death. I had plenty of time to read back then. I’ve always preferred non-fiction to fiction. Perhaps it’s a reflection of my journalism training, but a work of fiction has to be really, really good or I get bored quickly. Last Christmas Ryan and Sara gave me an iPod. It’s now up there with my must-have possessions. I can live without cable TV, but not without my iPod. As a legally blind person I used to get free books on tape from the Library of Congress. I haven’t done that in a long time. For all I know the technology has changed a lot, but I found having to buy the special four/track tape recorders cumbersome. It seemed like they were so fragile, yet so expensive. I was always sending them in for repairs. My iPod has allowed me to re-discover audio books. It’s so small I can lay in bed at night with ...