My daughter Lauren's book "Amelia's Journey to Find Family" was featured in a review in the Lancaster Newspapers today.
She published the book this summer after caring for a 14-year-old rescue Labrador Retriever named Amelia for the last year of her life. I wrote about Lauren's book and her love for dogs in a post in June last year.
If you want a copy of the book, you can order it here.
It's wonderful to see Lauren share her love of dogs in this way.
Her Dad is very proud!
That's the future of America according to the Canadian author Stephen Marche. By some definitions, the level of violence and political dysfunction in America is already at a point we are close to a civil war.
In the book Stephen Marche uses information he learned from military and political experts to make scenarios of how America could fall into civil war.
The first scenario he calls "The Bridge." Federal inspectors close a bridge between two rural counties. Protestors occupy the bridge, tear down the roadblocks, and defy the federal government to close the bridge. A sheriff in one of the counties becomes the spokesperson for the protesters. Soon he is on Fox News every day giving updates from the frontlines.
Eventually the Army moves in. After months of delay, the military attacks the bridge. The sheriff is arrested and charged with treason and becomes a hero to Fox News.
In the aftermath of the fight, the President comes to town for a "listening tour." An unemployed white kid living in mom's attic and dreaming of being a hero shoots the President when she makes a surprise visit to a Jamba Juice. He becomes a bigger hero than Kyle Rittenhouse.
From there the local terrorist war becomes national. Attacks, counter attacks become daily life in America.
Marche then speculates on how the US will break into pieces since we are ungovernable. One part will be Texas, by itself. Another part will be the Pacific Coast. Then the northeast and midwest will be the land still called the USA. The South and the West will form a nation with the most land area, no abortions at all anywhere, unlimited gun rights, and an economy that will crater immediately without all the tax money they get from the rich states. South Carolina, for example, gets $7.50 from the federal government for every dollar it pays in taxes.
Marche says he has some hope at the end, but he sounds like a manager who who talks for about 20 minutes about her worst employee then says, "I know she's a good person inside." The message of the rest of the book: move to a blue state or live in Gilead.
(In past years I have written an essay about the books I read in the previous year. As my list of books gets longer and my memory shorter, I decided to write about the books as I read them rather than 2000+ words at the end of the year.)
In November I visited the Institute Curie near the Sorbonne in Paris. This book was on the shelf in the tiny bookstore inside the small museum. I read kids books in French to keep some level of reading comprehension. This graphic novel gave me a chance to practice French and to remember what I learned about the life of this remarkable scientist.
I learned a lot about Marie Sklodowska-Curie's life because more than half the book is about her childhood in Poland and struggles to get to France to study physics. When I read about her previously, it was about her research and life-saving work in World War One.
After I finished the book, I looked up how many people have won Nobel Prizes: 962 laureates earning a total of 603 prizes (as of 2020). Just 59 laureates are women and Marie Curie is the first.
Just four laureates have received two Nobel Prizes:
Linus Pauling won a chemistry prize and a peace prize.
John Bardeen won the Nobel twice in physics.
Frederick Sanger won two chemistry prizes.
Marie Sklodowska-Curie won the Nobel Prize in physics and in chemistry: the only person to be awarded to Nobel Prizes in two different fields. She is extraordinary, even among the short list of multiple Nobel laureates.
If you read French at all, the book is fun to read and not difficult.
The summary on Goodreads:
Cette biographie de Marie Curie (1867-1934) retrace les principales étapes de son existence : son enfance en Pologne, sa scolarité studieuse et ses études supérieures, son arrivée à Paris, sa rencontre avec Pierre Curie, ses recherches sur le radium et ses découvertes sur les rayons X, l'obtention de ses prix Nobel en 1903 et 1911 et son engagement pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.
The Nobel Prize In 2025, I read 50 books. Of those, thirteen were Fiction. Of that that baker's dozen, six were by Nobel laureates ...
