Mad Cow and Evolution

So the extra days off last week, lead to 2 book reviews this week! I hope that everyone had a great long weekend+ On to the reviews...

I promised that I would read this year's Printz Award winning book for Young Adult Literature, "Going Bovine" by Libba Bray. I only made it about half way through before I stopped. I really did not like it, and I just did not want to spend anymore of my time trying to get through it. I will include a summary below, and you can read and then post your thoughts on it, but I just couldn't get into it. It started off really well, but as time went on, I simply lost interest in it. Here is the summary, read it, and post what you think.

In this ambitious novel, Cameron, a 16-year-old slacker whose somewhat dysfunctional family has just about given up on him, as perhaps he himself has, when his diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jacob, "mad cow" disease, reunites them, if too late. The heart of the story, though, is a hallucinatory—or is it?—quest with many parallels to the hopeless but inspirational efforts of Don Quixote, about whom Cameron had been reading before his illness. Just like the crazy—or was he?—Spaniard, Cam is motivated to go on a journey by a sort of Dulcinea. His pink-haired, white-winged version goes by Dulcie and leads him to take up arms against the Dark Wizard and fire giants that attack him intermittently, and to find a missing Dr. X, who can both help save the world and cure him. Cameron's Sancho is a Mexican-American dwarf, game-master hypochondriac he met in the pot smokers' bathroom at school who later turns up as his hospital roommate. Bray blends in a hearty dose of satire on the road trip as Cameron leaves his Texas deathbed—or does he?—to battle evil forces with a legendary jazz horn player, to escape the evil clutches of a happiness cult, to experiment with cloistered scientists trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, and to save a yard gnome embodying a Viking god from the clutches of the materialistic, fame-obsessed MTV-culture clones who shun individual thought. -From School Library Journal

Now onto a book that I thought was great, and didn't have high expectation of. "Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith" by Deborah Helligman. This non-fiction work about Charles and Emma Darwin, reads like a novel. You find yourself drawn into these "characters" and have to keep reminding yourself that they were real people. While I don't normally read non-fiction just for fun, this one is well worth the time, and it offers lots of interesting insight into this controversial scientist's personal life.

Beginning with Darwin's notorious chart listing reasons to wed and not to wed, Heiligman has created a unique, flowing, and meticulously researched picture of the controversial scientist and the effect of his marriage on his life and work. Using the couple's letters, diaries, and notebooks as well as documents and memoirs of their relatives, friends, and critics, the author lets her subjects speak for themselves while rounding out the story of their relationship with information about their time and place. She shows how Darwin's love for his intelligent, steadfast, and deeply religious cousin was an important factor in his scientific work—pushing him to document his theory of natural selection for decades before publishing it with great trepidation. Just as the pair embodied a marriage of science and religion, this book weaves together the chronicle of the development of a major scientific theory with a story of true love. -From School Library Journal.