Status Updates From The Best American Science a...

This is leaning towards a highly positive review.

Love this so far!

Wow. This book is both illuminating and terrifying. I have yet to read anything that I expected to know and have not been disappointed. Last story was done by the grandson is a surgeon who removed part of patient Henry M's brain. Henry could not lay down any memories from that moment on and he lived another 50 years.

This book is utterly fascinating. I just finished a chapter on the "Chemist's war on Prohibition" about how the US government added poisons to the alcohol so that people would actually die when they drank it. Over 10,000 people who illegally drank alcohol ended up dying and the government never took any responsibility for it or apologized. These are all fact based and scary beyond belief.

I only started this book this morning and I'm already freaked out by it. The first story is about the illegal kidney trade around the world but primarily focusing on India and a specific man who taught himself how to transplant kidneys and then would have middlemen either pay, or beat up, "donors" so he could make millions off of the buyers. It is pretty sick and disturbing but that is what is happening now.

So far the best essays: "Nature's Spoils" "The Brain that Changed Everything" "The Chemist's War" "Letting Go" "New Dog in Town" "Taking a Fall"