Quickies: 10% Human & Wit

10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Collen Publisher/Year: Harper, 2015 Format: ARC Pages: 336 Source: Publisher What it is: Microbes make up 90% of our bodies and help keep us healthy. However, with the twentieth century diet, we’ve also seen a rise in twentieth century diseases. Collen, a biologist, conveys some

Rare Objects

Maeve Fanning and her mother, a widowed Irish immigrant, live in Boston’s impoverished North End. It’s the 1930s and jobs are scarce. Maeve’s mother works long hours as a seamstress and hopes that she’ll one day be promoted to saleswoman, but she knows that’s unlikely; no one would hire an Irish salesperson. As such, all

Terrible Virtue

Given the current political climate — with a huge abortion access case before Supreme Court, a presidential candidate proposing women be punished for having abortions, and people still in a frenzy over last year’s “sting” videos that were doctored to make Planned Parenthood look as bad as possible — the publication of Ellen Feldman’s Terrible Virtue

Diamond Head

Spanning from China to Hawaii, Cecily Wong’s debut novel, Diamond Head, follows four generations of the Leong family through wars and betrayals. It’s a saga that takes sees the family through the Boxer Rebellion and World War II, one in which people’s fortunes turn around seemingly overnight. The patriarch of the family is Frank, a

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, Karen Abbott’s latest nonfiction work, tells the story of four women —  Elizabeth Van Lew and Emma Edmonds, Belle Boyd, Rose O’Neal Greenhow — who refused to sit idly by and watch the Civil War take its toll. There was little that women could do those days in any official capacity, but