Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic

[cornerofmadness]

Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic by Sandra Kahn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


More like a 2.5 read but I rounded up because of all the citations at the end of the book. I can no longer talk to my cousins who are dentists to judge their feelings about this. A dentist I saw as an emergency gave me the book (maybe because he knows I have pre-dental students in my a &p classes, It's not because I have a small jaw and crooked teeth).

It's a strange book, repetitive and honestly felt more like someone's doctoral thesis than anything else. Their hypothesis is two fold, one that orthodontics seem to be more out to generate money than to get to the root of the issues and two, it has less to do with genetics (not sure I entirely agree) and more to do with how we hold our jaws at rest (mouth breathing = smaller jaws, weaker chins, crowded teeth. Then again I tend to hold my jaw shut and I have room in my jaw for all my wisdom teeth. Is it that I don't mouth breathe or is it all the Neanderthal variants in my genome?)

The whole book is a bunch of anecdotal evidence about that thesis (with odd photos about attractiveness which seems out of the scope of what is being presented). I basically read it to get it off my shelf. It's not something I see recommending.



View all my reviews

Cards on the Table

[cornerofmadness]

Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sometimes, since we so often see Christie's work adapted to movies and tv shows we forget the time period when she wrote these was a deeply racist one. The movie/tv shows edit this out but when you read the book it tends to slap you in the face and you aren't expecting it. The anti-Italian sentiment in the first chapters made me set this aside (for years if I'm honest) and I only picked up again for a reading challenge.

Mr. Shaitana is an Italian man with theatrical presence, sort of a Mephistophelian presentation. He tells Poirot about a party he plans to host, a bridge game with four sleuths in one room and four potential murderers who got away with their crimes in the other and how he was going to one up Poirot and expose their crimes. Oddly enough everyone agrees to this (but only Poirot is in on that secrete I think, but maybe the other sleuths too)

So on the crime solving side we have Poirot, Inspector Battle of Scotland Yard, Secret Service Agent Colonel Race, mystery author Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, and on the potential murderer side there are Dr. Roberts, Mrs. Lorrimer, Major Despard, and Miss Anne Meredith. Shaitana sits out the game and by the end, he is dead with a dagger to the heart.

The sleuths all agree to pool their resources and help each other solve this crime, even allowing the amateur Ariadne to play along because she might be more trustworthy in the eyes of the other two women. In fact I loved that both Mrs. Lorrimer and Oliver are very capable women in no need of a man to help them (Anne less so but her friend Rhoda is a 'modern woman' in the parlance of the times and a fun character)

So we drop in to each detective's point of view (not so much Race's) and we follow along as they try to find the killer. Shaitana's reason to be dead seems almost as much to do with being a swarthy, shifty Italian (you know how they are with women, wink wink, nod nod) as it is the fact someone fears being exposed as a murderer.

Was Shaitana right? Did Dr Roberts kill a patient? Did Despard murder a man in the Amazon? Did Lorrimer take out her husband? Did meek little Anne kill a few along the way? All interesting questions and Christie keeps you bouncing back and forth between the four. All had good reasons to jab a knife into Shaitana's heart.

All and in all a good mystery with plenty of fun twists (and oh the other bits of racism which at the end of the day were only a few lines, dark skinned people were seen as untrustworthy by some of the characters (Africans and Indian) and oddly there's a line about of course he's not a killer, he's white, strange for anyone to believe/say that especially since almost all of Christie's killers are).



View all my reviews

Wrong Side of the Grave

[cornerofmadness]

Wrong Side of the Grave by Bryna Butler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Eric Jansen is the object of female attention, being a young handsome drummer in a local Point Pleasant WV band. So what if some of those women are vampires? Because Eric only looks human. He's actually the world famous Mothman of Point Pleasant and he and vampires are aliens (and they are each other's prey). His tattoo is actually a device that alters his form to look human instead of huge, grey with wings and red glowing eyes.

The only person who knows this is young Bridget a would-be journalist who lost her father a few years back which becomes horribly relevant when the newly dead begin to rise, soon followed by the not-so-freshly dead. The last thing Eric wants is for Bridget to go through that. He and Bridge along with a new Men in Black agent, Warner, try to solve the mystery of who is causing the dead to rise. It gets even more personal when one of the dead is a young man with domestic violence potential who had plagued Eric and his friends.

The story is a fun mix of local legend written by a local. Eric is such an arrogant creature that you sort of want to slap him but has just enough charm to pull it off. Bridget is intelligent and doesn't do too stupid to live things so that's a bonus right there. The mystery has some real world consequences for Eric which will be interesting in future volumes. I'll have to get volume two next time I see Bryna at events (because yes, I'm a local too)



View all my reviews