Becker begins the fascinating story of The Body Electric with contemporaneous events in the political and scientific realms. He recounts the epic battle between the electrical generation and distribution powers in the US and Canada and the nascent environmental movement of fishermen, trappers, and hunters who united to save Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from development of Ontaria power flowing to the Great Lakes, a movement which crossed the borders between the countries.

JFK and the Unspeakable: why he died and why it matters,  by historian and theologian James W. Douglass is a thoroughly researched and documented book covering not only the JFK assassination, but also the state of the geopolitical world during his presidency.  In addition to a book about JFK, it is also a very readable summary of the major foreign policy issues of his time and would be a good book to read just for the overview it gives the reader of the state of global politics during his administration.   It is not a book after the fashion of most of the so-called “conspiracy theory” works.  Rather it is a book that explores the theological aspects of evil in our world and how those things came together to end with the assassination of a President.  The reader is never asked to suspend disbelief and accept any notions that are not grounded in well researched facts.  The author does not name an assassin, but makes the argument that the assassination was the culmination of the evil that men do.  John Kennedy’s unwillingness to cooperate with “the Unspeakable” sealed his fate.  He turned toward peace when what was demanded of him was war.  He refused to see the Russians as the “Enemy” and as a result the world was spared a nuclear holocaust. The knowledge of his own mortality allowed him to fearlessly oppose those who would benefit from conflict with other nations.  Nevertheless, no one can read and digest this book and accept any longer the official story of what happened in Dallas on that day.  But the bigger picture is “Why he died and why it matters”.  The evil that led to the assassination of JFK is still with us and abounds in the world today.  Read this book and you will see the world through more enlightened eyes.  It is important.

Cast as a biography of the typhus bacillus, Zinsser gives us an eyeful of the several thousand years of death and destruction that have been attendant to the development of this organism. He chronicles, moreover,  its transformations with a hopeful modern eye, attempting to show how modern conditions have ameliorated its ravages. One certainly hopes he is correct, and yet no where in the public arena do we hear discussion of human immune system sufficient to fulfill the promise of science circa 1935. It seems instead that our political leadership has promised safe spaces where neither nature nor history offers any such expectation.