3 Free eBooks - October 2012

The Internet is chock full of good reads…and many of them are free. I’m going to start a monthly post highlighting three book length items. In some ways the post is similar to the weekly ‘Gleanings’ in that the items are found as part of my normal continuous learning habits; the items are different because they are longer, have more depth, and sometimes were published as books previously (sometimes long enough ago that they must be read with their vintage in mind). 

• Hibberd, Shirley; Hulme, F. Edward. Familiar Garden Flowers. London: Cassell; 1879. Available from: http://archive.org/details/cu31924051745945 - Note the date. Just as in the Egyptian Birds book, the color prints are the draw for this book. How many of the flowers do you recognize? It is surprising how many are still ‘familiar’ to us. I found that I spent more time on the ones I didn’t recognize - trying to figure out why they had fallen out of popularity (or maybe just never became ‘familiar’ in North America). Looking the puzzling ones in Wikipedia sometimes provides an explanation.
• Irwig L, Irwig J, Trevena L, et al. Smart Health Choices: Making Sense of Health Advice. London: Hammersmith Press; 2008. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK63638/ - This book provides a strategy to enable meaningful conversations with your healthcare providers. Chapter 5 is the keystone of the book (entitled Smart Health Choice Essentials). The “Useful sources of health advice” section right before the glossary points to databases and websites that provide current information about treatments as well.
• Whimper, Charles. Egyptian birds for the most part seen in the Nile Valley. London: A. and C. Black; 1909. Available from: http://archive.org/details/egyptianbirdsfor00whym - Note the date - well before a lot of excavation and the dam at Aswan. The colored pictures are what make this book worth the look. They are well labeled on the opposite page and include the surroundings. I particularly liked when the author included the hieroglyph or the bird as depicted in ancient Egyptian art. 

10 Years Ago – In October 2002

Many years ago I started collecting headlines/news blurbs as a way of honing my reading of news. Over the years, the headline collection has been warped by the sources of news I was reading…increasingly online. Reviewing the September 2002 headline gleanings - I forced myself to pick 10. 

1. A Florida man who was lost at sea for more than two months was rescued 40 miles off the coast
2. Canada plans to create 10 huge new national parks and five marine conservation areas over the next five years to protect unique landscapes and animals 
3. Enrollment at major Canadian schools by U.S. citizens has risen by at least 86 percent over the past three years, to about 5,000 students.
4. King Tut - an abnormal curvature of the spine and fusion of the upper vertebrae, a condition associated with scoliosis and a rare disorder called Klippel-Feil syndrome, which makes sufferers look as if they have a short neck.
5. Sniper keeps D.C. area on edge
6. Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Peace Prize
7. Peruvian archeologists have discovered a complete mummified human skeleton in the ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu
8. Bacteria found in a 2,000-year-old piece of cheese could be the final evidence that this food was a continuous source of infectious disease in the ancient Roman world.
9. All 115 hostages killed in the raid that ended a Moscow theater standoff died of health problems stemming from the gas used by Russian forces to end the siege
10. About 150,000 years ago, an anomalous ice age was triggered by an increasingly salty Mediterranean Sea, a development that's occurring today and may start new ice sheet growth in the next few decades