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(heads-up: this book is coming out April 10th. I read it early in exchange for an honest review.)If Natural Causes were an essay, it would open with a thesis statement like: "Health trends are faddish and often counterproductive to a long and pain-free life. Many 'healthy' things we do -- including things licensed medical doctors do -- are tradition-based and scientifically unfounded. We need to carefully figure out how to treat ourselves from an objective and rational standpoint."However, this
Jeff Bezos and the futile quest for eternal lifehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentis...=============Just re-read this book, focusing on the science in it, specifically human biology. If you don't read those sections closely you will not understand the rest of the book, in fact the rest of the book may annoy you if you don't understand the scientific basis for it.Not only is the human body not a product of "intelligent design," it is also not a product of evolutionary genius. As scientists have
1 Star**My #1 worst read of 2018**ARC provided by Twelve Books via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. And honest it shall be.My expectations for this book were of an insightful, well-researched look at how society handles aging and death. Ehrenreich is a well-known author, successful, and educated. But Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer is one of the biased books I have ever read. It’s a hostile rant lacking in facts thr...
An enjoyable -- if prolonged -- tract from one of our last, true, highly regarded crabs. And just the thing for a certain reader facing 50.I've been reading Barbara so long I feel like I'm on a first-name basis with her. I almost always agree with her clear line of thought and her mistrust of all the B.S. directed our way from all directions. She'll be forever known for "Nickel and Dimed," but I think she's fought the longer game against a more pervasive undermining of the human spirit, which wa...
Splendid, precise, no-bullshit assessment of which age-prolonging techniques are worthwhile. Ehrenreich has no tolerance for victim blaming. Her Ph.D. in cell biology serves her well.In short: eat more vegetables, exercise, expect some pain as you age, and don't assume that health professionals always know what's best. Keep an open mind, do research, and think carefully before committing to an operation or other procedure (or even the latest diet craze). Understand that the longest life may not
Informative and Illuminating. This author has a doctorate in cellular immunology, so one can expect quite a bit on the role of the different cells within our bodies. Some of this was quite dense but I believe I did understand most of what she was explaining. That our cells have different functions and can also turn on us. This section of the book, which was in the last half, was not my favorite. I loved her explanation and witticisms on the self help industry, and the ways we are mislead, or han...
Eh. Feels rushed and not well thought out. The overall subject is interesting but not the approach here.
What an illuminating and thought-provoking book! Author Barbara Ehrenreich poses a seminal question. How much time and effort should we devote to pursuits to extend our lives? The answer, it turns out, is less than we have been led to believe in recent years by the ever growing and exceeding profitable “wellness” industry. The book presents an antipodean view based on scientific evidence which depicts a more dystopian understanding of the body. A view, I would argue, that was already highly acce...
Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life. So, this one goes into understanding what exactly is behind a "natural cause" death and just about everything between life and the great beyond.And for the most part, this one was okay.It had a lot of interesting stuff in it...but the book did feel a bit scattered, and I think that's why I couldn't connect to it in the w
(2.5) A decade ago, Barbara Ehrenreich discovered a startling paradox through a Scientific American article: the immune system assists the growth and spread of tumors, including in breast cancer, which she had in 2000. It was an epiphany for her, confirming that no matter how hard we try with diet, exercise and early diagnosis, there’s only so much we can do to preserve our health; “not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds.” I love Ehrenreich’s Smile or...
Author Barbara Ehrenreich has produced some fabulous, must-read books: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America and Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them.Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer begins with Ehrenreich (now 76) explaining why she doesn’t get mammograms or Pap smears or annual exams: “I gradually came to realize that I was old...
Barbara Ehrenreich, who has bravely taken on minimum wage in her classic book, Nickel and Dimed, now takes on all the buzz-worries of my Baby Boomer generation in her book, Natural Causes. I was fascinated with her take on screenings and annual exams: unnecessary, all. This is not just her opinion, mind you; this is what science is telling us. Fascinating. And why haven't I read this before now?Probably just me, but I loved this sentence: "Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that
I pondered nearly an entire day deciding if I was going to give this book a 2 star or a 3 star. 2.5 stars rounded up for the core of the accuracy to her overall "outlook" upon aging and death in the USA. And also that we are highly "over-doctored". Most of the evidence is anecdotal in this book, but regardless- a great deal of it IS true. Especially in the nuance of how aging (both women AND men too) humans who are over 66 or maybe 70 years of age are encouraged for "optimal" health care treatme...
Uneven. Some excellent points and some nonsense. Mostly there's an unexpected level of credulity about weird stuff, and some strange places where she seems to miss the point entirely.Not up to the standards she has set with Nickled and Dimed, but not a waste, either.Library copy
1.5. This book is all over the place. If I could sum up - we all die regardless and she's mad about it, so she's blaming medicine and science. Side trip into her anger at the immune system for not fitting the pattern of "good" she wishes to assign and pearl clutching over what is essentially chaos theory as seen in biological systems. The part on macrophages was interesting and garnered the 1.5 stars here. Basically, Barbara sounds like Grandpa Simpson ranting. She starts out with a premise that...
We can, or think we can, understand the causes of disease in cellular and chemical terms, so we should be able to avoid it by following the rules laid down by medical science: avoiding tobacco, exercising, undergoing routine medical screening, and eating only foods currently considered healthy. Anyone who fails to do so is inviting an early death. Or to put it another way, every death can now be understood as suicide. I received an Advanced Reading Copy of Barbara Ehrenreich's Natural Causes,
One of my favourite jokes involves a person saying that they want to die like their grandfather, peacefully and in his sleep, not screaming and terrified like the passengers in the car he was driving. I read a few years ago that doctors aren’t allowed to write that you died of natural causes on your death certificate any more, even if you are 120 years old. You always have to die of ‘something’. And since you will have died of cancer or dementia or heart failure that also means that if you hadn’...
Ok, I have a shelf for death books, those that academically discuss death and its accompanying accudiments... this fits there well. (I would like to thank Mr. French for the accudiments word... if you know who that is, then you are old enough to die naturally!)I thought the book was super informative and certainly illuminating. I have to agree with so many of her observations and the changes in our society as we enter the age of increasing levels of narcissism. The book is in support of living y...
Barbara Ehrenreich, a renowned investigative journalist, political and social critic, author of 23 books has written Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying and Killing Ourselves To Live Longer. Ehrenreich is extremely critical of the health, fitness and wellness craze that has filtered into nearly every aspect of life. Independent examination and questioning medical experts and advice was encouraged, along with the social and cultural forces that influence individual and...
The Reductionist is INWith too much time on our hands, we are obsessed with ourselves. Barbara Ehrenreich visits the catalog of diets, wellness, mindfulness, religion, movements, medicine and idiotic fads that preoccupy so many. Eternal youth, eternal life, and managed death are all symptoms. Taking the view from above, it is of course of no moment in the ongoing universe.We want to think we can beat the odds and maybe even death. Certainly deterioration is ripe for conquering. So we work out, e...