Reviews and Comments

High school junior Cal Lewis is a budding journalist in Brooklyn, New York, who has earned a social media following for his enterprising live streams in the city. But when his father is picked as the unlikely final astronaut for the Orpheus V mission, in which NASA will send humans to Mars, Cal's life is completely uprooted at a moment's notice, and his aspirations – including his BuzzFeed internship – shattered.

But the move to Clear Lake City, in the suburb of Houston, among other astronaut families, while upsetting, does not stop him from pursuing his goals. As two tragedies strike with the mission, Cal finds himself caught between the well-meaning NASA which has been hapless at getting social media traction for the mission, astronaut families that are not as perfect as they appear, and a vulturous reality TV operation that cares more about drama and rating than anything else. With his loyal follower base, the teenager soon realizes he holds more power than he initially thought.

If you love stories around human aspiration to explore our solar system, if you love stories about the media circus, if you love stories of unlikely heroes who have to find their bearings in unfamiliar territories, "The Gravity of Us" would be a nice, leisurely, read for you with a light and adorable story line.

I realize "The Gravity of Us" is YA fiction. I would, however, have liked to see more character development in the book. Save for a two-faced side character who only appeared a handful of times, virtually all characters (our hero included) have rather one-dimensional depictions. Sure, most of them are quite likeable, which makes the book a fun read. But since I actually like these characters – I was rooting for them throughout – I would have enjoyed exploring each of their personalities much more than the book gave us. The romance arc fell especially flat because of this lack of depth.

“Ghost Town” (鬼地方) tells the story of a man’s return to his childhood home in a desolate rural Taiwanese village, after serving time for murdering his boyfriend in Germany. Despite the village being “haunted” by folklore ghosts, the more ghastly beings may have been the living humans after all.

The Chen family hails from the central Taiwanese township of Yongjing (永靖), a name which means “eternal peace” but also “always quiet”. The seven Chen children – five older sisters and two younger brothers – all lead tragic lives as adults: marital abuse, fraud, adultery, betrayal, bribery, homicide, suicide, mental illness… define their destinies. The youngest brother’s unannounced return from Germany sparked a flame so bright as to reveal the ugly dark specter hiding within each of them.

With each chapter, author Kevin Chen fluidly moves the narrative of the novel from the perspective of one character to another, both alive and dead, slowly peeling away layer upon layer of the family’s tragic past, leaving everyone’s skeletons of the closet out to hang. The unfurling of this multigenerational family saga is a page-turner that reminds one of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (Cien años de soledad) by Gabriel García Márquez.

It has been more than 20 years, but I still remember how dementia took a toll on the mind and body of my grandfather towards the last few years of his life – and the stress from taking care of him had eventually shaved decades off my uncle's life too, who passed just one day before he would have officially retired. “Dementia World Travel Guide” (Chinese title: 失智症世界的旅行指南 / original Japanese title: 認知症世界の歩き方) finally gives readers a first-person perspective on why folks with dementia behave the way they do, and what the rest of us on the side can do to make everyone’s lives a bit easier.

Having interviewed more than 100 dementia patients, Yusuke Kakei did a brilliant job depicting 13 bizarre worlds that the patients are plunged into: from a mystery bus where passengers won't be able to get off at their intended destinations, to a whiteout valley where nobody can ever take a mental image of its breathtaking scenery, to a fusion restaurant where the menus have no words and none of the dishes nor the ingredients have a name, to a village where everyone’s face is the same as everyone else’s…

These strange worlds where one cannot rely on their cognitive abilities are where dementia patients helplessly find themselves.

The “travel guide” describes how a patient would feel in such a world, and how such confusion translates into 44 types of behavior observed by others around.

The book gives its readers a profound understanding of where patients are coming from and where they are struggling the most, so that their friends and families will be able to provide more constructive support and reduce the mental and emotional strains in the relationships.

We all learned about our circulation and digestive systems from school, but those are child’s play in terms of complexity in comparison with our immune system, which my high school biology teacher just taught it along the lines of “something something white blood cell something something,” which, as it turns out, doesn’t even scratch the surface.

(To be fair, though, if my teacher had tried to explain immune system properly, he would have spent years teaching nothing else in his biology class, because it is so hopeless complex. And a majority of my high school classmates, myself included, would have probably flunked that class too.)

Thankfully, Philipp Dettmer, the founder of the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt, has done a wonderful job simplifying it for non-biologists like me, making an extremely complicated and convoluted subject somewhat relatable. I am in awe of how everything worked together to keep us alive. While it’s likely I will soon forget about the relationships between the Macrophages, Dendritic cells, MHC molecules, cytokines, B cells, T cells, etc., how he successfully debunked a lot of long-standing health myths in the book will likely stay with me forever:

• So you have probably heard that you have white blood cells and they are your immune cells or something like that. … “White blood cells” describes so many different cells that do so many different things that it is sort of useless if you want to understand what is really going on here.

• There is a vicious part of measles that is not discussed as much as the disease itself: Kids who overcome a measles infection have a higher chance of getting other diseases afterwards because the measles virus kills Memory Cells. … The virus basically deletes your acquired immunity. … Being infected with measles erases the capacity of the immune system to protect you from the diseases that you overcame in the past. Even worse, a measles infection can wipe away the protection that you might have gained from other vaccines, since most vaccines create memory cells. Therefore, in the case of measles, what does not kill you makes you weaker, not stronger.

• After decades of research it has become clear that with an extremely high certainty, your attitude has no effect on your chances of surviving cancer. … It is a terrible thing to say to someone with cancer that their attitude matters and that they should stay positive, because it does two things: For one, it puts the responsibility of healing and surviving on the sick person. It implies that if you don’t win the fight and have faced the gravest of all outcomes, it is your fault. … The other reason is chemotherapy, surgeries, and radiation therapy are, well, not a great experience. And by being told that you are supposed to be positive to get well, you are told that you are not allowed to feel how you feel.

• At least for now, there are no scientifically proven ways to directly boost your immune system with any products that are easily available. And if there were, it would be very dangerous to use them without medical supervision.

If you are at all curious about how we manage to keep ourselves alive despite all the pathogens around us, read this book. You’ll thank yourself for it.