Book cover of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

Book description

Nothing is as elemental, as essential to human life, as the air we breathe. Yet around the world, in rich countries and poor ones, it is quietly poisoning us. 

Air pollution prematurely kills seven million people every year, including more than one hundred thousand Americans. It is strongly linked to…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Choked as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Like Tim Smedley, Beth Gardiner brings a journalist's eye to the problem of air pollution and contrasts how it affects different people in different ways in the UK, India, Poland, and the USA. For some people, science is dull, mundane, and plonkingly prosaic, but Beth's eleven stories really brought the problem alive for me in a spellbinding writing style I really admire.

If you love Choked...

Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…

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In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…

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