Follow-Up

My apologies to those of you utterly uninterested in my on-going issues with Angels & Demons. I promise this will be the last post on the matter, but as I’ve just finished it, I thought I’d let you know the final verdict. I’ll keep it short:

1. Alright, so clearly Mr. Brown owns dictionaries and other word-tools. After all, he uses big words like “cognition” and “sepulchral” accurately and in context (although I’d have much preferred e.g., “looked around the room” to “surveyed the circumference of the room”). This is why I don’t understand why none of the characters “run”, “hurry”, “fly”, “hasten” or “sprint” – they only “dash”. Which is a fine word, but when a large portion of the last several hours of the book have people racing around the Vatican, could you maybe mix it up a little?

2. I wonder whether it’s possible to plagiarize yourself?

3. When Kohler – the older director of CERN, who has been unable to walk since childhood - arrives at the Vatican and sees himself in a mirror, “the sight of his own twisted form repulsed him”. Because of his disability he “ has never known the touch of a woman”. The Swiss Guard doesn’t search him well because they “are ashamed” by the disability. I’m not going to hold forth about my reaction to those bits of supposed insight into the lives of people with disabilities and the reactions of those around us. I’m sure you have an idea.

I'm going to do something serene now. Maybe I'll stop sputtering in a couple of days.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Farber’s Disease: Could Your Child’s Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Be Misdiagnosed?

Image
Joint inflammation or contractures. Nodules (small lumps under the skin or in other tissues). A weakened or hoarse voice. Children with these symptoms may have been diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) or other types of juvenile arthritis . But do they actually have JIA or do they have Farber’s disease? An equine digression When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. This is an adage in the medical world that encourages doctors to not wander off exploring rare and esoteric reasons for a patient’s symptoms. Because most of the time, that hoof beat of a rash likely isn’t the plague, the joint pain more likely a type of arthritis than the bends (especially if the person has never scuba dived) and you get the picture. But once in a while, it actually is a zebra. And even if it’s first identified as a horse, eventually, the stripes come through. It took five years of my parents running around to different doctors before one finally recognized that I had...
Read more

13 Things to Know for Rheumatoid Arthritis Newbies + Facebook Live

Image
Getting a diagnosis of any type of chronic illness can throw you for loop. There is so much to know and you have so little energy. My new slideshow for HealthCentral collects 13 things you need to know as an RA newbie : "Receiving a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a moment of strange duality. On one hand, you may be relieved to finally have answers for the symptoms you’ve been experiencing. On the other, it can be incredibly overwhelming to find out you have a chronic illness. Wrapping your head around all the new factors RA brings into your life is a long-term process. Here are some of the things you need to know." See the slideshow on HealthCentral . And in case you missed it, here is the Facebook Live I did yesterday talking about this topic:   
Read more