Prof Sarah Gilbert & Dr Catherine Green - Vaxxers

Prof Sarah Gilbert & Dr Catherine Green - Vaxxers 

4⭐

Genre: Non-Fiction, Health, Science, Academia, Medicine, Popular Science  

Pages: 352

Format: Hardback

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Date Published: 8th July 2021

Book Blurb: 

A gripping, inspirational account of the race to create a functioning vaccine to combat the spread of Covid-19, Vaxxers is the story of two scientists who have accomplished something truly remarkable at a pace that few people ever thought possible.

This is the story of a race - not against other vaccines or other scientists, but against a deadly and devastating virus.

On 1 January 2020, Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University, read an article about four people in China with a strange pneumonia. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a vaccine against a pathogen that no one had ever seen before. Less than 12 months later, vaccination was rolled out across the world to save millions of lives from Covid-19.

In Vaxxers, we hear directly from Professor Gilbert and her colleague Dr Catherine Green as they reveal the inside story of making the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and the cutting-edge science and sheer hard work behind it.

This is their story of fighting a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Sarah and Cath share the heart-stopping moments in the eye of the storm; they separate fact from fiction; they explain how they made a highly effective vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching; and they give us hope for the future.

Vaxxers invites us into the lab to find out how science will save us from this pandemic, and how we can prepare for the inevitable next one. 

Book Review: 

It is such a clear, scientific, simple and well-written account of the two lead scientists involved in creating the Oxford AstraZeneca Corona Virus Vaccine. This book explains in depth all the steps that were taken to create this vaccine in such a short time and ready for public use, including creation, design, development, trial, testing, trial result analysis, approval and then production.

I really liked the fact that scientific concepts around vaccine development and design in this book are very well explained in simple scientific language that makes sense for someone who is not as familiar with the terminology, processes or this field in general. A lot of really useful analogies were used to explain more complex concepts too, which helped me a lot to get my head around some of the science behind it.

Also, the book clearly explains how different types of vaccines, not only the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, are created, including the rigorous processes each has to go to be developed, tested and approves, which in turn displays the thorough safety of vaccines. Additionally, the authors discuss how the field improved the safety of vaccines for human consumption, since 1960, explaining all the ethics, policies and criteria that each vaccine has to go through to be safe to give to people.

Authors also don’t shy away from discussing other issues surrounding vaccines and vaccine design and development, such as anti-vaxxers, media influence on whether people trust vaccines or not and funding that is needed to get vaccines to people. Also, challenges when it comes to academia and doing science, as well as making those breakthroughs in developing effective vaccines are all aspects that are discussed in depth.

Each chapter is written either from Prof Sarah Gilbert’s or Dr Catherine Green’s POV, which allows the reader not only to learn about the vaccine that their team created but also allows the reader to get to know the people who worked on it, especially the long hours and sacrifices they had to make in order to deliver this lifesaving vaccine to people.

Overall: A very interesting, informative, factual and insightful book about the creation of the Oxford AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, the pandemic, and the importance of science and vaccine science in general. Definitely recommend it if you don’t know much about vaccines and want to learn more, as this book explains processes in a very simple, yet still scientific way. I will be looking out for more books like this to add to my TBR pile in the future. 

About the Author: 

Brian Verity - Why My Wife Had To Die

Brian Verity - Why My Wife Had To Die 

4⭐

Genre: Non- Fiction, Health, Medical, Autobiography

Pages: 302

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Envelope Books

Date Published: 3rd March 2022

Huge thank you to Envelope Books for sending me a copy of this book to read and review. 

 

Book Blurb: 

When Mary Verity started to display the same early symptoms of Huntington's disease that her mother and older brother had shown, no one took her condition seriously or knew how to respond to it.

From the health and social services departments of the local authority to the government and the church, Mary was given no choice about how to plan for what would become her inevitable physical and mental deterioration.

Support bodies were no help either.  

In this tough, uncompromising book, Brian Verity raises difficult ethical questions about the freedoms granted to carriers of the Huntington's gene to raise children of their own and the lack of freedom given to them to end their lives.

This is not a book with a happy ending, nor have its full ramifications yet been embedded into our supposedly caring society. 

My Review: 

This book was definitely hard to read emotionally as it deals with real people, their emotions and their lives. However, I also think the book touches upon very important subjects and is a very powerful read. It is a very eye-opening book, especially for those like me who don’t know much about Huntington’s disease. This story hooked me from the very beginning and I read this book in one sitting, as I just had to know what happened in the end to Mary.

This book is narrated by Mary’s husband Brian and we see mainly his point of view on how both of them dealt with Mary’s condition. He briefly starts the book with how they both met and then talks about how he first started to notice Mary’s symptoms, which then followed by her diagnosis and then the struggles they both as a couple had to endure as Mary’s condition worsened over the next 2-3 years.

I liked learning about Mary’s story and Huntington’s disease through this book, as previously I didn’t know much about it. So, in that aspect, it was a very eye-opening and heartbreaking read. I also liked that the book showed how little doctors knew about this condition back in the 60s and 70s and how the health support wasn’t the best in that regard from the doctors and local GPs who treated Mary and her family. To me, it displayed how far our medical knowledge and health services improved from the 60s. Additionally, I liked that this book was from a carer’s point of view and how hard and exhausting at times it is to care for your loved ones and to be a carer. This story gave a glimpse of the reality of people who aren’t professionally trained to be carers but still have to take care of their ill loved ones and their struggles physically and mentally.

However, there were parts of this book that were so hard to read. Especially, the author’s controversial obsession with the fact that the only way to stop Huntington’s is to sterilise those who carry the gene or forcibly stop them from procreating. I was quite shocked by some of the opinions he expressed regarding this subject.

I was also quite shocked at how at times he treated Mary, including keeping things from her, being angry with her deteriorating and not being the wife, she was before, as well as,  constantly expressing anger towards her and even having an affair whilst Mary was ill. He openly stated a few times in the book that the more her illness progressed the more his love turned into pity. Part of me realises how hard it must have been to him to see his wife deteriorating and having to deal with all that alone but at the same time, I was rather angry at him because from his accounts all Mary needed was love, empathy and support, because she struggled just as much as Brian did. He also refused to accept any help for Mary from the social services and others, especially if their opinions were different from his about Huntington’s.

Overall: An eye-opening and thought-provoking book that touches so many important topics, including the mental and physical health of carers, voluntary euthanasia, help and support from health services for those with incurable conditions, medical knowledge of conditions in the 60s and 70s and much more. A very important, captivating and worth-reading story that would not leave you for a while. 

About the Author:

Brian Verity lived through the trauma of finding he had married into a family whose members all carried the gene for Huntington’s disease and who suffered accordingly — as he would too, though for other reasons.

​

It became his mission to mitigate the consequences of his wife's condition and educate the public about its horrors.

​

Following his wife’s suicide, he was questioned at length by the police and kept under surveillance for a year. He went on to campaign for voluntary euthanasia. He died in 2019. 

​

Stephen Games, who edited his book, was in contact with Brian Verity in the year before he died, and is available to talk about the raw issues raised by the author and about the wider context of the book.

​https://www.envelopebooks.co.uk/why-my-wife-had-to-die

Baek SeHee - I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

  

Baek SeHee - I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

5 ⭐

Genre: Biography, Memoir, Non-Fiction, Mental Health, Self-Care, Health, Mind and Body, Korean Literature

Translated by: Anton Hur 

Original Title: 죽고 싶지만 떡볶이는 먹고 싶어

Original Language: Korean 

Pages: 208

Format: eARC on NetGalley 

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK)

Date Published: 23rd June 2022

Huge Thank You to Bloomsbury UK and NetGalley UK for a copy of eARC to read and review! 

Book Blurb: 

Baek Se-Hee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her - what to call it? - depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgemental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends; adept at performing the calmness, even ease, her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, and overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal.

But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a yen for her favourite street food, the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?

Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a 12-week period, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions and harmful behaviours that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness.

My Review: 

I really loved this book!  It is the first self-help book that I loved, actually enjoyed reading, and didn’t DNF’ed.

Firstly, it’s part memoir, featuring the author’s therapy sessions, where she is trying to find out why she is how she is, depressed, unhappy, with low self-esteem and always puts herself down. Secondly, it’s a part self-help book, where the author explains her mental health struggles without sugar-coating or glamorising it, whilst providing some explanation on different conditions and how it is possible to tackle them. The author also talks about how she is slowly overcoming her struggles, step by step and not always in a linear fashion, taking a few steps forward but in reality stumbling some ten steps backwards.

I love the honesty, the raw truth of mental health problems and how the author talks about her struggles, how she is not afraid to talk about her feelings too. I really liked how the book was so easy to read and felt really personal, like, I felt I was the one in the therapy room having the conversation with the therapist. I devoured this book in a few hours and would love to go back read it again and annotate, and add my thoughts (hopefully can do that once I get a physical copy when it's out). It was also so relatable, as most of the author’s struggles are so universal and some of us might face more than one in our everyday life.

This book is different but in such a good way, it stands out, as it's not your traditional ‘how to take care of your mental health’,  full of checklists and tips book. This book has a unique voice and true story, which makes it very raw and real, whilst teaching quite a lot about mental health from the perspective of our everyday life.

Overall:  I really think we need more books like this on mental health, as for me how the author bravely shared her feelings and thoughts on mental health conditions, made me think that more conversations like this need to happen in our communities and society to get over the stigma surrounding this subject. I can’t wait until it’s released, so I can buy a physical copy, re-read it and annotate it, and have it on my bookshelf to help me when I face hard moments in my life. It is translated so well, as writing just flows. It’s also so easy to understand, and there is some extra information provided, explaining Korean cultural nuances that the reader might not be familiar with.

Honestly, a book that is really worth a place on your bookshelf. 

This review was first published on NetGalley and can be found on:

https://www.netgalley.co.uk/book/252006/review/959200 

About the Author: 

Born in 1990, Baek SeHee studied creative writing at university before working for five years at a publishing house. For ten years, she received psychiatric treatment for dysthymia (persistent mild depression), which became the subject of her essays, and then I Want to Die, but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, books one and two. Her favourite food is tteokbokki, and she lives with her rescue dog Jaram.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/author/baek-sehee/