Category Archives: Nonfiction

Small Press Expo, 2024

by Rebecca

I love going to the Small Press Expo every year and seeing what new and unusual things are available and buying a whole stack of comics/graphic novels, and hanging out with a really fun crowd of creators. This was the first year that I attended some of the workshops in addition to the panels and vendor market, and they were so much fun and extremely inspiring. I bought a stack of new comics and have already read a number of them:

Garibaldiology: Japan Travelogue 1 by Garibaldi, 2014
This is an extremely cute little travelogue/drawn journal about the artist going on a trip to Japan, and is quite funny in a day-in-the-life manner about exploring a new place and meeting new people being a little gremlin. What particularly struck me is how non-judgemental, good or bad, it is in narration even as the person is judging the things around them. Their opinions are their personal opinions and not to be taken as anything greater than that. The over-all effect is just: wow, this is a thing that happened. And it’s just very cute.

Myths of Making: True Tales and Legends of Great Artists by Julien-G, 2024
The art is really striking restricted pallet of only three colors, that works to excellent effect, with retelling 25 stories and legends from pre-64,000 BCE, up to 2022. I really enjoyed both the art and the stories, but what really caught my eye was the book binding, which is beautifully done sewn pages onto a fabric spine with heavy board covers, such that a quite thick volume can be opened to lay flat without any concern for the gutters. I do have an appreciation for the artistry in bookbinding.

No Pants Revolution #8: Acceptance by Andrea Pearson, 2024
This is the eighth issue in a series for which I haven’t ready any of the preceding issues, but it’s okay because each one is a stand-alone auto-biographical collection of thoughts and experiences. In this particular issue, the author is contemplating acceptance as in a stage in grief, a prayer for serenity, and part of self-care.

I Got a Tattoo Every Month of 2023 and Now I’m Broke, by Clau, 2024
I got this at the same stall as No Pants Revolution, because it is very small accordion format zine and I liked the way the artist used a cartoon kewpie figure to show where the tattoos were located. It also seemed like a representation of how many people are struggling to get through the year, finding their own methods for motivation.

Body Issues: Comics About Body Image, art by Babs New, 2022
One of the workshops I went to at this small press expo was a life drawing (ie, nude model) class hosted by the artist/author of The Cadaver Diaries, which I’d bought and enjoyed last year, and modeled by Babs New, the non-binary artist for this book. This book is composed of short accounts by people talking about their struggles with feeling comfortable with their own body and societal perception, and illustrated by this artist. Each speaker has a little cartoon animal representative and then concludes with a simple line drawing of them in the nude, revealing the body they’ve been struggling with.

The Cycle by Jerel Dye, 2023
This is gorgeous little accordion book that is so beautifully crafted that I bought it without even really considering the story, but the art is lovely and the story is both simple and increasingly deep as I continue to think on it. I do love the use of gold foil on the cover. It’s drawn as a single scene in both the front and the back but it’s also a timelapse of events, scanning over a scene. The author makes excellent use of the different ways the book can be read.

Far Distant by A Liang Chan, 2023
This is a beautifully illustrated stand-alone short story graphic novel about a researcher stationed alone on a distant outpost in charge of managing some transmissions, but receives a series of transmissions that at first seem to simply be corrupted, but instead are a communication from something else entirely. This is a really excellent example of stories that require thought to tease out the implications rather than having everything be explicitly told, and I really enjoyed it. It also felt like a good companion piece with The Cycle, although they are completely unrelated.

Devil in the Pines by Natasha Tara Petrović
This is a beautifully illustrated “short comic about the tragedy of the Jersey Devil“, which I hadn’t particularly known about before, but this is beautiful and tragic, and makes me sad for a little devil who’s own mother cursed it. It’s just 16 pages long, and feels like it sits in the middle ground between a comic book and a picture book. It’s just a little devil who was born that way, does no harm, and is lonely being it’s own unique self.

Coextinct by Edea Giang, 2024
This is just 12 pages in black and white, a short but direct manifesto about how extinction events are happening across all species, not just the cute and beautiful ones, and how important it is to not ignore the small and unsightly. It looks specifically at the louse that lived exclusively among the feathers of a single species of bird that was also going extinct. The rescue workers who successfully managed to pull the bird species back from the brink of extinction, were also the ones who killed the the last examples of the louse. There was no evidence it actually hurt the bird at all, merely that it lived among the feathers. And no one knows what the relationship was between the louse and the bird.

Black Box by Carlos Chua and Regina Chua, 2024
This is the first issue in a proposed comic book series, so it’s just setting the premise but the premise is both a delight and a horror: it’s a fantasy world based on magic, but it’s also a modern world with capitalism and stock exchange, and our main character is an oracle who’s feeling burnt out after years of running prophesies about how stocks will fluctuate, and finally quits after she prophesies a major disaster and her boss reams her out for not suppressing that in her report. It felt remarkably realistic.

2020 was HELL but the KPOP was good! by Kori Michele
The first workshop I attended at small press expo was held by this author, about making extremely small zines, with simple folding techniques: teaching us how to make them and showing us examples of artists who had used them to good effect. This isn’t an example of those folding techniques, but is an example of her philosophical approach, which was to just make a zine as a way to give information to her friends and families: such as a playlist of the songs she was enjoying. The workshop was both fun and inspiring, and I got one of the authors larger books as well, but I haven’t read it yet. I also got this little zine, because it was a fun introduction to a music genre I’m not particularly into. I have since watched/listened to all the music videos, and it was a fun intro, even though it’s still not my music genre of choice. But it remains an inspiration of a fun way to create a modern mix-tape, leaving it to the reader to actually acquire the songs.

And, of course, these are just the relatively short comics that I’ve already read in the week since I got them. I have another stack of five larger and more extensive graphic novels that I need to read. But just, I do love the Small Press Expo and the whole range of people and creations that I see there.

Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You

by Anna

The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud

By Becky Holmes

Of course the title and cover of this booked grabbed my attention immediately! I’d read articles about romance scams before and wondered how anyone could fall for them. And, as the author points out, thinking yourself impervious to a particular type of scam can lead you to lower your guard and become more susceptible. So, I clearly had to learn more.

Becky Holmes is quite funny, in a particularly British way that I don’t always get, so while I was giggling out loud several times, I also occasionally just sort of shrugged. She begins with a lot of texts leading various scammers on, which is entertaining but gets repetitive. This is also how she first got interested in the topic, entertaining herself with the various scam messages she got across social media platforms. The silliness sometimes felt a little jarring in contrast with the harm being discussed, but as she got more into the topic with accounts from victimized people, it got fairly grim and I appreciated the levity.

As ridiculous as the scams sound when reading them from the comfort of one’s own home, she explains that they are most effective on people going through other trauma in their lives, and desperate for love and connection enough to overlook the signs of fraud that are obvious to the rest of us. And in that light, scammers purposefully looking for people in trouble and illness is particularly disgusting. The people Holmes interviews look back at their own situation and can’t quite believe they were in such bad shape to fall for the lines they did, which really struck me because I’ve certainly related to being retrospectively astonished at how stress and exhaustion can compromise my reasoning.

Towards the end of the book, though, the cumulative stories all started to feel a bit draining. I felt discouraged by the cynicism of the scammers preying on people looking for love, and wondered what it was doing for their long-term psyche. Even worse, I fell back into some victim blaming, not for falling for fairly blatant false scenarios, but their willingness to go along with some incredibly shady dealings that could have gotten them in serious legal trouble if they’d been real.

The author’s total and unconditional support of the victims (and mild scolding of anyone even remotely critical of them) didn’t help. Holmes explicitly compares romance scams to abusive relationships, but they seemed more comparable to addiction to me. The victims become so attached to the scammer that they’ll do anything for them and deny all reason, including pushing away family and friends. (Especially shocking is when some admit that they would welcome the scammer back if they got back in touch.) Of course this is terrible and they need help and understanding, but it is not such a shock that their other personal relationships have taken a hit in the process.

How to Give Up Plastic

by Anna

By Will McCallum

Like a lot of people I’m sure, I’ve been reflecting more and more lately on how much waste and plastic in particular there is in my life. It feels really daunting though, to try to cut it down, so I jumped on getting some clear guidelines on where to start. This turns out to have been a very timely read, since I just learned about the Plastic Free July campaign, started in 2011.

Will McCallum is Head of Oceans at Greenpeace UK, so feels VERY strongly about all of this, naturally. He begins by making the case for trying to eliminate plastics with some rather harrowing stories of natural devastation that I kind of wish I hadn’t read. I gritted my teeth and got through the first two chapters, though I wasn’t sure why I was pointing myself through the stress of it all, since I was already on board. However, I began to understand later why McCallum hits it so hard. A lot of the approaches toward eliminating plastic are going to be annoying (to you and others), inconvenient, and a little confrontational at times, so it is important to keep in one’s mind the criticalness of the endeavor. I also found some resolve in the idea of fighting against the notoriously anti-environment petroleum companies, who are incredibly invested in continuing to escalate plastic use for their own profits.

The third chapter gives some hope with initiatives that are beginning to work around the globe, primarily government and policy interventions; the fourth on the impact that individuals can make, both in their own actions and influencing their community and local government; and finally in the fifth chapter we get down to the nitty gritty of tracking down plastic alternatives. Luckily, the easiest replacements also seem to be the most critical. The book mentions the Big 5 of disposable plastics, those plastic items that we use for mere minutes one time and then throw out: cups and lids, straws, water bottles, plastic cutlery, and of course plastic bags.

A quote by oceans activist and actress (Ginny Weasley!) Bonnie Wright sums it all up nicely, “If I had a message, it would be that yes, it is very overwhelming and it is a really big issue, but these small changes that you are making are significant. It can be hard, so just choose one part of your household—like food, or cleaning products, or toiletries—to tackle first.”

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

by Rebecca

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
read by Merlin Sheldrake
2020

I adore this book! It is fabulous! It made various lists in 2020 and I’ve been sort of vaguely meaning to read it since then, but only just recently got to it when I was looking for an audiobook for a road trip. But it is so good!

Sheldrake is so deeply delightfully peculiar, surrounded by similarly peculiar researchers, that the most shocking point, beyond even his loving description of zombie ants as fungi who have temporarily become ants, or his musings on the heat produced by decomposition as he stewed himself at a fermentation spa, is when he refers to someone else as “eccentric”. I’m just like: “Sir!, you are not in a position to call someone else eccentric!”

He has a wide range of stories from his studies, his life, the studies and lives of his friends and peers, and from world history about how people think of and related to fungi, and they are all fascinating in ways I hadn’t previously imagined.

Sheldrake reads his book with a soft melodic voice that soothes the reader into an understand of the world from his perspective, from the fungal perspective, and makes a convincing argument for how important that perspective is.

He reminds us that there’s still a lot of unknowns in the world, and scientific theories are only as good as the phenomenon they explain. For any given law of nature that we think we know, there seem to be a variety of exceptions and ambiguities, and this book is focused on a huge category of beings that are pressure testing much of our current understanding of the world, and have been for as long as we’ve been aware of fungi as something to study. For example: the very word “symbiosis” was only created in 1876 to describe lichen, and “symbiotic” is even more recent as it became evident that the relationship was more common than just in fungal scenarios.

This book is fascinating and funny while giving an accessible overview of the current state of fungal studies. (Just take a moment to consider that sentence: fascinating! funny! fungal studies?) It also introduced me at least to the existence of a community of professional and amateur fungal enthusiasts I had not previously been aware of. They sound delightfully bonkers while still having some very real ideas and possible solutions to saving the environment and showing that both humans and fungi have a role in a sustainable ecosystem.

The entire audiobook is available for free online at the Internet Archive. I highly recommend it.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

by Rebecca

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
2013
read by Robin Wall Kimmerer
2016

This is a gorgeous and fascinating book, and I’m glad that I was able to listen to a version read by the author. The book is a wide ranging series of stories and musings about her life, family history, biology, ecology, and reclaiming that which is too nearly lost. It starts with a very personal focus, about her life and self-reflection and moves onto some really fascinating discussions of plants and of Native American culture and history, and then continues onto a discussion of both the dangers of ecological destruction and the importance of not giving up on repairing such casualties.

Kimmerer was raised with a Native American’s perspective on nature which gave her a love of plants and a desire to study them, and then went on to get a PhD and then a professorship in biology with a very scientific perspective on nature. It was later that she realized how important it was to combine the two approaches to nature rather than to give up one for the other. The scientific perspective is one of studying plants as objects, with scientists as unbiased outsiders, while the Native American perspective is one of being part of the nature with humanity as the younger sibling needing to learn from the plants and animals who came before them.

One of the themes that really got to me was her description of how nature is a gift economy: plants give fruits and berries to the birds, and birds give transportation of seeds to the plants. And also how humans are part of this gift economy, not separate from it. Our role in nature is supposed to be taking what is given with gratitude and giving back with reciprocity. The dangers comes with refusing what is given, taking what is not given, not having gratitude, and not giving back.

Another metaphor that she used to great effect was delving into the story of the windigo — a Native American monster that is constantly hungry and can never be satiated — and how capitalist society is trying to turn everyone into this very monster: hungry for more and never satisfied.

The audiobook is approximately 17 hours long, so I’ve been listening to this on my work commute for more than a month, and Anna has been inundated with “In Braiding Sweetgrass…” statements, because every day there is some new and fascinating story or perspective. I’ve also had to deal with becoming a bit teary-eyed while driving a few times.

This is truly an amazing book, and I highly recommend it to basically anyone and everyone.

Web comics

by Rebecca

I have been bingeing so many web comics! There are so many, and cover such a range! And I know I’ve read web comics before and even recommended some of them on this blog, but previously I was discovering them on their individual websites and now I have discovered that there are phone apps that give you access to some untold numbers of web comics all through a single searchable interface.

Admittedly, the vast majority are pretty darn schlocky, and my first impression was that they were like harlequin romances for fantasy fans. (“His Majesty’s Proposal”, “The Remarried Empress”, and “Justice for the Villainess” are all real titles of webcomics I’ve tried.) But on the one hand, I do enjoy some schlocky fantasy romances, and on the other hand, there are other genres represented, and some really good stories, as long as you’re willing to go searching.

Many of the stories are on-going with weekly updates which remind me of why I stopped following comics in individual issues and waited for trade paperbacks instead. I find the individual updates frustratingly short. But having just discovered these collections, there are a lot of issues to catch up on before I’m current, and there are some great stories that have been completed.

Manta is one of the apps I downloaded on my phone, although it’s also available as a website. I now have a monthly subscription that gives me full access to any story in their collection. Some of the completed stories that I recommend are:

  • Shall We Pole Dance? is a 12-issue nonfiction story about a woman’s experience improving physically and mentally through joining a pole dancing class, that’s just sweet and delightful.
  • The Night Market is a 12-issue fantasy story about a magical market that is an intersection of worlds, where you can buy anything at all, but once you enter, you must buy something, and everything has a cost.
  • Unbreakable Master is a 141-issue fantasy gay romance about a guy who breaks everything he touches discovering that there is a hidden world of magical beings fighting a war for control of the world, and what role his powers might have in this struggle.
  • Traces of the Sun is a 96-issue fantasy gay romance about a guy who has the magical power to fix things, a job fixing destroyed buildings, and a secret: that when his childhood friends were killed in an attack, he tried to fix them, but only raised them as zombies that he can neither bring fully to life nor settle into peace. (This is based on a book and I want to read the book so bad, but it’s in Korean and there’s no translation available.)

Webtoons is the other app I now have installed on my phone, which charges a certain number of “coins” per recent issue, with coins being sold for real money, however, as long as you’re willing to wait a few weeks, the backlog of older issues are free. None of the stories I’ve read on this app have been completed, but there are several that I’ve enjoyed the backlog and updates for:

  • Eleceed is currently at 262 free issues of a fantasy adventure story about a kid who has a superpower discovering that there’s a whole society of “awakened ones” with superpowers and working up the ranks of power via an endless series of dramatic duels, which is a tedious premise, but the growing cast of characters are so darn delightful! The sweet kid, Jiwoo Seo, discovers an injured cat, who is actually a person, Kayden, who had semi-accidentally transformed himself into a cat, but proceeds to mentor the kid. This story made me realize that for a society that’s essentially lawful evil, the chaotic neutral of Kayden is a net benefit.
  • Cleric of Decay is currently at 30 free issues of a fantasy adventure story where our protagonist has been sucked into a video game he was playing, but only after he’d both selected a particularly difficult/weak character class AND installed cheat codes to make it viable. So now he’s wandering around as the last living cleric of an evil goddess who was killed and dismembered years ago trying to collect objects of power at the demand of a mummified hand of a goddess while staying unnoticed by the various paladins and clerics of more accepted deities.
  • Paranoid Mage is currently at 11 free issues of a fantasy adventure story about a young man who discovers he has magic powers shortly before being discovered by a secret society of magic users who are strictly hierarchical and do not think he is allowed to opt out of joining their society on a low rung. He escapes, and is now on the run/in hiding, while trying to learn to use his powers, and also stumbling across parts of magical society.

These stories are a delight and an addiction.

Doppelganger

by Anna

By Naomi Klein

So, I didn’t really know who Naomi Klein was, or Naomi Wolf for that matter, but I’d seen the rhyme going around twitter:

If the Naomi be Klein / You’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

and it made me laugh, even without context. And, well, here’s the context and then some! Naomi Klein, I learned, is a renowned author who has previously focused on criticisms of capitalism and government, and who has long been deviled by the inability to distinguish her completely from the “Other Naomi.” Naomi Wolf first became famous as a feminist author in the 90s, a sort of peer of Camille Paglia.*

With the exponential popularity of social media and then the pandemic shutdown, the confusion grew even worse, and Klein became somewhat obsessed with her other, tracking Wolf’s sharp turn into deep right-wing conspiracies and alliances with Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson among others. Klein uses her particular relationship (such as it is) with her doppelganger as an extremely effective jumping off point to comment on a wide variety of societal issues, such as increased isolation coming out of social media, polarization in politics, and the various grifters that take advantage of it all.

Some of the criticisms of the book are that it is too wide ranging, and would be better to have narrowed the focus, but I strongly disagree. One of Klein’s theses is that our social systems are all interconnected, and in order to make change, one must be able to take a wide view of everyone and everything. The disenfranchisement we’re seeing in politics, economy, environment, personal relationships, and on and on, are all tied together, and Klein’s general framework of doppelgangers and mirror worlds is a very effective thread leading the reader through them all.

It’s such a sprawling and deep look at issues I don’t often read about for pleasure, that I was continually caught off guard by how funny Klein is. Just about every passage had me laughing out loud, her accounts of being very occasionally mistaken for Naomi Campbell being a notable example. That said, it does get more serious as it goes, an effective way to lead more casual readers like me into deeper philosophical waters than we are used to.

Speaking of deeper philosophical waters, Klein references several times the docuseries “Exterminate All the Brutes” currently on HBO, which looks at the history of genocide in establishing “civilized” societies. I have currently just watched the first of the four hour-long episodes, since the topic is devastating and takes some time to sit with. The meandering, montage style took me a while to get used to, and the images and topics are definitely a bombardment to the psyche. But it is also increasingly clear that we’ve been taught a very white-washed and sanitized version of history, and it is critically important to try to unlearn that propaganda whenever and wherever we can.

* I have never read Camille Paglia, either, but at least was familiar with her due to a scorching review by Molly Ivins.

graphic novels

by Rebecca

It’s Okay That It’s Not Okay
by Christina Tran
2022

I got this book from the Small Press Expo and it’s really good and also really emotional, about the process of dealing with grief after too long trying to push past it. Trans’ mother died in 2003, but the story is set in 2011, as she deals with the results of never fully allowing herself to grieve before, and not feeling able to grieve anymore. It’s really beautiful and well done, using the graphics to show both how busy she kept herself for years and also how hard the depression hit when she was no longer able to push the emotions away. There were definitely parts I recognized in myself and others. I highly recommend it.

Cat Burglar Black
by Richard Sala
2009

This is an adorable classic gothic mystery with gangs of orphaned street thieves, mysterious secret organizations, orphans, previously unknown aunts, mysterious illnesses that require full face bandages, hidden treasures, and a lot of just-off-screen gruesome deaths. There was also a lot of info dumping about the various backstories, but the action was really well done. The deaths had a certain Edward Gorey quality to them. I expect kids and teens would love this, but I might be too old to properly appreciate the many macabre deaths.

Thistil Mistil Kistil
by Sarah Schanze
2015

This is gorgeous. It’s another Small Press Expo acquisition that I bought entirely for the illustrations which are amazing, and only then did I pay attention to the story which is also really good. The plot is about a viking kid who has died honorably in battle, but due to circumstances has been blocked from Valhalla and given the mission to find three pieces of famous weapons that Loki has stolen and return them to Odin before he will be allowed to enter. So he goes to Loki to try to figure out what he did with them. Loki is more or less curious about how is all going to play out and probably has motives of his own to go along with this quest to find whatever happened to those pieces. Stuff happens. After reading this, I discovered that it is only the first five chapters, and while the story is not yet completed, the first twenty-two chapters are available online: https://www.tmkcomic.com/archive/ Yay! So I am now all caught up and wow, did things get complicated and I really hope the rest comes soon! But also, just wow, the illustrations are so beautiful and so significant to the story telling.

The Mystery of the Fool & the Vanisher
by David and Ruth Ellwand
2008

This book is less of a graphic novel and more an extensively illustrated short story. (“Picture book for adults” was how I first phrased this but then thought that sounded pornographic, which this is decidedly not.) The plot is a Victorian gothic mystery about a photographer, an archaeologist, and the pixies who do not appreciate archaeological digs in their territory. The illustrations are all photographs, including photographs of photographs, as the framing story is about a photographer who finds an abandoned locked trunk that contains documentation of a much earlier photographer who tried the prove the existence of the fae folk. (I was much reminded of Arthur Conan Doyle’s attempts to prove such.) It is extremely atmospheric.

Recipe for Disaster: 40 Superstar Stories of Sustenance and Survival

by Anna

Collected by Alison Riley

I thought this looked like an intriguing gift for any of my cooking-minded friends, so checked it out of the library to preview it (after a number of astonishing failures, I’m trying to do better about reading books before giving them as gifts). I figured I could flip through it at the very least, but I was shocked how quickly I was thoroughly immersed!

First, it is a beautiful book, with full-page photos to illustrate each story/recipe, and would make an excellent gift I think. This also makes it go by fast: I had casually opened the book just to flip through it, and two hours later, I was halfway through and already eager for the next story. Secondly, it covers so many different foods and so many different situations, including some very timely ones of isolation and illness during the pandemic.

It opens with Samantha Irby’s recipe for Rejection Chicken, a perfect author of brilliant, very human (i.e. often humiliating) stories to set the tone for an anthology about comfort foods in tough times. All the stories were so interesting and varied, with only one dud in my opinion. The final story, too, closed the book with such a humorous disaster that I gasped.

The Body Factory by Héloïse Chochois

by Rebecca

The Body Factory: from the first prosthetics to the augmented human
by Héloïse Chochois
translated by Kendra Boileau
2021

This is another book I bought from Graphic Mundi at the Small Press Expo and it feels a bit like a Mary Roach book, in that it looks at the history and development of a fascinating but somewhat disturbing topic, in this case amputation and prosthetics. This being a graphic novel* came with some pros and cons in that the illustrations were extremely helpful in following the topic, but also kind of disturbing as the topic started with dismemberment. But it covers a lot of ground very quickly, using a framing story of a young man who loses his arm in a motorcycle accident and is getting through the recovery process.

The book is divided into four main chapters:

  1. Amputation
  2. Phantom Limb
  3. Prostheses
  4. Transhumanism

This book is very much a basic introduction to the topic and concepts that can give you a foundation from which to look into more details, and I found this fascinating and sufficient for the first three chapters discussing history and anatomy but less so for the final chapter which seems a more niche philosophical perspective than a mainstream overview. The mention of how “Eugenics is a matter of great debate among transhumanists who recognize that there are negatives but also positive aspects to eugenics” was a major red flag for me.

So this book is fiction (framing story), nonfiction (first three chapters), and philosophy (fourth chapter.) In some ways this reminds me of Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder (a book I only read once, decades ago, so take with a grain of salt) in the way it’s framed, but I didn’t care for that book and I did enjoy this one. Although upon reflection, Sophie’s World was all about philosophy and the one section I didn’t care for in this book was the philosophy chapter.

I did enjoy this book, and I do recommend it, but with some caveats: be prepared for some casual medical gore and expect the fourth chapter to be the author’s take on philosophy rather than the nonfiction of the previous chapters.

* I’ll reiterate a pet peeve of mine that this type of book gets called either a “graphic novel” or a “comic book” and both of those are misleading terms when it comes to books like this one. But I don’t have a better term for it. Sigh.