Book Notices | Drop Dead Healthy by A.J. Jacobs / The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby

A.J. Jacobs, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection

Amazon   I enjoyed A.J. Jacobs' survey of various health regimens, probably more than I expected to. The author is likeable, and I didn't find his approach to the material at all annoying (as a number of Amazon reviewers appear to). He writes a lot in the book about two family members, his grandfather and an eccentric aunt. While the aunt's stories are relevant--she's a somewhat wacko health nut--the grandfather stuff is tangential and could be omitted (though I understand why it's in there, given its importance to the author). The Kindle version includes a lengthy index that amounts to an enormous percentage of the book--perhaps 30%. This gave the impression that the book was endless. I read and read and there was still a huge percentage left. I think the index should be omitted from the digital version. There's really no need for it, and I didn't like having the percentage of text remaining so skewed.

Gary Corby, The Pericles Commission

Amazon   I very much like the idea of this series, a detective series set in 5th-century B.C. Athens. Nicolaos, the son of Sophroniscus, is a young man with political ambitions who becomes a sort of detective after he's the first on the scene of a murder. The murdered man turns out to be Ephialtes, a democratic reformer who really was murdered back in the day. In the book, the victim's colleague Pericles (yes, THAT Pericles) commissions Nicolaos to find Ephialtes' killer. Other personalities from the ancient world walk across Corby's pages--the priestess Diotima, Lysimachus, and Callias, for example. We'll also likely be hearing a lot more in the series from Nicolaos' little brother, a short and squat, precocious kid with the face of a satyr: Socrates. Yes, that Socrates. For those of you keeping track, Socrates and his dad are historical; Nicolaos is not. The book was well done, I thought. MY only reservation is that I got a little confused when it came to the resolution of the mystery. Perhaps I wasn't paying close enough attention. There was a lot of intrigue, and lots of names bandied about, and I wouldn't be able to tell you at the moment exactly who was responsible for Ephialties' death. Still, I like Nicolaos as a protagonist, and I enjoyed the world Corby created.