Feb 9

The general consensus was that it was an interesting story and that we all learned a great deal, but that the book wasn't particularly well written, and ought to have been edited down quite a bit. There was quite a bit of repetition, and the final chapter seemed to have come from somewhere else entirely and been tacked on simply to make the book thicker. We psychoanalyzed the two main characters, deciding that Whitehead was the 19th century equivalent of a social worker, while Snow might have had Asperger's.

Feb 23

The book was better received than it was two weeks back. Nearly all of us were city dwellers, but a huge swath of us were also followers of Jane Jacobs. So the discussion tended to veer away from Victorian England and the use of scientific method to urban planning, and the health and environmental impact of country vs. city living. And is the new fad of hand sanitizers everywhere really helping?