DriftScribe

Queer feminist, liberal socialist, abolitionist she/her | 🇨🇳🇺🇸 | 📚🎧🎓🧠📖 mostly nonfiction, always on hunt for books on topics I’m into

900 points

0% overlap

My Taste

dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Reading...

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

DriftScribe commented on a List

required reading for U.S healthcare workers

by yayatheflower

22 books

these are books that i think are imperative for a compassionate, empathetic, understanding, proactive healthcare workforce cause they won’t teach you this in school. please suggest more you think should be here!!

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Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

Post from the One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway forum

DriftScribe

Thoughts from 7%

it’s kind of wild that Norway already had a female Prime Minister back in 1981, and not long after even had a cabinet that was nearly half women. They were sooo ahead of all of us.

DriftScribe started reading...

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

Åsne Seierstad

A harrowing and thorough account of the massacre that upended Norway, and the trial that helped put the country back togetherOn July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of Norway’s governing Labour Party. In The Island, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist? As in her bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, Seierstad excels at the vivid portraiture of lives under stress. She delves deep into Breivik’s troubled childhood, showing how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist and Internet game addict, and then an entrepreneur, Freemason, and self-styled master warrior who sought to “save Norway” from the threat of Islam and multiculturalism. She writes with equal intimacy about Breivik’s victims, tracing their political awakenings, aspirations to improve their country, and ill-fated journeys to the island. By the time Seierstad reaches Utøya, we know both the killer and those he will kill. We have also gotten to know an entire country—famously peaceful and prosperous, and utterly incapable of protecting its youth.

Post from the Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives forum

DriftScribe

Final takeaway

What really stayed with me in this book is the stark contrast between the clean-energy story we like to tell ourselves and the dirty reality underneath it. The book makes it hard to ignore that the “clean” future of electric vehicles and batteries still depends on cobalt from the Congo, and that this supply chain is tied to human rights abuses and serious environmental damage. That gap between the polished idea of “clean” and what is actually happening on the ground felt deeply unsettling to me.

What disturbed me even more was the sense that this is not just a clean vs. dirty problem, but a strange mix of technological progress and industrial regression. The world is moving forward with lithium-ion batteries, phones, and EVs, yet the work at the bottom of the chain can still look almost premodern—dangerous, manual, and brutally harsh. That contradiction is what made the book hit so hard for me: the future looks advanced on the surface, but underneath it still depends on labor that feels like it belongs to a much older, rougher world.

DriftScribe is interested in reading...

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Adam Hochschild

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West

DriftScribe finished a book

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

Siddharth Kara

The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award. An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation―and the moral implications that affect us all. Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt. Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.

DriftScribe commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

goldenwarrior

Music Whilst Reading?

Does anyone else listen to music (with lyrics!!) whilst reading?

Just to occupy another part of your brain. I've done since a child, my friends say I'm weird, but now when I hear these songs/albums I am "transported" back to those fictional worlds years, even decades later!

DriftScribe commented on a post

mahoo

Why are the richest countries the poorest ones?

I want to start this post sharing a little bit of my country history, which is also very rich in copper and very much invaded by the giants companies of capitalist USA.

This starts at the beginnings of the 1900’s in México, more specifically in the state of Sonora, where William Cornell Greene arrived alongside of his company “Cananea Consolidated Copper Co.” which exploited the valuable copper deposits of the region and of course had their workers in inhumane conditions, at the time there was a movement starting in the country called the “Magonista movement” that boosted the workers to demand better working conditions, and by better I mean that they wanted to be paid equally to the United States workers and that their working hours doesn’t exceed 8 hours per day, they also wanted to remove some United States workers from high positions since the United States workers where racist and very hash to the Mexican workers. Long story short, the people form the United States denied the workers demands and the Mexican government at the time was more interested in keeping the United States investment than to safe keep the rights of their people, a lot of people died, but there workers where the fire the started the Mexican Revolution movement and thanks to them and to the revolution, the constitution was changed and Mexico was a pioneer country in the working rights movement, we do have a long way to go, but my hope is that a movement like this ignites in the DRC.

Sorry for the long post it may seem off topic but for me is impossible not to see the correlation, I hope that we continue to learn from our history and keep fighting for a better tomorrow.

DriftScribe commented on a post

mahoo

Thoughts from 15%, can we talk about the damage that colonialism has caused?

Whenever we talk about colonialism we tend to think about England or Spain… but what Belgium has done to Africa is unacceptable, and I feel we don’t talk about this enough, how are this countries not being held responsible for the devastation they brought, the DRC was not “independent” until 1960 and in this 65 years they have not been able to land on their feet, I’m just astonished about all this. Feeling sad ☹️

DriftScribe is interested in reading...

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Harriet A. Washington

From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment.Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read Medical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.

DriftScribe started reading...

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

Siddharth Kara

DriftScribe wrote a review...

Wonder Drug: The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims

DriftScribe

Apr 03, 2026

4.0

Enjoyment: 4.0Quality: 5.0Characters: Plot:

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This book is the kind of nonfiction that reminds me how powerful investigative journalism can be. Jennifer takes the thalidomide disaster and turns it into a gripping investigation, but also something bigger, a story about medical greed, institutional failure, and the people who were left to carry that damage. The first half reads almost like a thriller, as if you are moving through the case with the author in real time. What makes it even more impressive is how fully she rebuilds a story that began more than 60 years ago and still feels painfully alive.

The parts about the FDA and the legal vacuum around thalidomide are just as compelling. Frances Kelsey’s refusal to approve the drug is one of the book’s most important threads, and it naturally connects to the Kefauver Amendments, which strengthened U.S. drug regulation after the thalidomide tragedy. Jennifer makes that history feel vivid rather than dusty, and that is a real achievement. can also feel how much reporting and interviewing went into the book, because every detail seems earned rather than simply reconstructed.

What stayed with me, though, were the absences. The mothers of the “thalidomide babies” are also direct victims, and I wished the book had spent more time with them. The decision not to prosecute Merrell also left me wondering how much can hinge on a single institutional choice. And when thalidomide returns later as a drug for leprosy, that reversal is fascinating, because the same substance moves from poison to cure, yet the survivors’ reactions are only briefly touched on. Even so, this is a beautiful and serious book, and one that lingers long after the final page.

DriftScribe finished a book

Wonder Drug: The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims

Jennifer Vanderbes

A riveting account of the most notorious drug of the twentieth century and the never-before-told story of its American survivors In 1959, a Cincinnati pharmaceutical firm, the William S. Merrell Company, quietly began distributing samples of an exciting new wonder drug already popular around the world. Touted as a sedative without risks, thalidomide was handed out freely, under the guise of clinical trials, by doctors who believed approval by the Food and Drug Administration was imminent. But in 1960, when the application for thalidomide landed on the desk of FDA medical reviewer Frances Kelsey, she quickly grew suspicious. When she learned that the drug was causing severe birth abnormalities abroad, she and a team of dedicated doctors, parents, and journalists fought tirelessly to block its authorization in the United States and stop its sale around the world. Jennifer Vanderbes set out to write about this FDA success story only to discover a sinister truth that had been buried for For more than five years, several American pharmaceutical firms had distributed unmarked thalidomide samples in shoddy clinical trials, reaching tens of thousands of unwitting patients, including hundreds of pregnant women. As Vanderbes examined government and corporate archives, probed court records, and interviewed hundreds of key players, she unearthed an even more stunning Scores of Americans had likely been harmed by the drug. Deceived by the pharmaceutical firms, betrayed by doctors, and ignored by the government, most of these Americans had spent their lives unaware that thalidomide had caused their birth defects. Now, for the first time, this shocking episode in American history is brought to light. Wonder Drug gives voice to the unrecognized victims of this epic scandal and exposes the deceptive practices of Big Pharma that continue to endanger lives today.

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