Sunday, January 29, 2012

Confessions of a Surgeon: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated

The Wall Street Journal posted an excerpt from this book by Paul Ruggieri a few weeks ago and I was intrigued enough to pick it up from the library and read on. 

The Good: In addition to some downright funny stories about past patients (hungry Fred was my favorite), this book also provides unique and interesting insight into the ways of doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies. The discourses (sometimes verging on rants) about malpractice insurance were especially noteworthy: I never stopped to think about the numbers, but the fact is that by practicing long enough, virtually every single doctor will be sued. No wonder health care costs are out-of-control. 

The Bad: I got a little tired of what often came across as “poor me,” particularly as it related to “lifestyle” and pay. I have no doubt that the hours are long and the stress is tremendous. As Ruggieri acknowledges, though, that’s part of what drew him to the field. I really couldn’t sympathize with the oft-repeated I-don’t-make-enough sentiment. At one point Ruggieri laments being unable to retire for want of being able to maintain the same lifestyle. My feeling is either suck it up and keep working, or retire and change your lifestyle, but the angst over feeling unable to retire is nothing unique to surgeons. 

The Complicated: Not much. Except for a few bloody pages (skip, skip, skip), Ruggieri does a good job of making medicine accessible – and not gross. He does raise important questions about medical education, insurance, malpractice, and the like, none of which is, or can be, answered here but which provide definite food for thought. This is a fine, quick read, if you’re looking for one surgeon’s take on surgery (and especially the broader issues surrounding healthcare). For something more broadly-based – and more sympathetic – I still prefer Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Alice I Have Been


I felt this book was really two books: the book of Alice as a child, which could be a bit tedious and hard to relate to, and Alice as an adult which was reminiscent of Downton Abbey (I’ve become a bit obsessed, so the parallels were positive for me), and also profoundly moving. Before reading this book, I was vaguely aware that Lewis Carroll was whispered to have had some sort of inappropriate relationship with the young girl for whom he Alice in Wonderland. This book, a well done work of historical fiction, is the story of that girl, their relationship, and her life after Wonderland.

As I said, it felt like two books, and I nearly gave up while reading the first. Upon finishing the book, I determined my disenchantment with the earlier chapters, which focus on Alice Liddell’s childhood, may have largely owed to the higher degree of fiction present in these early chapters than in those that focus on Alice as an adult. As the author notes, while much is known about Alice’s adult life, her life as a child, including the break in relations between her family and Mr. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) is much less so. (Here, even – or especially – the little details nagged at me. Did her mother really refer to all maids as “Mary Ann”?) It was largely the engaging descriptions of Oxford life that kept me interested long enough to reach my reward: the later chapters, particularly those which find Alice amid the tumult of the Great War.

Monday, January 23, 2012

The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us

The LSJ doesn't often publish reviews of books that rely so heavily on research, but a few months ago they did; evidently I wasn't the only one who read the review and thought it sounded interesting. After waiting three months, I finally received the hold notice and could see what all the fuss was about. A little background, first: Jeffrey Kluger writes for Time and this book, as he acknowledges more than once, grew out of feature stories on sibling relationships tha he wrote for the magazine in 2006 and 2007.

Not surprisingly, then, the book reads a bit like a very long feature story. It's chock full of interviews, longitudinal study results, and other standard research fare. Kluger examines everything from sibling rivalry, to the trajectory of shared substance abuse and teenage pregnancy, to abusive sibling relationships. In places, it's a little dark.This would probably be too much, if not for the generous, and usually very funny, helping of personal anecdotes that Kluger regularly doles out. Dysfunctional in any number of ways, the Kluger clan often serves to illustrate any number of research findings in ways that make the reader both thankful and sorry not to be a member of the troop. As for recommending it? If you enjoy magazine-style features, or have an unquenchable thirst for research about siblings, this is a well-written and certainly informative book.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Isaac's Storm

Since I so enjoyed my previous Erik Larson reads (In the Garden of Beasts and The Devil in the White City), I decided to see what else Larson had written. The answer: Isaac’s Storm, the story of the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas. The protagonist, Isaac Cline, is the station head of the national weather service’s Galveston station; he arguably bears much blame for the town’s ignorance of the storm.Even so, he comes across as a mostly likable, and even somewhat sympathetic guy. His likability stems, no doubt, from the fact that he's introduced not when he's at the brink of making one of the greatest meteorological blunders of the century (though there is more competition than you'd think for even this dubious distinction), but as a young child born in Tennessee hill country in the midst of the Civil War. Following his exploits from the age of six, the reader can't help but be a bit partial to Team Isaac by the time the real drama unfolds.

Before recounting the real drama - the ravaging of Galveston - and in the midst of telling Isaac's personal history, Larson sets the stage with the history of early American meteorology and hurricanes from centuries past, essentially from the time of Columbus through the twentieth century. He does this with the same attention to detail and humor that accompanied his telling of Hitler’s rise and Mudgett’s murders. The material is certainly serious, but it is presented with a lightness that, if possible, makes it seem more real – and certainly more memorable. (Case in point: the weather service’s forecast for March 12, 1888.)  Reading about the weather may sound about as exciting as watching paint dry, but I was definitely as impressed with this book as with the other Larson books I've read; at this point, I would count Larson among my favorite authors.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Travels with Henry

A colleague suggested (and loaned) this book to me because she thought I would find it interesting. She’s right. Travels with Henry is Richard Valeriani’s telling of his time as part of the traveling press while covering Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Not only was it frequently laugh-out-loud funny, but I found this book interesting on many different levels:

1) The travelogue. From Vatican City to Saudi Arabia to the Kremlin and the jungles of Africa, Valeriani documented many places that not only are off-limits to many travelers, but in some cases (the Soviet Union or 1970s China) will never again exist in the contexts in which he discovered them. The travails he and his colleagues experienced – with plumbing, communications, transportation, and the rest – add tremendous color and keep the book lively for the duration of its 400 pages.

2) The foreign policy perspective. Given his close proximity to Kissinger and other diplomats, elected officials, sovereigns, and even the occasional dictation, this book serves as a crash course in the hows and whys of foreign policy and diplomacy. This book also underscores the intractable nature of the problems in the Middle East and provides unique perspective on America’s identity crisis in the post-Vietnam, middle-of-Watergrate years.

3) The journalism as a profession perspective. However idyllic Charlie Gibson, Bob Schieffer, and Diane Sawyer may have made journalism – and television journalism, in particular – seem to me years ago, Valeriani has undone. Coming hard on the heels of Foreign Correspondence, I have a new appreciation for how incredibly hard the job of foreign correspondent is. That’s not to say it doesn’t sound fascinating or exciting (or come with plenty of perks, as when Valeriani visited an otherwise-closed Taj Mahal with Nancy Kissinger or toured Petra with the Jordanian Prime Minister), the sheer lack of sleep alone would be enough to do me in.

This is an obscure book that I never would have found on my own, but I’m glad to have had it recommended to me, as it was well worth the read.

Friday, January 13, 2012

The Devil in the White City

The Ferris wheel, Cracker Jack, shredded wheat, alternating current, and the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry all have their origins in the World’s Fair that was held in Chicago over 100 years ago.

Erik Larson, the author who wrote In the Garden of Beasts, brings all of these little details to life in telling the story of how the 1893 World’s Fair came to be. As with Garden of Beasts, he intricately weaves the story of myriad people and events into an intricate and coherent narrative, which he tells with great precision, down to the smallest details. From a rivalry with New York to the need to “out Eiffel Eiffel,” and the architects’ frustrations with one another, Larson places the reader in Chicago in the last decade of the 19th century. 

The city he creates is dark, dirty, and often bloody, a far cry from the beautiful city Daniel Burnham predicts will rise and that I love so well. Larsen writes that it was so very easy to disappear in this place, and no small part of the book focuses on one individual who was responsible for an untold number of those disappearances. Herman Webster Mudgett, perhaps the most infamous Michigan grad after the Unabomber (and a corpse theft while still a medical student), quietly goes about engaging in one long crime spree, swindling, defrauding, and especially disappearing one young woman after another.

I enjoyed this book very much, and was so enthralled by the whole scenario that I had a hard time putting it down. (I read it in less than three days.) As in Beasts, Larson does a great job of capturing both the macro-level factors of the time – labor unrest, a plunging stock market, societal shifts in attitudes toward women – and the micro level factors – how the first Ferris wheel was built, for example, and what Infanta Eulalia ate when she visited the fair.  

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Foreign Correspondence


I loved this book. I happened on it by chance; Foreign Correspondence was the first interesting-sounding and available book available for the Nook (my new toy!) from the library. Geraldine Brooks is a former Foreign Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. This book is her memoir, revisiting her childhood in Sydney, and especially the penpals that featured so prominently in it. Driven by a desire to broaden her worldview and interact with kids from other countries, Geraldine begins collecting penpals, corresponding with each in earnest and glimpsing life in Israel, France, and the United States.

Geraldine eventually becomes a journalist and then a foreign correspondent, at one point writing of her time in the Middle East, “I was on the Frequent Flyer Program from hell” (p. 147). Later, she begins to track down each of her former penpals, visiting their home towns and finding each one to see how life has treated them. While I loved the light, conversational writing style, I was especially taken by the entire premise of the book. Certainly my own interest in the broader world was shaped in no small part by penpals from France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil; I could connect with the author’s emotions and motivations in a way that is rare when reading a memoir.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Dakota, Or What's a Heaven For


This complex book is ultimately the story of a late nineteenth century young woman’s marriage, move from the established city of St. Paul, Minnesota, to the unsettled Dakota Territory, and struggle to be happy – and independent. The book has several strong points – the prose is striking and each character has a unique voice that is maintained throughout the book. The story itself is interesting and lively; the reader can easily feel the essence of the prairie days. While it may not be Little House on the Prairie, one has a clear sense of the rhythm of prairie life. 

Ultimately, however, I came away feeling that the author had simply bitten off more than she could chew. Too many characters seemed to fall by the wayside, leaving me wondering whatever happened to them or, in some cases, what purpose their creation and cultivation had served. Likewise, elements that initially seemed they would be integral in the plot (Anna’s little brown bottles and the Little Carl plot twist, for example) were introduced and then disappeared, adding more confusion.  I often felt a bit overwhelmed, needing to flip back to reread passages to see if I’d missed something (I never felt that I had, only that I couldn’t quite put the pieces together), or to remind myself who a character was and what role they played in the story. So much just didn’t make sense. In the end, I was disappointed that the accumulation of the lost characters and plot points overwhelmed the story.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is completely different from every book I have ever read. There is a main character (Frankie), supporting characters (her mother, her friends, her college roommate), and a plot (small town girl in 1920s New England is accepted to prestigious college on scholarship, makes most of years there, takes jobs in New York and Paris - yay, Jazz Age! - before realizing home is where the heart is), but that is where the similarity to any book I've previously read ends. The reason is that Scrapbook is no novel, but a stunning, full-color scrapbook with ticket stubs and photographs, graduation invitations, dried flowers, hair clippings, and Valentines. The pages are beautiful and truly a pleasure just to look at and contemplate the memorabilia contained within this little book. Moreover, it is a testament to Caroline Preston's creativity and story telling ability that, although no more than a paragraph of text appears on each page of this compact novella, I felt completely satisfied by the end that I knew and understood the characters and their lives.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific

I do not recall where I first heard of Paul Theroux's non-fiction account of his voyages throughout Oceania, but it sounded interesting enough that I decided to purchase a copy when I was unable to obtain it from the library. The fact that I had paid good money for this book made me determined to keep reading, even when boredom threatened to overwhelm me. It is not a bad book. It is simply a very, very long book (528 pages) for the topic (author takes kayak to faraway land and kayaks around the boys, inlets, and motus, while ruminating on the culture, language, and history of the various Oceanic peoples - repeat 51 times, including two identical jellyfish stings).

Admittedly, I couldn't help but compare it to J. Maarten Troost's hilarious tales of his travels in many of these same islands, Getting Stoned with Savages and David Quammen's fantastically researched, beautifully written The Song of the Dodo (which covers many more of the earth's islands than those found in the Pacific, but still). Happy Isles also suffers from age: Theroux wrote this book in the opening years of the 1990s, so I could not help but wonder, often, whether various statements or descriptions (for example, a lack of resorts on one island or lack of tourists on another) still hold true. While I certainly don't fault the author for the passage of time, I was nevertheless distracted by these musings, and admittedly the book simply felt more dated than Troost's or Quammen's, owing to the different approaches the three authors took.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that this book has going for it is that many of Theroux's travels occurred during the first Gulf War. It is interesting to read the concerns many islanders express in the run-up to that war, remembering the hell that World War II wrought on their corner of the world. These exchanges with islanders (not least Theroux's meeting with the King of Tonga and former Prime Minister of New Zealand) are the highlight of the book and lend it the most character. Unfortunately, I found such encounters to be fairly limited - undoubtedly the result of Theroux preferring to keep to himself when possible - and to be vastly outnumbered by his descriptions of the islands and paddling conditions. Not surprisingly, at least on the page, the islands and their people closely resemble one another in chapter after chapter (each chapter being a different island), giving the book a monotonous, rambling quality.