The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber

I picked up this page turner on my birthday, while I was away from home at a conference, my traveling companion was busy doing other things, and my family was far away.  I needed something to draw me in and help me forget that I was missing birthday among friends.  I am not sure where I first heard about this, but the minute I saw it on the shelf I knew it would be my birthday present to myself.  I love reading journalistic accounts of real life events.  I am interested and amazed to watch a writer recreate complex events and turn them into elegant narrative despite the fact the he or she was no where near the events of the story. This write especially was able to see and hear and interpret all that happens with his clever imagination and in the eye of his mind. The transformation and writing can be miraculous.

This story of an angel of death, a nurse who begins killing his patients, is a  difficult story to tell for a host of reasons.  Charles Graeber recreates the events of 16 years by reviewing police reports, hospital reports and interviewing the many many people why were involved, even the killer himself. The story is told in an exciting manner, first by following the nurse who is perpetuating the crime, and then by following the police who eventually clue in to his crimes. The difficult mitigating factor is the fact that the hospital was fighting the police who were investigating the crime. Hospital officials would never be complicit in investigating the system that allowed a nurse to kill multiple patients over and over. How bad would that look for the hospital?

The Good Nurse is a true life crime thriller complete with good guys, bad guys, and real heroes. It is scaring me away from hospitals for the foreseeable future.  Who know how easy it would be to get away with murder? I highly recommend this true crime/hospital drama.  

True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

My life lately has been filled with nurses.  Between my father going into a skilled nursing facility, my son needing lots of doctor appointments, and watching Call the Midwife, I think about and interact with nurses all the time.  More than I realize.  Funny that way, doctors are the important ones, the ones we see for problems, but nurses really have all the answers, comfort, and common sense.  

Reading, I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse made me actually consider becoming a nurse.  Each essay, written by a different nurse, was thoughtful, articulate and presented me with a side of nursing I had not before considered.  The authors were mostly female, from all over the US and Canada, and most had discovered second careers in writing and had written about their working life with humor, pathos, and insight. 

There were nursing students, nursing home nurses, pediatric nurses, ER nurses, nurses in rural china, and nurses on ships that sailed to impoverished nations to aid the poorest of the poor, suffering from common ailments that would never bother us.  I read about nurses who dealt with AIDS patients in the era when no one would touch one and nurses who arrived at people's homes to check on them in their darkest hours.  There were hospice nurses, and nurses who survived cancer to go on and become nurses themselves and one beautiful essay about nurse whisperers: told from the point of view of the person watching the nurse care for her aging parents.  Great one!

I enjoyed every essay and would like to write to one woman who raises issues about HIPPA and confidentiality that I have always thought about and considered in my own career with writing circles and incarcerated women.  She articulated some of the things I think about with regard to storytelling beautifully.

The epigraph on the front of the book says, "required reading for anyone going into healthcare" I would go one further and say it is required reading for anyone needing healthcare.  Truly, that good.  Good work. Thanks Nurses!

The Road to Santiago

Odd little travel narrative about one woman's three trips on the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela told in a kind of mixed-chronological order.  First, the most recent trip, a weeks worth of the camino taken with her 12 year old daughter.  I have been thinking lately this would be a fun trip to take with my daughter when she is about 12, so this part became a kind of cautionary tale.  I pictured my sweet girl, age 12, wearing an i-pod for 200 km and rolling her eyes at me.

The next part was a short chapter, her first time on the Camino, which involved her arriving in Spain while 7 months pregnant to do some research for a book and stumbling upon the path, walking on it a bit, and then realizing she needed to come back someday. Walking the Camino while 7 months pregnant was not smart. Contractions ensued.

The last part was the second time she came, 7 years after her first try, and she walked to the end.   I was a little unclear how many km she actually walked, but I don't get the impression she did the whole pilgrimage.  It seemed like perhaps two weeks worth.  It was a solitary journey and one she embraced even though it was often difficult and painful. She was not so much interested in the sites along the way as she was her own personal solitariness and the spiritual experience of walking the Camino.

At the end I realized this short narrative was part of a series published by National Geographic which included all manner of places around the globe.  Somehow, the fact that it was a series kind of made it seem a little less that it should have been.  Somehow, it explained why it was thin.  But it made me want to go and try it myself.  I have begun planning.  I think my first goal is to simply get in shape.  I have 8 more years until my daughter is 12.  Think I can do it?

Drinking with Men by Rosie Schaap

I heard Ms Schaap interviewed on NPR a few weeks ago and her take on life-- by the bars she frequents--seemed an interesting way to approach a memoir.  She takes readers through her life from the bar car on the train as a teenager, to an Irish bar, college bar, grad school bar and various dives she has known and loved throughout the years.

Drinking With Men (because she finds women are often uninterested in bar culture) is a valentine to bars.  She writes so poetically about what it means to be a regular patron of a bar in a city that I actually found myself envious that I have never been a regular in a bar.  I am not even sure I have ever been in the kind of bar she frequents and has written about.  Maybe, I thought, I should even consider opening my own bar.

So yes, I enjoyed this book.  It was fun to read and enjoy her observations of life in the bar and watch her grow up in bars and with their patrons.  I did observe early on, that she really did not seem like my kind of person.  That for all her romance about bars and drinking, I didn't really like her. (Although on NPR she sounded quite likable.) I feel torn: interesting book, good writing, unlikeable narrator.

The biggest criticism I have of her memoir is that she unfairly dodged, what I would consider the central question of the book.  About half way through the memoir, in a chapter about skipping all her classes in grad school to hang out at her current bar of choice, she is one day reading her roommate's journal and reads her roommate's observations that she, Rosie, is an alcoholic. It never occurred to her that she was an alcoholic, and she begins to consider the question.  It is a moment for me that the memoir began to quicken and picked up my interest.  I read it in rapt attention, how would this realization change her life?

But suddenly, she changes the subject, and meanders off to another topic, even though it seemed she was about to conclude she had a big problem. She never went back to the question again.  So, although I certainly loved her stories in bars and her love of even the divey-est of them, I wonder if she will ever consider the big question again.

A good book, worth the read, available at your public library.

I want to lick this book I loved it so much

After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story by Michael Hainey, I found by accident when a friend posted a short article on fb about it. I requested my library purchase it. (I love doing that!)

Michael Hainey's father died when he was 6 and afterward he felt he could not talk about it.  His mother and family, in their grief, had a kind of conspiracy of silence about that night and about the man. So for years he lived with this wonder of who his father was and how he died that night in 1972.  When Michael finally begins to seek out answers, he delves deep into the Chicago newspaper world of the 1960's and 1970's: a fascinating time and a fascinating place.

His work takes him to hospitals and morgues and all over the city. It takes him back to his father's hometown in Nebraska and to a small town in Ohio.  It takes him to San Francisco and he even meets a few people in Kentucky, New York and Wisconsin.  He meets long forgotten family members and newspaper colleagues of his fathers. He meets the sadness of a life cut way too short.

It is beautiful writing and an amazing tribute to a time, a place, a family, and a person or rather several people. I loved everything about this book: the writer's pacing and sensibility. His honesty and his self-revelation. I loved how much he loved his mother and family and how much getting to know his father after all these years meant to him. All the passages about his childhood and adulthood and his unraveling the past felt poignant and purposeful.  He wove all the stories of his life and his parents' lives together quite skillfully. I read it in two days.  His last line in the book was the ultimate:  "I went searching for my father and I found my mother."

I am pretty sure I heard him interviewed on Fresh Air about this book as well, and here is the original article from the Chicago Reader that got me started.  I highly recommend this memoir.

Her by Christina Parravani

My latest memoir read and early review installment is the captivating tale of Christa Parravani, one half of a set of identical twins.

Her book tells the narrative of two girls who go through life together and when one of them dies tragically, the other is left to discover what it means to be alone. I have never understood so thoroughly what being a twin must be like, and I found that the parts of the narrative that discuss the power of identity and the ties of love specifically between twins to be the most interesting part of this memoir.  I felt real pain for Christa as she attempted to navigate life without her other half.

Reader's should be warned that there is a horrifying rape scene in the early chapters of the book, that was written by the rape survivor, Cara, the twin who died (by drug overdose).  The author of this memoir included several excerpts from the deceased twin's journals to illustrate many points of their lives together.  Among those excerpts is the description of the rape that led Cara to the circumstances of her eventual death.  I loved the extra point of view of the twin's lives together.  Cara had a captivating voice as well and it is a tragedy that her life ended early.

This book is scheduled to be released in March.  I am thrilled to have an early copy and will certainly be glad to lend it to anyone with interest.  This story is sad, beautiful and worthwhile reading. The message, corny as it sounds, rang clear and true:  Love always wins over death.

100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do by Kim Stafford

A few weeks ago I expressed my love and appreciation for this book on the elegant art of listening.  I was so impressed by the author's love of words and writing that I thought I would check out his new memoir  100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared.  It was not readily available at the bookstore, so I asked my public library if they would order it, and it showed up in about two weeks.  (Love the public library!)

This is such a fine and exceptional book that I can't stop thinking about it.  Stafford makes everything seem effortless yet profound. His writing is smooth and creamy and makes me want to eat it at every meal.  He is writing about his beloved brother who committed suicide 20 years earlier.  Mr Stafford remembers his brother in a series of stories from their youth together, their short adulthood together and the aftermath of living with such a tragic end to someone you loved.

Every week I sit in the company of great writers who pour their hearts out in short poems, and memoirs of their lives.  Word upon word, each writer is building a series of stories and vignettes not unlike these.  I loved this work.  All the stories individually and as a collective quilt of stories, were without question true and beautiful: honesty that cut to the bone of life.  My fellow writers and I can and do easily write this beautifully and could piece our pieces together to form a grand story, but something about the way he did it seemed profound and unreachable.  He has left something tugging at my heart. Writing that is worth emulating in its candor and vulnerability.

God Bless my library for buying this for me, but  I will have to buy my own copy.  There are many writing lessons to be learned here.

For my reader that lives in Portland. This man runs the Northwest Writing Institute.  You should check it out and take a class from him.  Better yet, I'll come visit and we can both take a course from him.