Season’s Readings: Notable Books read in year 2003 by Eva. Order is not significant.

• Second Opinions by Jerome Groopman, M.D., who is a practicing hematologist/oncologist. 7 case studies, one of which was previously published in the NYer. Two were from the author's own family. For example, Groopman's back surgeries left him worse off. Sometimes the best course is "don’t just do something, stand there." It does not surprise me that there are contradictory opinions among physicians since there are among gutter tradesmen (We just fixed a fallen gutter) and programmers: The hardest part of creating our Master Lab online bookstore in my Java course at WPI last winter was getting our group of five to agree.
• Singular Intimacies, Becoming a Doctor at Bellvue by Danielle Ofri. ©2002 Think E.R., the book. One of these chapters was selected for Best American Essays 2002. I’m interested in how expertise is achieved.
• My Own Country, A Doctor’s Story of a Town and its People in the Age of AIDS by Abraham Verghese. ©1994. Nonfiction about 1985-89 spent as an infectious disease specialist in Johnson City Tennessee. The Johnson City Medical Center was one piece of the author's gig, the VA hospital another, and there was a tiny research piece too. We see his marriage strained by his devotion to his AIDS patients. The couple’s second son is born during the period covered. 1985 was the year the blood test for HIV became available. About 3 years later the first AIDS-specific treatment, AZT, became available. The author drew the people, the work, the place and the times. I put this right up there with Randy Shilts' AIDS book And the Band Played On.
• Rosalind Franklin, The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox. ã 2002. 328pp plus photographs. I’ve been interested in Rosalind Franklin ever since I read The Double Helix. I read the many-paged review of this biography in the NYer, but only with the reading of Maddox’s book itself do I feel R.F.’s life has been properly explained to me. My own take after reading this fine biography is that Rosalind had a very full 37 years and was a most admirable human being, whereas the NYer focused too much on an unflattering view of her love life. R.F. contributed fundamentally to science in 3 areas: coal, DNA, and viruses. She herself probably died counting only the first and the last as successes since DNA was associated with that awful unhappy period in the King’s College lab when she was patronized and ridiculed. She never knew that her photo #51 gave James Watson his eureka moment. J.T. Randall, head of the King's lab, should have made the respective domains of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin clear. When working conditions deteriorate due to harassment so people can’t do their best work, the employer bears some responsibility. Not that I absolve Maurice and Rosalind. It takes 2 to tango plus a setting. Brenda Maddox does not know if Rosalind jumped or was pushed from Kings. (Reminds me of Robert McNamara saying in Errol Morris' film The Fog of War that he told his friend Katherine Graham of the Washington Post in the 1990’s that "I still don’t know if I quit or was fired from LBJ’s cabinet." K.G. said, "You were fired."). The sweetness of working at Birkbeck with a congenial group of collaborators, which she put together and led expertly, had to be balm after King’s. Rosalind coped with ovarian cancer the last 19 months of her life, working most days. Maddox says, "Rosalind Franklin did not have her eye on the prize. Nor did she worry about being outrun in a race no one but Watson and Crick knew was a race. Rosalind knew her worth. The lost prize was life."
• Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson. ©1994, 9 cassettes. I must've read an excerpt before because I was familiar with the outlines of E.O. Wilson’s childhood in the South. I like to read about a person who has a passion, ants and the natural world in this case. Wilson had an eminent career: early tenure at Harvard, for example. But he had stressful conflicts with fellow professors James Watson, Richard Lewanton and Stephen Jay Gould. Wilson writes of the particulars of his graduate students’ research projects.
• I Want To Be A Mathematician, an Automathography by Paul R. Halmos. ©1985, but out of print (Why? It’s so good!) One of Halmos’ Ph.D students at Michigan was Steve Parrott, who is in my Go Club! Halmos satisfied my curiosity about the career of an academic mathematician. Halmos is confident enough to be able to speak of slights and just criticism he has encountered. Halmos is opinionated in a good way. Part of my mental engagement with this author was challenging some of his opinions, like his penchant for linearly ordering universities and mathematicians, or his assertion that two important interests are "one too many" for most mathematicians. Halmos advocates examples in teaching and learning. He practices what he preaches, giving many particulars in this book as to what his regular professional activities involve. He shares the professional tips of a lifetime.
• Remarkable Mathematicians from Euler to von Neumann. By Ioan James. 60 mathematicians covered in 422pp. Napoleon said to LaPlace: "Your book on Celestial Mechanics doesn’t mention God." LaPlace: "I had no need for that hypothesis." LaGrange: "Ah, but it’s such a good hypothesis. It explains so much." The U.S. absorbed 45 top flight mathematician refugees in the mid 1930’s. George Birkhoff of Harvard thought it put promising young Americans looking for research positions at a disadvantage. Felix Hausdorff and his wife calmly chose death—they took overdoses of Veronal—on Jan. 26, 1942 on the eve of being transported East by the Nazis. He was 73. I had no idea before about the person behind Hausdorff spaces.
• Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody with Wm. Hoffer read by Julie Just. Abridged to 2 cassettes. Herman saw the movie on TV. Betty, a 39-year-old American woman traveled to Iran in 1984 for (so she thought) a 2 week "vacation" (only she wasn’t looking forward to it) with her husband Moody, a 47-year old osteopath, and their 4 year old daughter Mahtob, to visit Moody’s family. Upon arrival Moody belatedly informed Betty that he had lost his job in Detroit and meant to stay in Iran. Betty spent 1.5 years trying to escape with her daughter. She finally succeeded, in winter, by horseback, over mountains, into Turkey.
• Married to Laughter, subtitled A Love Story featuring Anna Meara, by Jerry Stiller, read by the author. Abridged to 5 CDs. Meara & Stiller had been married for 47 years at the time of the writing, and are the parents of two, including comic actor Ben Stiller. Eric Osman said he was disappointed that this book did not contain any jokes. I learned a lot about the acting vocation.
• Seldom Disappointed, a memoir by Tony Hillerman. Comparable to Stiller's, but the writing vocation. Both born in the 1920's. WW II vets. Long marriages. Neither tells us much about parenting. Stiller confesses marital rocky patches, Hillerman does not.
• Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James. ã 1980, 171pp. Many first novels are autobiographical. This is the converse. There’s truth, humor, and exemplary writing craft on every page. James was born in Australia in 1939. His father never came home from WW II. The memoir takes us to the point where he left Sydney in 1961 to seek his fortune in England. He became a critic, but I only know that from the jacket. I loved the photo on the cover so here it is:
• Heart Earth by Ivan Doig Read by Grover Gardner. 4 cassettes. So well-written! A memoir of the author’s pre- school years. His mother died at age 31 on Ivan's 6^th birthday in 1945. In 1991 Doig came upon a stash of letters she had written to her brother Wally in WWII. It inspired him to reconstruct his little family’s life during the war years.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig, read by Lawrence Pressman. I finally caught up with this old '60’s classic (actually it was published in 1974). Blame it on the abridgement (to 4 cassettes, 6 hours) but I didn’t much like it. Mental illness, philosophy, and road trips are not themes I groove on. The box’s description that it was about a father-son relationship in the '60’s is what attracted me. Plus, where there's fame maybe there's fire. In the forward the author states there’s not much about Zen or Motorcycle Maintenance in the book. I took that as encouragement to proceed with it.
• Keith Haring by John Gruen ©1991 238pp including many plates. This biography was a gift from Ellie who correctly identified it as something I’d like when it came into the swap shop where she volunteers. Keith Haring was born in Kurztown, PA, in 1958. He moved to NYC in 1978. He very quickly got a circle of friends. He dropped out of The School of Visual Arts in 1980 when he started to be able to live from his work. This book told me just what I wanted to know about Haring: family background, schooling, cultural milieu, influences, personal relationships, housing, and economic conditions. K.H. died of AIDS in 1990. I admired Keith’s energy. I did not admire his celebrity jet set phase. In 1978, in Pittsburg, Keith was "incredibly impressed" by a lecture by Christo accompanied by the just-completed documentary Running Fence (dirs. David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin). It happens that Running Fence was being screened at the Harvard Film Archive the very night I read that passage! So I walked over and saw it. Keith wanted to engage the public like Christo did. He started with subway art.
• With Malice Toward None by Stephen B. Oates. A biography of Abraham Lincoln. 16 cassettes. Even though I took American History in the lower grades, the upper grades, and high school, and I grew up in the Land of Lincoln (yes, I’m from Chicago and Boston, which was a double whammy during this year’s baseball playoffs), my prior knowledge of Lincoln could have been written down in two paragraphs! Presidential politics 140 years ago is much like today's process! Herman liked the bits he heard.
• The Eye of the Albatross by Carl Safina 352pp. ©2002. Radio transmitters are affixed to albatrosses for research purposes. Safina reports on other kinds of wild animal research on Pacific islands as well, but the nominal focus of this book is a particular Laysan albatross. The author recounts the sad history of albatrosses, with photos of egg harvesting, thousands of dead albatrosses killed for their feathers, etc. Sometimes I could hardly stand it. Some of the sad paragraphs are about ongoing environmental degradation. Albatrosses choke on plastic debris, which is all over the remotest Pacific islands. On a happier note, I learned about more enlightened fishing practices that hook fewer albatrosses. And I enjoyed reading about researchers who are dedicated to their work, and about creative ideas. One researcher, noting that parasites suctioned onto the side of a shark, designed a camera to suction onto a shark. Lots was learned. Researchers can get a transmitter into a shark for up to three weeks by putting the transmitter into an albatross, dead of natural causes, which the shark eats. Researchers attach a small bar code to a sea turtle’s flipper so they can identify it with a wand. Elder Hostel goes to Midway island where 15 seabird species nest, unafraid of us.
• Chang and Eng, a novel by Darin Strauss. Imaginative reconstruction of the inner lives of the joined twins from Siam (1811-1874) who emigrated to America, made money by showmanship, married the Yates sisters of Wilkesboro, N. Carolina, farmed (with slave help), & fathered 21 children between the two. Gift from Micah Feldman. He & Sharon spent New Year’s with us.
• Atonement, by Ian McEwan ã 2001. 365pp. My book club selected this. The first half of the book covers two days in 1935. Briony is 13. Her sister Cecilia is just down from Cambridge, as is Robbie, the housekeeper’s son and her father’s protégé. Briony’s 25 year old brother Leon comes home with a houseguest. With 3 cousins as actors Briony is trying to write and produce a play. She witnesses and spectacularly misinterprets some courtship behavior among the young adults. Part 2 is about Dunkirk. In Part 3 a more mature Briony confronts the consequences of her 1935 behavior. The epilogue is set at a family reunion in 1999.
• Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. One theme this novel takes on is how academics think their path is superior. One of them confronts the dignity, character, and maturity of relatives on other paths. Also, by putting a man in the role of someone whose ambitions are thwarted by a teenaged pregnancy, it brings a fresh perspective to that situation. Set in Canada. My book group discussed this.
• The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan read by the author and Joan Chen. This novel had all the same themes as Annie Lamotte’s Blue Shoe, also 8 cassettes. Bonesetter’s Daughter is the better book. Both books are about mother-daughter relationships in California where the daughter is middle-aged and coping with her own issues. Her mother is in the early stages of Altzheimer’s. Family secrets are finally aired out. In the Tan book before the octogenarian forgets everything she has written down her memories. Structurally I thought the mother’s book—her story is set in China—which was embedded in the daughter’s outer story set in San Francisco—was a bit long. The reader almost forgets about the San Francisco wrapper story.
• Disobedience by Jane Hamilton ©2002. Abridged to 4 cassettes. Maybe this novel, read by Robert Sean Leonard (I don’t think he did it justice), lost something in the abridgement. The part I did find masterful was Henry’s first impression of Elvira’s outing (Mrs. Shaw was out of control) contrasted with his friend Karen’s perception of the same event (Mrs. Shaw was a heroine), and then contrasted again with his own re-interpretation upon reflection. Henry is a high school senior. His younger sister Elvira is a Civil War re-enactment buff whose fellow re-enactors don’t know she’s female. Elvira calls herself Elvernon at the rallies. There’s also a thread about Henry learning his mother's having an affair by reading her email.