Critical Care by Theresa Brown

No matter how many medical memoirs I read, I never seem to get enough.  The best ones, I’ve found, lead me to a new understanding of how we, as biological creatures and thinking beings both, function.  They bring me into a realization about myself and others that would not have otherwise occurred to me.  I think this is a gift that this particular genre can give more easily than most other forms of nonfiction.  Theresa Brown’s entry into the field, Critical Care, is a competent work written about the in-hospital training of the author as a nurse.

In her book, Brown discusses some of the standard concerns of a new nurse:  feeling inadequately trained for some of the situations that arise; facing the strict chain of command that structures every hospital; dealing with horrible time constraints and unreasonable work loads; and learning to balance personal life.

Brown writes on these topics with an open hand, allowing the reader to easily grasp what is being said.  She has a gift for making the reader understand what, exactly, is going on with a particular treatment or procedure, and is able to make most situations fairly approachable.  I suspect this is because she has a background as an English professor, and has the technical skill to use language in a very effective way.  In fact, I think her idiosyncratic career history makes her story more compelling — it’s quite the career change to go from being in front of a classroom to being in a hospital room, hanging an IV.

She takes a look at some interesting topics, such as injuring her knee after becoming a nurse and viewing the role of patient from within, rather than without.  In fact, the book is full of fascinating stories about patients, the learning process, and on keeping one’s humanity while working with those who are ill.  It takes a while to realize that even those people Brown discusses as having gone into remission are more likely than not either dead or experiencing relapses.  How hard that must be for their caregivers, both past and present, to handle.

The stories she tells about her experiences and the people she has known and taken care of are not, however, ultimately satisfying.  The main reason for this is that she doesn’t manage to provide a feeling of depth to the lessons she attempts to impart.  Her anecdotes and recalled stories all have an underlying message of some sort or another, but are lacking the aspect of new insight.  The things she tries to teach feel as if they have been discussed before and been discussed better; she has nothing to add to the conversation that is special or innovative.

This is sad, because I think, with a little more encouragement, Critical Care could go from being a mediocre nurse’s memoir to being a work of incredible power.  Brown works with oncology patients, and, from what she has written here, she has had many powerful experiences.  She just needs to be able to focus on creating tight narratives that can stand on their own, without the explanation of what should be gleaned from the story she feels compelled to include.

Rating:  3/5.

The Dogs of Rome by Conor Fitzgerald

When I first got this book, I thought it was going to be a story about organized crime in Rome.  And it is.  I thought it was going to be about murder.  And it is.  I thought it was going to be about how the police struggle with corruption from within and powerful forces from without making investigations more difficult.  And it is.  It’s all those things, but it also goes beyond those things in surprising and delightful ways.

The first book in what appears to be a planned series about the investigations of its protagonist, Commissario Alec Blume, The Dogs of Rome is also an impressive debut into fiction by the author, Conor Fitzgerald.  I’ll be honest — I didn’t expect to enjoy it a whole lot; new author, a genre I’m not well-read in, takes place in a country that I don’t have an inordinate amount of interest in.  It had a lot of marks against it.

Then I read the first chapter.  Oh, my God, the first chapter.  Fitzgerald puts his technical skill to amazing work here; the words describe a fairly pivotal event with such realism that I was left without breath for a couple of seconds by the time I finished reading it.  It was superbly written, and, if I could, I would pay him to write a book full of little vignettes just like this first section.

The rest of the book does not disappoint.  It doesn’t quite come to the level of the opening, but it’s finely crafted.  We follow Blume through the investigation of one murder, which turns into two murders, which turns into … well, you get the idea.  Fitzgerald brings the reader into the world of Roman law enforcement, which means that he also has to bring us into Italian politics, organized crime, and international diplomacy.  It’s interesting to watch Blume, an American, try to both navigate the subtleties of communication that Italians employ while also staying true to his straightforward, blunt style.

Rome in this book provides us with a series of crimes that brings us into contact with a wide variety of people:  a national representative, the leader of an organized crime ring, a shifty geek, corrupt law enforcement workers, an American legat working for the FBI, and a man running a dog-fighting ring.  I love the variation Fitzgerald is able to give the characters; they feel both firmly settled in established character types, yet fresh and innovative enough to cause the story to rise above the average thriller.

A couple of small things were a bit distracting to me.  The first was Fitzgerald’s rush to introduce the reader to the entire cast of law enforcement characters within the book.  Many were presented before they actually made a personal appearance.  This caused me to lose track of who was who, since I had too many names to keep track of.  It got straightened out fairly quickly, but was something that could have been easily avoided.

The other problem is truly minor:  some of Fitzgerald’s information about World of Warcraft was factually incorrect.  Yes, I’m a dork.  I know it won’t bother most people, who are not dorks.  But the top level in WoW currently is eighty, not sixty.  It very well may have been sixty when he started writing the book; that was the top level for a while.  Not now, though, and that’s where Fitzgerald or a fact-checker could have easily have won points with the dork faction for getting the technical aspects of their game right, but failed to do so.

Overall, I’d say that The Dogs of Rome is far from being a dog itself.  It is a sharp tale, told in a direct manner, with good characters, an exciting plot, and enough going on to keep the reader engaged until the end.

Rating:  4/5.

The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander

No matter how I think I have grown up, some books manage to put me back in the head of the little girl I once was.  The Black Cauldron is one of those books; it’s a pity I didn’t manage to read it when I was young.

I was, unfortunately, one of the kids who only knew about The Black Cauldron through the Disney movie adapted from The Chronicles of Prydain series.  I absolutely loved that movie.  Now, with two of the five sequenced books under my belt, I see how poorly that movie treated such rich material.

We pick up with Taran and the crew after they have resettled in Caer Dallben and are living normal lives once again.  In the first couple of pages, the entire population of the estate has been agitated into participating in a dangerous venture: stealing and destroying the Black Cauldron.

Taran, eager once again for adventure, readily agrees to go along.  Unfortunately, he is paired with unpleasant Prince Ellidyr, who frequently and unceasingly maligns him and his other companions, goading Taran into angrily confronting him on a regular basis.  He appears to have no checks on his behavior, nor remorse for his mistakes.  Ellidyr eventually runs off to find honor on his own, leading to the scattering of the group when they are left without someone on watch one night, only to return to cause further harm later.

The wonder of Lloyd Alexander’s second book about Prydain is that it provides nice lessons for children around the age of Taran without seeming to preach about them.  He writes on how to treat those who treat us badly, on what honor truly is and what your word means, on how to think on the greater good while ignoring your own wishes.  These are valuable lessons, and they’re presented in a remarkably approachable way.  Even I, ostensibly an adult, have a wish to act in a more honorable and admirable fashion after reading one of his books.

Alexander provides us with a hero who is a work in progress, which I think most of us can relate to.  He has big-name warriors to look up to, villains to escape from, odd characters to negotiate with, and companions who are as imperfectly charming.  He learns throughout his story, becoming less and less foolish and more admirable.  This is probably the most valuable lesson Taran has to offer:  no matter who you are, if you learn from your experiences, you also learn to be a better person.

Rating:  5/5.

Ava’s Man by Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg, the author of All Over but the Shoutin’, says in the introduction to this book that people would come up to him and tell him that they felt cheated out of the story of his grandfather, Charlie Bundrum.  They wanted to get to know him and learn what he was like.  Bragg decided to give to us this book, Ava’s Man, to repay the debt.  I’m glad he did.

Without ever having met his grandfather, Bragg writes about him and his surrounding family with an ease that felt lacking to me in his first book.  He’s an incredibly descriptive and evocative writer.  It’s a joy to read about the world of the Deep South from the twenties to the fifties, about the back woods, about running stills and raising children and moving to find work, about both hard times and three-egg days.  It’s a pleasant read.  I’m not sure if you can get a full understanding of Bragg’s mother’s family without having read his first book, but it’s worth the try because Charlie is such a warm man, and Bragg shows that light in such a grand way.

Bragg still has the issue of sometimes using his remarkable talent for writing to take on a persona (most likely genuine) that is at turns journalist-straight to rural-southern.  It shifts back and forth, and is at times jarring.  I appreciate the attempts to make his accounts of life in the first half of the twentieth century authentic, and to establish himself as an authority, as part of rural southern culture, but I think he has to pick one voice or the other.  Either make the rest of the tone fit calling liquor “likker” and your mother “momma,” or write in a concise and tight voice that doesn’t use the colloquialisms.

My only other issue with this book is Bragg’s occasional over-sentimentalization of his mother’s family.  Take, for example, his account of his great-grandmother Mattie’s gravestone:

In the spring of 1994, a tornado, the storm of the century, tore across the mountain and dropped onto the Mount Gilead cemetery, knocking some of the headstones over and pulling others from the ground.  Mattie’s headstone was untouched.

Why, precisely, is it so interesting that her gravestone was left standing?  It apparently wasn’t the only one to survive, since he doesn’t state that; Bragg is consistent and would have done so if it did, since it makes a better story.  He apparently feels it makes some comment on her character, but feels forced and underwhelming to me.  He also takes some potshots at the larger American society, never saying outright but implying that those in the rural South were (and are) superior, more worthy of empathy, and more poorly treated.  This feels wrong and is what turns me off of his books; just because they’re your people doesn’t mean that they’re better people.

Overall, though, Ava’s Man feels smoother and less bitter than All Over but the Shoutin’.  I suspect this is because Bragg is separate from his subject, to a certain extent — he is no longer writing about himself and his struggles to fit with both his mother’s world and that of contemporary America.  He is writing about someone whom he loves, yet never met.  He had to do research, discover and explore the events of his grandfather’s life, talk to relatives and friends.  He had to get it right, for them, for his readers, and for himself, and getting it right meant capturing Charlie’s essence.  That essence is lighter than Bragg’s own, and he was mostly successful.

Rating: 4/5.