Review: The Body: A Guide for Occupants

The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This really was a wild book - a buffet of crazy facts about our bodies and it was was not for one small moment dull or pedantic. I took my time with it and read a few pages every night. So it has been with me for months and I'll miss it, I really will. Of course, reading Bill Bryson is like listening to a great conversationalist. His delivery is so darn affable.

Some of my very favorite take-aways:

"Almost three-quarters of the forty million antibiotic prescriptions written each year in the United States are for conditions that cannot be cured with antibiotics."

"The fact is that odors and flavors are created entirely inside our heads"

“Race is one millimeter deep. Intrepidly attending the dissection of a corpse", Bryson quotes the surgeon who pulled back a minute layer of skin and said: “That’s all that race is – a sliver of epidermis.”

“Altogether, 80 percent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Hormones are the presumed culprit, but how exactly female hormones trip up the immune system when male hormones don’t is not at all clear.”

“Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.”

“Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them.”

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Review: Legends of the Fall

Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is actually three separate stories in one book. The first Revenge was by far the best, but the second two rocked as well!

This book is my "discovery" of Jim Harrison, a prolific writer and poet. The years ahead will be filled with his works because this man doesn't just offer beautiful, impactful sentences. It becomes clear through his words and reflections that he was one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

"No one has figured out how accidental is the marriage of blasphemy and fate.

He looked around the clearing in recognition that he was lost but didn’t mind because he knew he had never been found.

Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits."

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Review: A Gazelle Ate My Homework: A Journey from Ivory Coast to America, from African to Black, and from Undocumented to Doctor

A Gazelle Ate My Homework: A Journey from Ivory Coast to America, from African to Black, and from Undocumented to Doctor by Habib Fanny
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a charming story of a young man from Ivory Coast, Africa who came to America with little but the clothes on his back.

Escaping the civil unrest of his homeland, Habib struggled in earnest against poverty and threat of deportation, yet he stayed on course and applied himself to the task of surviving very difficult circumstances whilethriving academically.

The colorful stories of his life in Africa and in the USA are funny and are told in an authentic voice - humble and honest. The stories simply say ... hey, this is who I am. He talks about his flaws and his missteps. He talks about his trepidations. His life was storm-tossed and his circumstances chronically precarious, but he never brags about his grit and perseverance in the face of this. The reader can hear his determination to prevail in each sentence, but he does not stop to tell his reader how extraordinary this is. He doesn't think he is anything special. His readers will think otherwise.

He discusses with great clarity and courage the alienation he felt when he arrived in the USA. He openly describes the difference between his African heritage, culture, and blackness and the culture of blackness in the USA. He explains the difference between being an African in America vs. an African American. This was very instructive and an important reminder to those who move too quickly to compartmentalize groups of people.

More than once as I read his book, I thought of the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley...especially the last four lines:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

I hope I cross paths with Dr. Fanny one day. He sounds like a person who is worth knowing.




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Review: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book whose pages overflow with wisdom on how to view death - that insistent, inevitable, and, so far, undefeated foe.

Gawande goes where few can follow without great discomfort, without experiencing a malaise in morale. Well, it is still a very worthy read. Death is an experience that will come to each of us. It seems sensible to consider what medicine can do, what medicine should do, what medicine cannot do, and what we will actually want done when the time comes.

He details the history of how countries and civilizations deal with the very old, the sick, and the infirm - from the almshouse to hospitals, to nursing homes and assisted living. He offers the reader abundant examples of the many people he has known; people he has followed into their old age and their diminishment. This is very effective, as the reader gets to know these charming, feisty individuals. We follow them, their families, their treatments, their time in assisted living facilities and their eventual deaths. The role of medicine in this process is disturbingly uncertain and ineffectual.

At one point he talks about the fact that older people are generally more satisfied with life - the research reveals that they are not (as a rule) unhappy. It's almost as if living life is a skill and the longer you live the better you get at this skill. However, when it comes to death, maybe because it is something we only experience once, most of us aren't very skilled at it. His books pushes the reader to rectify this by getting more familiar with the complexities of letting go. Most of us will live long enough to become infirm in a dozen different ways. Must we all wait until it happens to think through it? Wouldn't it be better to continue to be the author of our lives until the very end, rather than allow ourselves to be infantilized by medicine and institutions?

Gawande believes that modern culture has made it very difficult to talk about death. He points out that culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations. Those habits and expectations have resulted in a singular focus on safety and institutional routines in care facilities at the cost of the inhabitants being able to live a good life ... a life worth living.

This is a profoundly important book that asks all of the right questions about why we should focus on a good life, right up to the end.

“The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.”

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