Being Mortal by Atul Gawnde

This guy touches a sensitive spot when writing about our generation, his parent’s generation; sometimes our parent’s generation

It can be a depressing book!  This is “stuff” we don’t want to talk about.  But there’s nothing here that my family didn’t go through with our Mother, even Dickie, our father.  No new news; but a different perspective, maybe a slightly more positive one. 

He holds out a bit of hope for those of us who are: smart, committed to healthy living; and willing to follow Doctor’s orders – to the end.   He acknowledges that the real fear is of an ugly, painful death, not death itself.  After 80, death is a foregone conclusion.  The question is: “Can it be a peaceful passing” at home with hospice friends and family?  Or will it be a stressful event, in a hospital or “rest home”, with strangers administering drugs and injections, hoping to receive a gold star for keeping your body alive for another 24-hours?

The author gives his recommendations for end of life scenarios.  He cites many case histories, selected to exemplify his points.  But there is no denying that “care homes” are not the solution.  Hospitals are not the solution.  Even the “old school” grand-kids taking care of their elders, are no longer the solution.  The world has moved on beyond that solution, pleasing as it was for the elders.

I’m only half thru – it’s a short “message” book; an easy read; it’s worth a few days’ time.

I’ll add more comments when I finish.

 

Sparta by Roxana Robinson

Wow! This author has taken on a huge and risky task: writing a fictional memoir, putting herself in the head of a Marine officer, a returning Iraq war vet

O.K.

Does she get into his head?

This is what it’s all about.

No.!  I don’t think so.  And she, Roxana the author, has to, or this isn’t really a “novel” at all; maybe only an overdone weekly supplement article.

It is suspension of disbelief that fiction is all about.  It’s the creation of a writer’s mind.  If it’s not, it might be great research, a journalistic success and a wonderful story for a monthly or an in-depth TV study, but it’s not a fictional novel.

Roxana tries too hard, and paints a passable picture of Conrad’s problems from the Mom’s point of view; the sister’s point of view; even the girl-friend’s point of view.

And all for naught.  It might have been a more valiant offering if there had been a developed dad’s point of view and/or the brother’s point of view, mysteriously missing until the end, where an entire life shifts after 380 pages, right on the very last page.  If she’d balanced the story with male characters, then it might have become more of a dramatic novel, but I’m thinking, that would have been too much for Roxana to handle.

This was clearly a single message story – PTSD is real and it sucks.

So again, the author doesn’t suspend my disbelief.  As I read the thoughts of Marine Lieutenant Conrad Farrell, I didn’t believe his character.  It’s not that I question the facts: the episodic fears; the rage, the psychedelic time & space shifting of the modern world.

The author took all these well-researched episodic, symptomatic behaviors and repeated them, in scenes, again and again.  It became word filler for the weary reader – we got the point in the first few pages.  There was nothing new to offer here – the generic PTSD story has been well-documented and extensively written about.  That’s not to say that the public ever tires of war stories – they’re still making movies about WW-II.

The need for psychiatric care is obvious to all around, but missed by everyone with whom he comes into contact.  Wouldn’t somebody along his year-long pathway give him a handful of Prozac?  If I mention the words: “nervous”, “anxious”, when I’m at Kaiser; there’s a prescription in my hand without me even asking.

 

In The Fall by Jeffrey Lent

My first notes about “In The Fall” after a hundred pages of this lengthy novel -- I love it.  The plot line is well-paced.  The characters are wonderfully portrayed.  It is already a gripping story that I don’t want to put down.  The union between the two central characters is inexplicable; but then many unions are inexplicable --  most of mine were.

The opening story is a post-Civil War return to Vermont by a farmer and his new bride, a black woman from the South.  It’s a man’s story, written by a man.  It’s an epic story of a Vermont farmer’s life, colored by his choice of bride.  A Negroid woman in Vermont was/is as strange as a blond in Mexico City, and as dangerous.

Now halfway into it – I love the writing even more, but it is slow going, 25 pages a day.  It’s far more than an epic return from the Civil War.  It’s a monumental family saga, at least through turn-of-the-century Americana.  Maybe it’s really more a cultural history, for the stories are probably manifold, not unique.  Prohibition – a multi-level, temporal sin, black & white; scotch and water.

The author, Lent, takes the reader deeply into his characters.  We shift from Norman, the returning Civil War vet, to Jamie, his son, without hesitation.  Amazingly, on the surface of things, we forget Leah, Norman’s colored wife, by mid-novel.  Let me clarify that the author dispenses with Norman and Leah as characters, but not as progenitors.  All the new characters are predictably based on what Leah and Norman taught their children.

The  family seems to have a yo-yo gene; a tendency to move away – a tendency to return.  Personalities and issues deeply ingrained, slowly filling the arc of generations, but inevitably leading back to the original traumatic issues (Civil War) and people (African-Americans).

Foster, Jamie’s son, and Norman’s grandson; 1/16^th or less negro, at this point doesn’t even acknowledge the question about “passing”.  

I’m now at the end.  This has been a great book; many mysteries resolved for the short term.  It was an interesting take on the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War.  Also interesting were the various depictions of the stresses of bi-racial marriages. At a third level, this was about how dominant the father-to-son inheritance of lore and character is within families. Does this persist? Are grudges carried forward?  Is male honor rewarded for retribution?

Were these all crimes?

Were we all complicit in these crimes?

Can/(How do) we ameliorate these crimes?

Is this the same question Germans ask themselves about the Holocaust?

The HEAD Game by Philip Wood

This is a non-fiction book about critical thinking: how to assess incoming information and other data.  It’s an unusual way of looking at data analysis. 

It caused me an epiphany.  That’s happened before where I re-digested facts and came up with new conclusions.

In this case Mudd is espousing Right to Left thinking rather than is common in most European cultures.  He’s saying: think of the question before you start analyzing the data.

Reading the first few chapters took me back to post-college, pre-Army days, I was getting drafted: what could I get out of the deal?  I would enlist, if I could get the Monterey Language School.

Who even knew what the Language School was? Or did?  I didn’t think very deeply.  It was what I knew, languages, grammars, logic.

The NSA knew.  What sort of idiot would enlist, just to get a year of Russian or Japanese? -duh- Our NSA[1] kind of guy.!  They gave me a languages test with made-up languages; one of them read right to left.  I had to define the grammars and structure in order to answer the questions.  It was a tough test; the kind that I liked.  I was sure I had done really well.  Now I realize it was a code-breaking test.  But when basic was over, my CO said they were not going to send me to Monterey, my language skills were already good enough.  I just now saw the connection; there’s no language test for the Monterey Language School.  I’d said no to the NSA, so they just sent me to Germany.

The decision-process analysis proposed by author Mudd is valuable and worth considering.  I am using it to reconsider my approach to “How do we fund the Library System in Sonoma County?” and also to the question, “How do we reduce summer Latino drownings in the Russian River?”

 

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[1] In our third week of the two-month boot camp, I was called aside from early morning formation.  I was given a building location and told to report there at 9 am.  You don't ask questions in the Army, and whenever you get out of a days' training, it is a pleasant relief, so I went along happily.  When I got to the location there was another trainee there already, Bob Rivera was in "A" company and I was in "C."  We discussed why we were there but neither of us understood what it was all about.  When he had knocked on the door a few minutes earlier, he told me, someone had poked his head out and said to wait a few minutes outside.

At 9 am sharp, a man in civilian clothes opened the door and asked us to come in.  The room was like a swank apartment, split-level with a sort of mezzanine above and to the side of us.  The main room had twenty foot ceilings and was spacious, just a few pieces of furniture, but what was there was plush.  "Would you like a drink?" he began.  "No thank you, Sir," came our reply, almost in unison.  "Sit down and relax," he said. "I've got some questions to ask you and maybe a proposition, but you're free to leave at any time you wish."  We were puzzled, not understanding what this was about.

He probed our backgrounds, whatever had been written down so far in our records.  He asked for more detail about legal or criminal trouble we might have been in at any time in our lives.  Hackles went up, this was a sensitive area for me.  When I was a kid of 13, I had been to court on a shop-lifting charge from a stamp dealer I used to buy from on Saturday mornings.  I'd also stolen some stuff while in college that no one had ever caught me at, but everyone I knew had knowledge of these offenses. 

He explained that he worked for an especially sensitive area in the military and that they lived a pleasant life, as we could see.  But to get into this group, it was required to have the FBI totally scour our past and we would have to write down everything that might possibly come up in a thorough background check.  He said they would talk to every one of our teachers and friends going back to Kindergarten.  Worse than what we might have done would be to lie about it and not write it down in advance.  He praised our educational backgrounds and our Army test scores so far.  This all took about two hours.  I opted to say no and left the building, never to hear from him again.  Bob, however, stayed and apparently filled out all the paperwork.

In the seventh week of training, I was over in "A" company's barracks visiting a buddy and I asked where I could look up Bob Rivera.  "Ooh, the MPs hauled him away last week!" came the answer.  "Apparently, he was wanted in Fresno on a car theft charge," my buddy continued.  "He used an alias when he enlisted, I don't know how the Army found out."  I didn't say anything.  I had figured out by this time that my friendly chat had been with the NSA.

Murder on the Champ De Mars by Cara Black

This is another in a long series of Aimée Leduc mysteries.  My sister says it’s too squishy with all the French words.  Maybe she’s just too Ohioan or Nebraskan: remember Frog-Fries? 

I got used to, and like, the designer names, and the common argot phrases.  I bonded with Louise Penny’s French-Canadian Inspector Gamache, who was recommended to me, by my sister – go figure.

Paris is my favorite city, but it’s all through memory and reading now, thus mellowing with age like a good Chambertin, and enjoyable in sips.

O.K., my sister must have stuck it out farther than I did.  The first few books were cute with their mentions of designer shoes and bags and coats, and I liked that, superficial as I am.  But this is too much.!  Cara Black, the author, is dumping product placement ads 2/3 to a page.  As an author, she’s prostituting herself and reflecting badly on her trade, which supposedly is writing murder mysteries, not whoring.

After 100 of 300 pages, I am returning this book to the Library and I do not recommend it to anyone.  The plot is thin, character development is lacking.  The author appears to be just grinding out “another one” for maximum $$$ payback.

the Buried Gsant by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is an interesting middle-ages adventure story somewhere between The Canterbury Tales and Arthurian legend; and it’s written by the man who brought us, “The Remains of the Day”, Kazuo Ishiguro.  In some ways, it’s irritatingly slow-paced; then again, I’m continuing to move through, “The Elephant’s Journey”, so I’m already committed to Cervantes-like travel stories.

In this story, an elderly couple embarks on a journey to visit their son.  Along the way they acquire traveling companions, each with their own mission, but all seeing the advantage of banding together.

As their journey proceeds through small village and monastery, they seem to remember more and more of their past lives: a fog is lifted and they surmise that their forgetfulness is the work of a magical spell – the question is?  black or white magic?

I am half way through this book (160/317), but can see the outcome being either a traditional battle with Merlin, and/or between Merlin and Morgana.  I’m sure that in the end, Peace will rule in the land, and that good will continue in the realm.

However, I have to turn the book in now, -- 3 weeks --.