What BOOK are you reading right now?

(Rereading some of the later pages of this thread)

I so agree with that, djjd.

I'm not sure yet if I ever responded to your comments on Alice Munro reading, but she's one of my favorite short story writers. Of which I have quite a few.

Does anyone have any good ideas for a short story collection that's Halloween appropriate?

Between the two of you, it goes on the wish list.

Verghese, I just read about him yesterday. Saved the link on my desktop.

http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2010summer/article3a.html

I think his views on this are very important.

Only by reviews.

As you probably read on this thread, I read the book in a push pull of irritation and pleasure, and called it a keeper.

NO! I hate halloween...
(years of orange cupcakes on or near my birthday as a child, not to mention wearing a sheet like a ghost and, in the cold, knocking on a victorian house door, carrying a paper bag and wearing a scratchy mask..)

Interesting. Maybe that angst is at the heart of my detestation for stuff about ghosts and vampires.

Osso, I have a reverential view toward this guy (Vergese) for personal reasons. This new book is unputdownable -- I read it until the wee hours last night -- but that is not the reverential bit.

I read a piece by this guy in 1978-ish, in a mag in a doc's office, about rabies and how that disease plays out when untreated. It chilled me to the core, and the article came to mind about 15 years ago, after I had read his remarkable book "My Own Country" about his experiences as a new physician in the US while he was working in a TN clinic for AIDs patients. After I read that book, I recalled the earlier magazine piece years before and became curious...did a web search and found nothing...Googled his name and found he was at a Texas university doing research.

I wrote him a letter (a real letter..we still did them then) and he wrote back, a personal letter and sent copies of the magazine article and said how pleased he was to hear from me, etc. This guy was bigtime by then but he wrote me a letter.

If you read the piece that Osso has linked -- NYT did a thing on him recently too -- and you are awestruck by his intelligence and perception. The hands-on stuff and his connection with people and patients.

That's how I got to the Stanford site.

I have my own memories. I ran a lab (well, it was me and me doing this, with a director a long way away, but also there by a phone call) for clinical immunology, and that lab was down the hall from where the patient clinic was. I have a strong visual and auditory memory of one of the residents getting a patient to try hard to walk down the hall.

I remember being appalled.
I understand more now.

Osso, Halloween is my favorite holiday (aside from Thanksgiving) because it is free-form. You can do or be whatever you want at Hallowe'en. I drove into the local town (at that time, Chapel Hill) early in the evening of 31 Oct some years ago and passed a bicyclist in full regalia of a monster...mask, leg stuff...and the rider turned to look at me with a rictus of horror/humour. I smiled for hours and thought how Hallowe'eny it was. You can be what you want that night when ghosts walk.

Ok, Kara mia, it's all over. We differ about halloween!

About your lab and clinic memories. How very interesting. This is totally where this man is. I'd like to meet him some day. You would like Cutting for Stone. There is lots of clinical detail -- fascinating to me but might cause some yawns in others -- and I'm only 200 pages into 650. Back to report...

I'm interested.

You possibly remember that I was a kid who wanted to be an md - when women in the profession were few. That was likely related to my father having to leave med school in the mid twenties to take care of his mother, while the elder brother finished law school, later removing himself from the Bar, cough. Who knows about my motives, but I became interested in the history of medicine at an early age.

At school, I was one of, say, three, women in the premed classes.

Things changed shortly thereafter.

Say it isn't so

Ah, yes. The best laid plans....

My interest in medicine dates from reading a book called The Cry and The Covenant, by Morton Thompson, about Ignaz Semmelweis, an Austrian-Hungarian physician who studied puerpural fever and antisepsis.

I read it shortly after it was published -- my parents bought it and I took it off their bookshelf and read it without asking. They would have not wanted their tender-aged teen daughter to read such a frank book...I think I was 16 or 17, which was a lot younger then than it is now.

I just started to read String Theory For Dummies. Back when I finished my postgraduate work in physics, string theory wasn't yet considered a suitable topic for dummies. In fact, I remember one biophysics professor, and a fairly intelligent one at that, refuse to even bother with it: "Why would I? It will do nothing for me but make my head spin." I'm relieved that meanwhile, the matter has been clarified down to the dummy level, and I'm looking forward to understanding it myself, soon.

I have a admit your current choice leaves me baffled.

Really?

Anyway, today I read an old issue of the Economist. It reviewed a book that seems kind of related to your dissertation: The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy. Might this be something for you? If your eyes are giving you trouble these days, Amazon also offers an unabridged Audible audio book.

yes, that's right up my alley. thanks.