sttimsbbb

Awakenings, Oliver Sacks

Once when I was working in the garden, a bee plummeted out of the blue and dove into the heart of a hollyhock and stayed in there a long time, maintaining a little motion and humming, gorging. Eventually, he crawled out, sat a spell, and lifted off heavily. He literally couldn’t fly straight. After a couple of lazy loops and bemused U-turns he disappeared over the hedge.

That’s a fair description of what can happen to readers of Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings, a book about the catatonic, post-encephalitic patients Dr. Sacks treated at Mt. Carmel hospital when he went there as a young neurologist in 1966. We readers dive in because both author and book are so widely acclaimed (ten other well-received books and countless articles and lectures from Sacks; a movie and various stage plays from the book.)

Like the bee, we find lots to feed on: several prefaces and forewords as the book has gone through different editions. A twenty-five-page prologue. And then the heart: The compelling stories of twenty patients who awoke from their long sleep (brought on by encephalitis) after being administered L-Dopa (one of the very early psychotropic meds). In this section, there are surely as many lines of footnotes as of body. And they aren’t necessarily boring footnotes that the reader wants to skip.

Then there is a forty-page riff, in a section called Perspectives, on how illness fits into Western culture, history, philosophy, and literature. And a thirty-five-page epilogue to the 1982 edition and a brief postscript to the 1990 edition. Plus eighty pages of appendices (an interesting series of essays/papers that has an “Oh, and everything else interesting on the subject . . .” feel to it). Followed by a glossary (useful for medical terms), a bibliography, and an index.

In the middle of the book is an inset of haunting photographs of Mt. Carmel patients caught in catatonic sleep and their poignant awakenings. There are also clips from the media: Sleepy Sickness Spreading: Fatal Cases: Hunt for Elusive Germ: 20,000 Cases Last Year: Epidemic Worst In Britain and Italy: Record Death Toll.

That’s why the reader comes out sated. A little over-fed. Stunned. Sacks was (he died this year) a brilliant neurologist and a deeply compassionate physician. He had the imagination and audacity to experiment with new chemistry and awaken catatonic patients; he had the sorrow of watching them eventually regress and suffer and die.

Perhaps one reason Sacks has been so embraced as a person, physician, and writer is that he felt the humanity of illness. In the section called Perspectives, he writes “Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s character: character is monadic or microcosmic, worlds within worlds within worlds, worlds which express worlds. The disease-the man-the world go together and cannot be considered separately as things-in-themselves.”

In our current specialized, assembly line, code-for-payment medical industrial complex, who can help but feel nostalgia for that humanity?

— Sharelle Moranville

A Thief of Time, by Tony Hillerman

Tony Hillerman creates a sense of place so strong and compelling you forget this is a mystery and just get caught up in the land, its people, and its history. More mystical than mystery, A Thief of Time is named for the criminals who steal Native American artifacts—in this case, Anasazi and Navajo pots—and sell them for exorbitant amounts. Those people, according to Navajo culture, are stealing their ancestors’ history.

In the book, an anthropologist who has found a treasure trove of artifacts disappears, and the Navajo Tribal Police are charged with finding her. It’s a compelling story, largely because of the cast of full-bodied characters, including two tribal policemen, several anthropologists, a random assortment of petty thieves, an influential Mormon leader with a sad secret, a New York museum curator, and a wealthy Manhattan pot collector.

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn leads the search; this theoretically is one of his last cases, having given his notice of resignation after his beloved wife Emma died. The young Jim Chee joins him, trying to balance his police work with his unsuccessful attempts to become a Navajo shaman. Both are beautifully crafted characters whose frustration with one another is matched with a common love for their religion and traditions.

As well-woven as a Navajo rug, the story centers on the remarkable Chaco Canyon and the surrounding area of New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. It won the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel (1989) and was a nominee for the Anthony Award for Best Novel (1989) and the Edgar Award for Best Novel (1989).

It’s the eighth of 18 books Hillerman created featuring Leaphorn and Chee. His daughter Anne completed an additional two. PBS produced TV movies of three of them—A Thief of Time, Skinwalkers, and Coyote Flats—that are available through PBS or on Netflix.

—Pat Prijatel

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson

Several years ago, my best friend, who grew up in Des Moines in the 1950’s, gave me a copy of Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I enjoyed it so much that I subsequently read and enjoyed virtually all of his numerous books. So, when the opportunity recently arose to suggest it to Books, Brews, and Banter, I heartily recommended it, although I rarely read books twice.

“I can’t imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than in Iowa and the 50s,\” Bryson wrote in the first chapter, and then set out to corroborate it. He and his friends found endless adventures on the streets of Des Moines at a time when all kids hung outside pretty much all day during the summers, only returning home for dinner.

In this hilarious memoir, Bryson captures the time and place of his boyhood in Des Moines in the 50s and 60s, reminding us of a happy time when cars, household appliances, and even nuclear weapons grew larger and more abundant each year, while DDT, cigarettes, and atomic fallout were considered harmless or even good for you. He writes about his loving but eccentric family, including warm portraits of his father, a gifted but often absent sportswriter for the Des Moines Register, and his absentminded mother, who was the home furnishing editor also for the Register.

His early childhood recollections include the first televisions, comic books, toys (electric football and erector sets), his mother’s bland cooking, the threat of the Atomic Bomb, movie matinees, fears of polio, TV dinners, the Iowa State Fair, and visits to Grandpa’s farm. His alter ego, The Thunderbolt Kid, born of his love for comic book super heroes and his need to vaporize awful evildoers, allowed him to see under women’s clothing, if only in his imagination. When adolescence took over, Bryson’s adventures were replaced with riskier hobbies of smoking, drinking, forging IDs, and his growing fascination with sex that included the discovery of Dad’s secret stash of girlie magazines, his attempts at gaining access to the notorious “strippers tent” at the State Fair, and his unfilled desire to see Mary O’Leary naked.

Bryson is a master of the detail. He mined magazines and newspapers of the period with an eye for the tragic, the revealing and the just plain odd, including the story of the barmaid charged with obscenity for being able to carry two glasses of beer on her breasts, the black man sentenced to death for stealing $1.95, and parents climbing ladders outside polio wards to shout greeting to the children.

His book is so outlandish and improbably entertaining, you sometimes begin to doubt its veracity. For example, none of our book club members remember his contention that the Japanese sent balloons with bombs in them over the US during WWII, some going as far as Virginia.

Nonetheless, it’s a wondrous laugh-out-loud book, evoking both the unadulterated joys and everyday battles of childhood. A great fun-read, especially for Baby Boomers nostalgic for the good old days. Ken Johnson