Category: Non-Fiction Reviews

An Invisible Thread, by Laura Schroff

 

In this true story, Laura Schroff befriends a homeless boy, Maurice, and he gradually becomes central to her life. We asked whether we would have had the courage to act as Laura did. We acknowledged that we would have considered the “what if”s and “why”s and “oh no”s of bringing such a boy—and his family— into our lives. Schroff did it with only minimal hesitation and with a wholehearted welcome, and she faced a stunning learning curve she shares with the reader. 

Maurice lives within feet of Laura’s comfortable apartment in midtown Manhattan, but they might as well have been in different countries. Laura even has to teach Maurice how to blow his nose because he has never done it, and she ends up making him school lunches in a plain brown paper bag so he can fit in with the kids at school. 

Laura is honest about how her relationship with Maurice eventually foundered as she tried to build a life with a new husband, and her backstory helps explain why she might have taken the chances she did with Maurice and also defines her need to have a child of her own. 

The writing is a bit weak—Schroff wrote the book with friend and colleague Alex Tresniowski,  which may have reduced some of the immediacy and power of the memoir. It is an easy read, though.

—Pat Prijatel

 

Chameleon Days: An American Childhood in Ethiopia, by Tim Bascom

Tim Bascom’s memoir of his childhood in Ethiopia is fascinating and beautifully written. It begins when three-year-old Tim and his two brothers were uprooted from their Kansas home and taken to Ethiopia by their missionary parents. Because Tim’s father is a doctor, the family first lived near an established missionary hospital. There is much to see and explore in this new and strange world and Tim’s visual memories are clear and colorful.

But when Jonathon, the oldest of the brothers, is sent to a faraway boarding school, both Jonathon and Tim are saddened and frightened. Jonathon is just six and is not at all happy to go. Tim reluctantly follows him when he is seven. They see their family during summers and on very rare visits. It is a difficult challenge for the young boys to be so far from their parents and younger brother in a strange country and for such a long time. But the family’s strong and loving ties helped them through it. The boys came to understand their parents’ strong commitment to the people they came to help and work among.

Ti’s childhood memories are amazingly clear. He finds a chameleon in a poinsettia tree and is fascinated by the little reptile and its abilities to change its color to blend in with its environment. He watches the chameleon’s two large eyes focus simultaneously on two completely different directions— a perfect symbol for the complex demands of missionary children: One “eye” watching desperately for a way to fit into the strange culture and know and understand the Ethiopians while realizing they will never truly belong; the other “eye” never losing sight of the American life they left behind.

Tim’s recollections of his childhood and his surroundings in Ethiopia are narrated with delightful color and wonder. Tim helps us see his pet chameleon crawling cautiously along his finger, eyes swiveling in different directions; Tim’s hiding place and observatory high in an avocado tree; the view of his world from behind the large leaves of a hibiscus tree; the frightening cries of hyenas just outside his bedroom window; and the banquet he and his family attended for Emperor Haile Selassie. As time passes the country becomes full of political unrest and rising turbulence, putting the lives of the missionaries at risk and finally leading to Selassie’s overthrow and the rise to power of brutal Marxist-Leninist regime.

It’s time for the family to return to Kansas. They leave with disappointment and reluctance, but return periodically for brief stays.

Books, Brews and Banter was privileged to have Tim Bascom and his wife Cathleen, the former dean of the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul, come to discuss his book and answer our questions. It was both fun and enlightening to hear about his childhood in Ethiopia from the author himself.

—by Gail Stilwill

Note: Many of us are looking forward to reading Tim’s second book, Running to the Fire.

 

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande

 

In Being Mortal, Gawande tackles a significant challenge of his profession: how medicine can improve life, as well as the process of its ending. In other words, he asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end. 

Being Mortal is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on aging, death and dying.  Despite advances in medicine, he calls for a radical transformation in how we approach the end of life.  He states that nursing homes are preoccupied with safety, pinning patients into railed beds and wheelchairs;  hospitals isolating the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot; and doctors, committed to extending life, continuing to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

His early description of how the body decays with age is nothing if not sobering. From the news that an elderly person’s shrinking brain can actually be knocked around inside the skull to the way a tooth can determine a person’s age, he goes through a litany of descriptions of how the body goes through scary decaying changes.

He states that it is unfortunate that the number of doctors willing to become geriatricians is shrinking, primarily because the field is not as lucrative as most other specialties and because it provides so little instant satisfaction, and requires such work as a detailed, lengthy examination of callused old feet. Patients are usually deaf and forgetful, can’t see, have trouble understanding what the doctor is saying, have not one complaint but fifteen, have high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis. “There’s nothing glamorous about taking care of any of those things,\” he writes.  But, he contends that patients who receive good geriatric care stay happier and healthier, particularly those who can remain at home and aren’t forced into a nursing home.

At the end of the book, he states that, “The debate is about what mistakes we fear most – the mistake of prolonging suffering or the mistake of shortening valued life.” While posing that there are no perfect solutions, he asks that medicine commit itself to creating better options and making choices with the goal of a purposeful life in mind.

Aside from suggesting it be read by physicians, I also strongly believe it should be read by everyone over sixty, and well as their children who will like be involved in the decisions that need to be made toward the end of life. 

—Ken Johnson