New Bookshelves for Departed Writers

This weekend I took the long drive into the nearest town that has more stores than our single Walmart. Five furniture stores later, I landed in the overpriced Pottery Barn and finally found what I needed: a pre-assembled half-height bookshelf. (I am deathly sick of assembling bookshelves myself - the last shelf lay in my living room half-finished for about a month.)

I immediately filled the bookshelf with the last box of books rescued from my parents' basement. I have great satisfaction in having a copy of Pat Conroy's Beach Music waiting for me out in the open now.

Pat Conroy died this week at the age of 70. Harper Lee and Umberto Eco died in February this year. Last year we lost Oliver Sacks, Jackie Collins, and Ann Rule.

Each author left behind a unique literary legacy, and they all meant something to me personally, too. Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery set in a library labyrinth, led me to Jorges Luis Borges, one of my favorite authors.

I once bought a paperback copy of Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, but as at the time I lived in Seattle and was attending the University of Washington, I immediately chickened out and gave it away. Her books are read to pieces in my library, but I lack the necessary courage to pick them up at this point. Someday! (Maybe.)

I read To Kill a Mockingbird as a teenager, and feel it is overdue for a re-read. I don't plan on reading the controversial Go Set a Watchman anytime soon.

Oliver Sacks' compassionate accounts of treating patients with neurological disorders, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, made me see medicine and mental illness in a new way. His TED Talk on hallucinations is a great introduction to his work, given near the end of his life.

Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides amazed me by being a literary story that was also a page-turner - an incredibly rare combination.

Jackie Collins' American Star kept me well-entertained, and is the perfect level of fluff, which in my book is praise. It is no simple thing to write an effortlessly entertaining book. Many try, few succeed.

Rest in peace, you wonderful authors. I will cherish your works.

The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this elegant blend of history and science, a practicing oncologist reveals the hidden history of cancer: a story riddled with painstaking research, leaps of insight, and the seemingly endless instances of human suffering and endurance.

Cancer once lurked quietly behind common plagues like smallpox, cholera, influenza, et cetera - until the 20th century, when longer life spans and healthier human beings revealed the seemingly inescapable disease that had no effective treatment. Starting with the story of one of his own adult leukemia patients, Mukherjee tracks the brief appearances of cancer throughout the centuries, then narrows his focus on the doctors who began the modern fight by first seeking treatments, and then slowly moved to searching for the causes of this imperial affliction.

The history of cancer in America is one of movements in both scientific understanding and medical activism, a story of the unintended consequences of attempting to manipulate complex systems. As Mukherjee guides us through the theories about cancer (from Galen's four humors to carcinogens, to viruses, and finally to genetics), he uncovers the incredible difficulties that beset scientific advancement, where judgment can be easily clouded by desperate hopes, ambitions, prejudices, misconceptions, and outright lies.

Mukherjee covers an incredible amount of ground in this microhistory, but rarely leaves the importance of the all too-human doctors and patients behind. This book is a masterpiece of writing and research, and in 2011 received a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize.

For further reading, there are few science history books as impressive as this one; but Oliver Sacks is a science writer and neurologist who always treats the fascinating case histories he writes about with compassionate insight. His book Awakenings tells the story of people stricken during a sleeping sickness epidemic who were briefly awakened decades later, like real-life Rip Van Winkles. Mukherjee often refers to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, which is both an allegory of the Soviet state and a depiction of people suffering terminal illness.

On a shallower note, it strikes me as somehow unfair that Dr. Mukherjee should be such a gifted writer and oncologist - and have hair this good:

Author Siddhartha Mukherjee

Am I right?

This is an incredibly moving video about the power of music, featuring one of my favorite science writers, Oliver Sacks. Watch it with a hanky handy. You'll need it.


Discovered via TYWKIWDBI.