Showing 1 - 10 of 664 annotations tagged with the keyword "Survival"

Demon Copperhead

Kingsolver, Barbara

Last Updated: Jan-24-2023
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

This novel recasts Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield for modern day as a literary take on the opioid addiction crisis in the U.S. during the 1990s and 2000s with apparent connections to Beth Macy’s nonfiction book, Dopesick, and the eight-part TV miniseries of the same name it spawned. The author, Barbara Kingsolver, assures potential readers that having read David Copperfield is not a prerequisite for comprehending and appreciating Demon Copperhead.   

Demon Copperfield, a name that evolved naturally enough in early childhood from his birth name, Damon Fields, was born into entrenched poverty in the heart of Appalachia, Lee County, Virginia. He tells his story starting from when he drops out of his drug-addicted mother’s womb onto the floor of a rented trailer, to when as a young adult, he makes a last-chance effort at breaking loose from the life-threatening clutches of Lee County. In between, his stepfather frequently beats him bloody, his mother dies from a drug overdose, he enters foster care, attends school off and on, and works assorted jobs, many of which involve illegal, unethical, and dangerous activities. All the while he is variously abused, starved, and exploited. 
 

Demon shares his plight with many others in the community, and though they help each other as best they can, nearly all of them become ensnared in the same traps—drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, hazardous occupations, unfinished education, familial disintegration, and societal abandonment. For Demon, these conditions and experiences obliterated any vision of a future free of entrapments, let alone one of prosperity and happiness. “Here, all we can ever be is everything we’ve been. I came from a junkie mom and foster care,” is how he assessed his prospects (p. 461). 
 

Amidst all this suffering and bleakness, an observant and caring teacher discovers Demon’s talent in graphic arts, and he gets a peek at a path to commercial success. He has to first fight off what he knows of “Lee County being a place where you keep on living the life you were assigned” (p. 460). His story turns to this fight and onto this path. 

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What She Left Behind

Wiseman, Ellen

Last Updated: Jan-03-2023
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Izzy is a teenager who has been in foster care for a decade since the age of 7 when her mother was imprisoned and judged insane for having killed her father. She struggles with a desire to cut herself. Her current foster parents, Harry and Peg, seem kindly and engage Izzy in their task to catalogue artifacts from the nearby state asylum that has recently closed. 

Izzy is given the journal of Clara, a patient who, at age 18 in 1929, was pregnant by her Italian lover, Bruno. She was committed to the asylum by her angry father.  Clara gave birth, but her baby girl was taken from her. She observed how the brutality of the hospital damaged those who did not belong there, eventually provoking the mental illness it purported to treat. With the help of a gravedigger, Bruno planned an escape, but their plan was uncovered, and Bruno died.

Izzy’s own story unfolds as she works her way through the journal, subjected to bullying and tormented by her anxieties. Peg kindly arranges to take Izzy to see her dying birth mother in prison, where she learns that the murder of her father was to prevent him from abusing young Izzy.  

Spoiler alert! Izzy learns from an elderly nurse that the asylum director took Clara’s baby for himself and that Clara is still alive. She reunites the mother and child, who is now a grown woman. Izzy joyfully learns that Peg and Harry will formally adopt her.

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Station Eleven

Mandel, Emily

Last Updated: Oct-27-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In the not-too-distant future, Arthur Leander, a famous actor, suddenly collapses and dies on a Toronto stage in the final act of King Lear.. That same night the deadly and highly contagious Georgian Flu reaches North America from Russia. Within days, civilization, as we know it, collapses: no electricity, no gasoline, no water, no travel, no Internet, no information, no medicine, and no escape. A handful of survivors hide in their separate lairs, until their resources are depleted and then they flee on foot, at first alone, stealing and foraging for food, trusting no one, and learning to kill. Surviving. The story takes place in Year 20 after the collapse with frequent visits to the past. 

Without realizing it, the protagonists are all connected to Arthur– his ex-wives, young son, best friend, a child actor, the paramedic who tried to resuscitate him at the theatre. Older people remember and mourn the “before time” and its marvels that are lost, perhaps forever. In oppressive heat, a troupe of musicians and actors, called the Traveling Symphony, moves from place-to-place around the Great Lakes, performing music and Shakespeare’s plays because “survival is insufficient.” Usually, they bring pleasure and diversion. But they must take care, as some villages are led by cult-like prophets, intent on control by theft, rape, and murder. Only at the end do they reach Severn City, where a fledging community has created a semblance of peace and respect in an abandoned airport with a museum devoted to all that is lost.

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Hurdy Gurdy

Wilson, Christopher

Last Updated: Oct-14-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Brother Diggery, formerly called Jack Fox, tells us that he was given to the monastic order of St Odo at the age of seven in 1341. For another seven years, he is raised in innocence within the strict rules of the community, serving the brother healer, learning herbal remedies, and playing the hurdy gurdy.  

As plague arrives in 1349, he is assigned to help care for the anticipated sick – and immediately falls ill. The brothers seal him inside his cell, where he suffers greatly, narrowly escaping death; however, when he recovers and forces himself out of confinement, he discovers that everyone else has died or fled. After filling a mass grave with the remains of his brothers, he sets out on a picaresque series of adventures, blithely unaware that he and his fleas spread illness wherever they go.  

Like a fourteenth-century Candide, Brother Diggery’s gullibility and curiosity lead him to discover the wonders of good food, sex, and marriage, the cruelty of lies, theft, and wrongful imprisonment, and the corruption of the church (p. 164). He closes his account in 1352, age 18, already twice widowed, but set for life as a lay physician and father of a young boy whom he plans to give to the monastery of St Odo when he reaches age seven.



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Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Autobiography

Summary:

All the [medical] world’s a stage! In elegant prose, with Felliniesque flights into whimsical metaphor, physician-historian-playwright Charles Hayter describes his encounters with cancer, as a doctor and as a son, and how the experience changed him as a person. 

Just as he finishes his residency training as a cancer specialist, his stoic physician father develops cancer. The story of that family illness is interwoven with vivid case histories of patients, recounted personally rather than clinically. These patients display many of the characteristic reactions and behaviors of his own father. 

Several other themes are prominent: the losing battle against death – or rather Death--who is a character lurking in the corners of the consultation rooms; the tensions of a son trying to please his difficult parents with advice and understanding that they seem not to want; the bravery of a gay man coming out to his wife and children to find a new place in the world. 
 

These struggles are placed on a background of the nebulous status of radiation therapy, a maligned and misunderstood specialty.

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Wild Boy

Dawson, Jill

Last Updated: Jun-15-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Young doctor Jean-Marc Itard is serving in the Paris home for deaf-mute children. When a “wild boy” without speech is found near a village in Aveyron, France, Itard accepts the challenge of educating him. Many senior colleagues, including Philippe Pinel, opine that it will be impossible, even when Itard determines that the boy is not deaf. The lad, now named Victor, seems to be about ten years old, but his small size owing to malnutrition may be deceptive; he quickly reaches puberty. Helped by the care and empathy of the home’s housekeeper, Madame Guérin, and Julie, her daughter, Victor learns to perform several domestic tasks but manages to speak only a few words.

 His situation is a mystery. Caregivers marvel at how he had been able to survive alone in the woods for several years. They wonder if he ran away from an abusive home, or if he was deliberately abandoned because of his disability. A crisis emerges when a woman appears claiming to be his relative. Itard eventually abandons the effort to educate Victor, but he is allowed to continue living with the Guérins.

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The King's Anatomist

Blumenfeld, Ron

Last Updated: Jan-03-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Brussels mathematician Jan van den Bossche, (fictional), single, and fifty years old, is devasted to learn of the death of his lifelong friend, the brilliant (and very real) anatomist Andreas Vesalius.  Companions since childhood, shorter, sturdy Vesalius was the outgoing exuberant leader of the duo, snubbing authority, taking risks, and seizing every opportunity to explore the anatomical structure of animals and humans. He constantly dragged the quiet, shy Jan in his exploits.  

News of Vesalius’s death sends Jan in two directions. First, he wanders back through many memories: their lives and travels together to Paris, Leiden, Padua, Spain; the rise of Vesalius’s fame in anatomy, medicine, and surgery; and his odd departure from academe to serve foreign crowned heads in France and Spain. Second, it propels him forward on a journey to his friend’s grave on the Greek island of Zante (now Zakynthos), in an effort to comprehend why the notorious skeptic would have embarked on a religious pilgrimage in the first place. Jan realizes that he can forgive Vesalius almost everything, including the theft by marriage of his beloved Alice. But he is incapable of pardoning the bewildering manner of his death.

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Practice

Berlin, Richard

Last Updated: Oct-26-2021
Annotated by:
Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Practice is Richard Berlin’s third book of poetry (two of which are chapbooks) in addition to two prose books. It contains 64 poems and is fronted by an essay, “Why Doctors Need Poetry”. A few pages of notes at the end helpfully explain the context for 15 of the poems. As Dr. Berlin explains at the beginning of his opening essay: “Most of the poems in this volume first appeared in my column, ‘Poetry of the Times,’ a feature of Psychiatric Times”, which, at the time of publication of this volume he had been writing for 16 years. This—and many more poems in other journals, anthologies, and books— all from a man who began writing poetry in “mid-life”. Evident in the poems in this collection is a person experiencing much more than medical/psychiatric practice, but a full cornucopia of life: his love of art, music, food, nature, and the people he shares this bounty with. The collection, presented in three sections, weaves through all of these rich encounters, with only the final section, the shortest of the three, having more of a focus on family, friends and late of the year poems.

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Motherless Brooklyn

Lethem, Jonathan

Last Updated: Apr-12-2021
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Lionel Essrog is the narrator and main character of the novel, although when his Tourette syndrome kicks in, he might introduce himself as: “Liable Guesscog, Final Escrow, Ironic Pissclam, and so on” (p. 7). Tourette syndrome is a neurological condition causing involuntary, repetitive movements and vocal sounds (e.g., words, utterances, growls)—tics. 

Lionel lived at the Saint Vincent Orphanage in Brooklyn, New York until a local “penny-ante hood,” Frank Minna, recruited him and three other “white boys” to do his bidding as a “motley gang of high-school-dropout orphans.” (p. 291) Truck piracy was their first line of work, all the while oblivious about why they were moving boxes from one truck to another. Minna expanded his business into more lucrative and dangerous activities under the façade of a limousine service and private detective agency. He gets too close to the sun and is murdered. Lionel liked Minna, who became a father figure to him, accepted his Tourette quirkiness, and even conspired with him to throw their clients off balance when it served their purpose. Though Lionel admitted, “We were as much errand boys as detectives,” he recasts himself as a bona fide detective and makes finding the murderers his raison d’être. (p. 156) 

In typical murder-mystery fashion, Lionel must wend his way through complex relationships and find hidden clues to solve the case. In not-so-typical fashion, he contends with the Tourette syndrome accompanying him; Tourette is a major character in the book. Together, they find who murdered Frank Minna. 

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Annotated by:
Brinker, Dustin

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Graphic Novel

Summary:

Compendium 1 (Volumes 1-8)
Taking place in a post-apocalyptic United States, these graphic novels follow the life and legacy of a former county police officer named Rick Grimes as he and those he encounters learn to survive and thrive in a world beset by zombies. The story begins in medias res as Rick awakens from a coma after being shot on the job a few weeks earlier. He finds himself in a seemingly deserted hospital and stumbles upon a sealed room, inside which walks dozens of decaying, groaning human bodies seeking to consume him. He flees the hospital to find a desolate landscape. In his home neighborhood, he runs into a father and son who tell him that the last national broadcast said for people to head to large cities for military protection. Thinking that his wife and son may have heeded the advice, Rick gathers what he can from police headquarters and begins toward Atlanta, the nearest large city. Galloping into Atlanta on horseback, he is overwhelmed by a large number of the undead. A young man named Glenn comes to his rescue, bringing him to a makeshift camp of roughly a dozen people. There, Rick finds his wife and 7-year-old son Carl along with his former police partner and a young woman named Andrea. Mishaps and death ensue, forcing the group to travel in search of more secure housing and food. It is revealed that everyone will become one of the undead upon death, bitten or not.  They eventually find a prison after leaving behind a small farm run by a tightknit, religious family with skewed notions of the undead, one member of which, Maggie, becomes romantically involved with Glenn and joins Rick’s group. After ridding the grounds of the undead, termed Roamers, the group encounters inmates who had been holed up inside. Conflict follows distrust, yet the leadership remains with Rick’s group. The group’s numbers are bolstered when a middle-aged black woman named Michonne arrives carrying a katana and accompanied by two jawless, undead guards. Soon after, the group encounters Woodbury, a hostile community led by a man calling himself the Governor. Members are taken hostage, and Michonne is brutally tortured and raped. The group manages to escape and return to the prison, but only after Michonne returns to claim revenge on the Governor, torturing, maiming, and leaving him for dead. The Governor survives and leads an assault on the prison, resulting in the separation of most characters and the deaths of many others, including Rick’s wife and their recently delivered baby. Only Rick and Carl are shown leaving the carnage alive.  

Compendium 2 (Volumes 9-16)
Rick and Carl survive on their own for a bit until they encounter three individuals in a large truck heading to Washington D.C. They are under the false assumption that one of the new group’s members, Eugene, knows how to cure the undead pandemic. Shortly after discovering his falsehood, the group is introduced to and integrated into a walled community near DC known as Alexandria, a haven of houses, electricity, and running water. Battles arise with scavengers, resulting in compromised walls, injury, and more death. While searching for supplies, the group encounters a man dubbed Jesus who is acting as a recruiter for another walled off community called the Hilltop. Rick ventures to the Hilltop with the hopes of rebuilding civilization, only to learn that their community is plagued by a pseudo-mercenary group known as the Saviors; “protection” from Roamers is forced upon the Hilltop by the Saviors in exchange for half of all food and supplies. To free the Hilltop and gain favor for trade, Rick agrees to challenge and eliminate the Saviors along with their leader Negan.

Compendium 3 (Volumes 17-24)
Upon confrontation, the Saviors pin Rick’s vanguard, and Negan savagely kills Glenn in front of a pregnant Maggie, using a barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat named Lucille to do so. Negan forces obeisance from Rick, albeit under a vow from Rick to kill him. Returning to Alexandria, Rick’s group returns to normalcy, appearing to acquiesce to the demands of Negan. Unbeknownst to most of those under his care, Rick embarks with Jesus to enlist the leader of another community known as the Kingdom in an allied war effort against Negan and the Saviors. Rick’s arrival coincides with that of Negan’s lieutenant Dwight who also seeks to overthrow Negan. The four of them begin war preparations. Despite misfortunes, the allied group comes out victorious. Rather than kill Negan, Rick vows to keep him prisoner for life so that he may see how the communities rebuild civilization. The following new leadership is established: Rick and Andrea, now romantically involved, as the heads of Alexandria; Dwight as commander of the Saviors and their community, the Sanctuary; and Maggie as the chief of the Hilltop. The four communities effectively rebuild a functional society in the next two years, establishing a safe trade route and taking in stragglers as they find them. Eventually the communities face a new danger in the form of a wild group called the Whisperers, who disguise themselves in the skins of Roamers and follow a wolfpack social hierarchy, when they accidentally encroach on the unmarked territory of the latter. The leader of this group, known as Alpha, infiltrates the first community fair held by Rick’s people, covertly snatches away many members, and uses their undead heads as signposts to mark the boundary between territories.

Compendium 4 (Volumes 25-32)
In the shuffle of Rick and his communities declaring war on the Whisperers, Negan jailbreaks and manages to kill Alpha as a sign of good faith with Rick. The established communities survive the war, suffering enormous casualties in the elimination of the Whisperers. Meanwhile, Eugene discovers the existence of another large community in Ohio using a repaired CB radio. A team, including Eugene and Michonne, gathers for the long journey there. The results are beyond reasoning: an incredibly large community dubbed the Commonwealth. This community gives the appearance that an apocalypse never occurred, relying upon the class system of the old, pre-undead world to establish order. Amazingly, Michonne reconnects with one of her long-lost daughters and chooses to remain in the Commonwealth by resuming her old vocation as a lawyer. She attempts to mitigate underlying tensions between the classes of this newfound community, but ultimately fails to quell the waves of indignation and retribution from the labor classes towards their privileged elite. Rick and his crew inadvertently add the final spark to the brewing civil war within the Commonwealth, a war which is only narrowly stopped through Rick’s diplomacy and abdication of leadership from current governor. Despite the now solidified union of a new civilization, Rick is murdered by the self-righteous son of the deposed leader, never living to see the fruition of the new coalition. The story ends from the perspective of Carl living in a civilized, nearly undead-free world decades after Rick’s death. The final events reveal the glorification of Rick Grimes and his contributions during what is now known as the Trials.  

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