Summary:

Children wasting away, in pain, infected with parasites whose life cycle continues "bodies to fingers, / fingers to lips, of lips to eggs / and eggs to worms." That cycle is echoed in the human experiences of "loneliness to pangs of loss" and of "deep escape to deep connection." The actual parasites take on symbolic significance and become the worm that inhabits us all, whether we be sick kids or weary health care providers.

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Pale, gaunt children from the backwoods hills of Kentucky bring their stool specimens to school so the visiting physician can check for worms. But these sinewy kids come from a long line of leathery ancestors "bred from one tough root"--and they keep on surviving whether they have worms or not. They "shall inherit" the earth, whether or not physicians treat them.

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This poem describes the deterioration of a man after the death of his spouse, as he ends up drunk, penniless, and in jail. The physician is asked to certify the cause of his death. He decides that the complex social factors leading to his death can only be summarized as "complications".

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In 1965, Dr Fingal Flaherty O’Reilly is traveling in his car with nurse Kitty when they come across a road accident and stop to help. The incident leads to reminiscing about his final years of medical training in Dublin hospitals in the 1930s.

Fingal has just returned from a stint in the navy. His student cohort includes a steady chum, a respected, brilliant woman, and a narcissistic pest–-all rather familiar tropes, comfortably portrayed. A picture of a hospital-based education emerges through teachers both kindly and rigid, a crusty head nurse who turns out to be a good soul, and a lovely student nurse, Kitty. Fingal’s professorial father disapproves of his son’s choice of a medical career and on his infrequent visits home, their relationship is tense.

Attractive to medical student readers are the clinical stories, the diagnostic dilemmas, and the stress of examinations. Social factors, such as poverty, unemployment, and discrimination, are intimately connected to the health of Fingal’s patients both as causes and results. His concern for his patients and those aspects of their lives earn him the respect of the head nurse and her student.   

This story set in two time periods is partly a prequel to some of Taylor’s other tales, such as An Irish Country Doctor.

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Performance poet Bao Phi was born in Saigon; his parents emigrated to Minnesota, where he grew up and still lives. His poetry is rooted in Asian American immigrant experience, especially in Vietnamese American experiences, and speaks of racism, economic hardship, cultural difference, and the legacy of the Vietnam war. The collection is divided into four sections, each preceded by a quote from another (usually Asian American) writer. Four introductory poems set the tone for the poet's project of "refugeography" (from "You Bring Out the Vietnamese in Me", p. 9): recognition and celebration of the variety of Asian American lives, and anger at exploitation - both economic and cultural: "They box our geography / And sell it in bougie boutiques / Our culture quite profitable / But can somebody tell me / How our culture can be hip / And yet our people remain invisible?" ("For Us", p. 1)

In section 2 (The Nguyens) 14 poems highlight the lives of a variety of unrelated individuals and families across the US who have the same family name. "They are one story for every Viet body, one song for every voice that sings or otherwise" (p. 17). Many are angry and bitter. There is the Sacramento girl who grows up, makes good, and wants now to get even with the white boy who pushed her down and called her "gook" in ninth grade: "where is your wheat- haired crown now, / where is your Made- in- America tongue: / a slide of spit to take me back to where I came from / now that I am ready to show you / show you / where I come from" ("Vu Nguyen's Revenge", p. 20). There is the chef who had once worked in the kitchen of a restaurant where the waitstaff was white only: "let me tell you that the white people / can choke to death on their lychee martinis" ("Fusion", p. 24). Others are reflective - such as the soldier in Iraq who meditates, "let me not tear apart a people, a country, causing Iraqi food to / become the nouvelle cuisine in 25 years back home" ("Mercy", p. 29).

Some wrestle with generational misunderstanding: Dotty from Dallas whose mother "hid the food stamps by holding [her] hand out like a fan of shame at the checkout line" and later kicked her out of the family, accusing her of being a "Commie" (p. 45). There is tongue in cheek irony, such as in "The Nguyen Twins Find Adoration in the Poetry World" (p. 40), about two vastly different poets - Joan, who has an Anglo boyfriend, publishes in respected traditional literary journals, includes in her work Vietnamese sentences "she never fails to translate" and who won the "safe ethnic poet award"; and Jesus, whose poems are "system fascist overthrow racism working class" performed on Def Poetry Jam where he mispronounces all three of the only Vietnamese words he uses in his poetry.

Numerous poems in sections 3 and 4 address racism. "Reverse Racism" (p. 59) imagines the tables being turned on whites: schools that teach only Asian-American history and suspend any student who questions it; jobs that "stick white men in middle -management hell, then put them on a pedestal as an example of how whites can be successful", and "when white men form their own groups to protect themselves, I'll accuse them of being separatists and reverse racists". "Dear Senator McCain" (p. 65) begins with a quote from the year 2000 in which the senator (who had been imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war) says, "I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." The poem issues a challenge: "I am that gook waiting in your nightmare jungle / that gook in front of you with 17 items in the 10 items or less lane at the supermarket / that gook born with a grenade in his head / that gook that got a better grade than you in shop class" and ends, "Senator / what's the difference / between an Asian /and a gook / to you".

Another poem ("8 [9]", p. 93) is based on the 2006 killing of a 19-year-old Hmong American by a white policeman in Minneapolis. There is despair ("For Colored Boys in Danger of Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome and All the Rest for Whom Considering Suicide Is Not Enuf ", p. 82 ). There are also poems of self-awareness, for example, of the dichotomy of an earlier ghetto life and a later "fancy college" experience ("Called [An Open Letter to Myself]", p. 76); intra-ethnic suspicion and misunderstanding ("Everyday People", p. 99); energy and pride ("Yellowbrown Babies for the Revolution", p. 86).

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This story centers on Lena, an immigrant teen from Ukraine, whose entire family has been traumatized and uprooted by family deaths during a violent pogrom.  Relocated to Chicago, in a tiny apartment on Bittersweet Place, the family struggles to survive in the years prior to World War I. Wineberg’s tale of disrupted life and resettlement is weighted by formidable issues that stretch beyond the ordinary range of family experiences. 

Lena, the intelligent, highly observant and resilient adolescent, narrates an unvarnished tale of survival for the extended family clustered together in this strange new world, but especially for herself.  While the family’s economic and financial circumstances are difficult, her own life is made worse by an unkind teacher, mean-spirited classmates, and hormonal impulses.  Her uncle touches her inappropriately, a favorite uncle goes mad, a cousin dies, and her mother, who is unfamiliar with the new world setting and mores, drives her crazy. 

Nevertheless, Lena is a clear-eyed survivor exhibiting a surprising toughness of character and determination. For example, her introduction to sex is far more direct than might occur with most girls of that time.  In addition, when her teacher fails cruelly to support her artistic talents, she shows amazing defiance.   When she discovers that her father has a beautiful female friend, undoubtedly a lover, her consideration of this circumstance does not render the crushing blow that might be expected.  In retrospect she is more adult, more mature than most young women might be in each of these situations.  She is a remarkable young woman with a spirited edge.

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Although Dr. Helman’s untimely death did not permit a final editing by this prodigious writer, the published edition is not a book-in-progress. An Amazing Murmur of the Heart: Feeling the Patient’s Beat represents a powerful and persistent continuation of observations and themes that grew out of medical education, close observations of physicians and patients, and his studies in anthropology. All of these forge an approach to patient care that is out of the ordinary.  

As his previous writings suggest, Helman is passionate about medicine but concerned, equally about the emergence of those who fail to listen and to those who might be called techno-doctors.  While professing his appreciation of and attraction to the magic machine or computer, he is mindful of its absence of emotion and ambiguity.  “For this post-human body is one that exists mainly in abstract, immaterial form.  It is a body that has become pure information.” (p. 11)

Chapters are comprised of stories about patients and their care providers, each representing complex facets that defy precise measurement, answers and conclusions.  As Helman steadily notes, the physician must be an archeologist:

Most patients present their doctors with only the broken shards of human life—the one labeled infection, disease, suffering and pain each of these shards is only a small part of a much larger picture….the doctor will have to try and reconstruct the rest. (p.66)

In general, the chapters illustrate first an initial review of medical history, and then specific patient stories.  Of the two, the story is most important.  “Mask of Skin,” for example, begins with an overview of skin from Vesalius to the present: largest organ, stripped bare by anatomists, penetrated by disease, later scanned and X-Rayed, tattooed, re-fitted by surgeons, etc.   That said, Helman the physician-anthropologist, moves from science to specific stories about patients whose skin may cover profound experiences, psychic and otherwise, that might be overlooked by a dermatologist.   Although skin is involved in each of that chapter’s stories, the willing physician must dig deeper in his observations and caring manner to make more profound discoveries.      

In a chapter entitle “Healing and Curing” the author describes an old friend, a practitioner who provides advice about patient care that ”was not included in his medical texts”.  Patients are more than a diagnosis dressed in clothes.  Doctors must make patients “feel seen, listened to, alive”.  Always patients should be regarded as people who happen to be sick.  From his admired colleague Helman learned to be an attentive listener  to the "tiny, trivial, almost invisible things" in patient encounters and stories. To truly heal as well as cure requires the doctor to empathise with what the patient is feeling thereby requiring both an act of imagination and of the heart.  The chapter, of course, continues with with stories that illustrate the points enunciated by his colleague and accepted by his disciple. 

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Soldier Girls is an exhaustively researched, intimate report by a journalist of the lives and deployments of three women in the Indiana National Guard, who, through serving together in Afghanistan, become friends. Each of the women joined the Guard prior to 9/11/2001, mostly for economic reasons. Thorpe selected women who were vastly different in age and background.  Debbie Helton becomes a grandmother during deployment and has served in the guard for decades - she is eager to be deployed. Michelle Fischer (a pseudonym) is newly out of high school, has liberal political views and sees the Guard as a way to pay college tuition. Desma Brooks is a single mother of three with a fractured and unreliable support system. All three have alcohol and or drug dependency issues. Brooks and Helton are deployed a second time - to Iraq.

 As one of the women, Fischer, notes, the Bush wars were an ‘economic draft' (p. 374) The struggles to find adequate housing, reliable partners, good schools, decent jobs, and to avoid the morass of drug dealing, which particularly surround Fischer and Brooks, are paramount in their lives.   

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Marie Commeford, daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants who grows up in Brooklyn, narrates her life story in episodes rich with reflection on the losses, failed fantasies, illnesses, and disappointments of a life at the edge of poverty, which is also rich with love and poetry and humor and the stuff of which wisdom is made.  The story unfolds as memory unfolds, in flashbacks and reconstructions shaped by a present vantage point from which it all assumes a certain mantle of grace.   From the opening story in which a neighbor girl slips on the steps to a basement apartment and is killed, to repeated glimpses of a blind veteran who umpires the neighborhood boys' street games, to the bereaved families Marie meets when she works for the local undertaker, to her gradual discovery of her brother's closeted homosexuality, and to her aging mother's death, the story keeps reminding us of how much of life is coming to terms with the "ills that flesh is heir to," and also how resilience grows in the midst of loss.  Because much of the story represents the vantage point of a child only partially protected from hard things, it invites us to reflect on how children absorb large and hard truths and learn to cope with them. 

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Nora Kynd (born in 1825) was a central character in Barrett’s Ship Fever (in this database). She survived illness and quarantine at Grosse Ile, but lost contact with both her younger brothers, Ned and Denis. She reaches Detroit by 1848 where she learns about herbal remedies from a kindly landlady. She marries late and has a son, Michael, but never stops searching for her brothers. Her husband dies. One day in 1868, Nora sees Ned’s name as the proprietor of a hunting and fishing lodge in the Adirondacks. She packs up everything and moves there with her young son.

Ned takes Nora and Michael into his home. He carries on with the hunting business and taxidermy, but they increasingly cater to people with tuberculosis who come for “The Cure” of good food, fresh air, and lots of rest—as a reflection of the famous nearby sanatorium (unnamed but likely the Trudeau Sanatorium at Saranac Lake). In this capacity, they meet lodgers Clara and her two daughters Gillian and Elizabeth—the almost abandoned family of the naturalist Max from Barrett’s story “Servants of the Map” (also this database).

Young Elizabeth has a cough and an eye for Michael, but he has eyes only for Gillian whom he eventually marries. Together they take over Ned’s Inn. For her cough, Elizabeth becomes a resident of the sanatorium and finds her own husband in fellow invalid, Andrew. Together they open a nearby boarding house for other invalids and Nora joins them in the endeavor as the nurse, serving until her death. But Nora was difficult to replace and Elizabeth is now searching for a new nurse to help with the care of her ailing clients.

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