Summary:

Chris Eigemann plays Jake Singer, a well-liked middle-aged English professor to a group of privileged students at a posh high school for precocious young white men with floppy hair styles and ironic disdain, located somewhere in New York City. Having just discovered that his ex-girlfriend is engaged, Singer begins a psychoanalytic treatment with an Argentinian analyst, played with relatively understated gusto by Ian Holm. Singer meets Allegra Marshall (Famke Janssen), a woman whose deceased husband was a benefactor of the school; she is now the single (and rich) mother of two adopted children.

They fall in love, complicated slightly by Singer's father, a curmudgeonly heart surgeon, and a rather strange plot contrivance involving Marshall's failure to tell the adoption agency that her husband had died even though the biological mother had insisted that the child go to a family with a mother and a father. In one other plotline, left satisfyingly unresolved, Singer has clearly been the mentor to a young African American student, who self-sabotages at this otherwise all-white, all-privileged academy.

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Fifty-something Canadian professor of history and lifelong womanizer Rémy (Rémy Girard) lies in an overcrowded hospital with a fatal illness. Family and friends gather, including Rémy’s estranged son Sébastian (a wealthy financier played by Stéphane Rousseau) from overseas, and Rémy’s ex-wife (Dorothée Berryman) and several previous romantic partners. Rémy and Sébastian fight painfully about Rémy’s philandering, but after a plea from his mother Sébastian decides to make things better for his father, even if they have not been reconciled.

This he does in many ways, most of which involve spending lots of money and many of which are highly irregular or illegal. For example, he arranges to have his father taken into the U.S. for an expensive PET scan that would have required six months’ wait to have free in Canada. And he arranges through Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), a childhood friend who is now a heroin addict, to provide a regular supply of heroin to control his father’s pain, which the hospital apparently is not able to do with morphine.

These and other extraordinary measures work for Rémy, and the process of caregiving brings Sébastian and his father closer. (Rémy’s only problem seems to be the feeling that his life has been wasted because he has not left his mark--and he gets help with that, paradoxically, through several conversations with Nathalie.) For his last few days, Rémy and ensemble move to a friend’s lakeside cabin, where the conversation is witty, intellectual, and sexually frank, and the mood upbeat and conciliatory.

In the face of Rémy’s imminent demise, all is forgiven, and others seem to gain insight about their lives. Rémy’s last act is peacefully nodding to a sorrowful Nathalie to begin the series of heroin injections that will end his life. In a final dig at the establishment, the heroin is administered through an IV provided on the sly by a hospital nurse.

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Veneta Masson's latest poetry collection is a clinician's guide not to illness and disease but to the souls touched by illness, both the patient's and the caregiver's. In 45 poems, she reviews her life in caregiving, from her early days in nursing to her work as a nurse practitioner in a community clinic and finally to her decision to use her hands "to write and to bless" (p. 93). Her poems are enhanced by the artwork of Rachel Dickerson, whose woodcuts and etchings are paired with poems to provide another voice, another way of looking into the soul of caregiving. For an example of this wonderful pairing, see the print that accompanies "The Screamer in Room 4" (p. 24). The print allows us to see the frustration of the screaming child, the child's mother, and the caregiver.

As always, Masson's poems center on the patient-caregiver experience; in this volume, as we follow her through her various adventures in nursing we also travel with her through the changes she has witnessed in healthcare and the politics that continue to affect its delivery. "Rx" (p. 22) examines Medicare and Medicaid and the political decisions that often deny medications to the elderly who need them most. "Gold Standard" (p.34) looks again at medicine and money, juxtaposing the medical pill against the placebo of the caring healer. One of my favorite poems, "The Doctor's Laptop" (p. 40) laments how technology might deprive patients of the doctor's time, attention and touch.

Other themes that are central to this collection are the unexpected presence of humor in caregiving (see "Conga! at the Rio," page 50), of spirituality (see especially "Rescue," page 36, "Refuge," page 45, and "Prevention," page 82), and of the personal. In several moving poems Masson looks at her own sister's death and her reaction to it, writing about her conflicting roles as sister and nurse (see, among others, "Matinee," "Hilda and Snow White," and "The Nurse's Job," pages 70, 72 and 74). In an excellent final poem, "Winter Count," Masson takes us through her own nursing history, a chronicle of work, joy, disappointment and survival that any caregiver will recognize.

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This memoir chronicles the pre-adolescent and adolescent years of the author, the son of an alcoholic, abusive mathematics professor father and a psychotic Anne Sexton-wannabe confessional poet mother. The only family member who does not abuse the boy in any way is estranged--an older brother with Asperger’s syndrome. Meanwhile, the amount of trauma to which young Burroughs is subjected boggles the mind. Just when one thinks it couldn’t get any worse, it does.

Burroughs, who loves bright, shiny, orderly things, also likes doctors--paragons of cleanliness, virtue and wealth. Unfortunately, his mother’s psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, described as a charismatic Santa Claus-look-alike, is unethical, bizarre and squalid. As Mrs. Burroughs becomes more and more dependent on Finch, she allows her son to be adopted into the crazy Finch household.

This family includes wife Agnes, who copes with her husband’s infidelity by sweeping madly; son Jeff, daughters Kate, Anne, Vickie, Hope and Natalie; grandson Poo; and adopted son, Neil Bookman, who is twenty years older than Burroughs and homosexual. When Burroughs is thirteen, and has told Bookman that he, too, is gay, Bookman forces the boy to have oral sex. They become lovers.

The Finches, meanwhile, exhibit their quirks and weird tendencies in multiple ways. "Bible-dipping" is popular to read the future, as is prophesying by examining Dr. Finch’s turds. A patient with agoraphobia, Joranne, lives in one of the rooms--in fact, she has not left the room in two years. Young Burroughs is allowed to smoke and drink. When Burroughs says he doesn’t want to return to school, Dr. Finch facilitates this desire by giving Burroughs alcohol and pills to fake a suicide gesture, then hospitalizes the boy.

Yet Burroughs manages to befriend a couple of the Finch daughters, and to survive his childhood. The book closes with his departure for New York City and with an epilogue outlining various people’s outcomes. Finch lost his license due to insurance fraud.

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This is a gripping and poignant account of newsman Bob Woodruff’s brain injury and recovery. He was injured in Iraq by a roadside bomb on January 29, 2006, shortly after being named co-anchor for ABC’s World News Tonight. A public figure—even a celebrity—his injury and recovery were well publicized, bringing to light the injuries of many kinds suffered by soldiers (not to mention civilians) in war-torn Iraq. Woodruff received every benefit American military medicine could offer and had impressive support of ABC and various luminaries. He made a spectacular recovery against all odds.

The book is mostly told by Lee Woodruff, Bob’s wife, who flew to Germany on a moment’s notice to see him at the Landstuhl Military Hospital, who waited 36 days for him to wake up, who saw the CT scan with rocks embedded in his head, who managed their four children and household during the long recovery time, and who writes vividly and personably. There are also flashbacks about the lives of Lee and Bob, truly a remarkable couple: their courtship, their time in China and London, their decision to use a surrogate mother to have their second two children.

Bob himself contributes pages, before and long after the accident. Thirty-one photos, both black and white and in color, enliven the text. One photo shows the interior of a critical Care Air Transport Team, a C-17 cargo plane outfitted like an ICU to transport wounded soldiers.  Throughout, the costs of warfare on people, society, materials, and land (not to mention dollars) is dramatically evident.

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A French Canadian family gathers for Christmas around the ailing patriarch and his quiet wife. But it is dominated by anxiety over the father’s rigid Parkinson’s disease and a recent stroke that have robbed him of clear speech and movement.

Through the eyes of the son who is nearing sixty, the holiday is a painful obligation that must be endured; the toxic atmosphere contains an undeclared emergency. The son admits that he has never loved his father whom he compares to Stalin for his iron-fisted and undemonstrative ways. One of the dad’s greatest sins was stealing credit for the catch of a giant fish that had actually been landed by the son long ago.

Nor does the narrator like his siblings to whom he refers in epithets that convey his disparagement of their proclivities: the Banker, the Vegetarian, the Homeopath, the Medicals, the Buddhists. His young nephew – who has two names—William / Sam—genuinely cares for the feelings and well-being of others, especially the grandparents. The only other person who is granted these qualities is Isabelle, the much younger fiancée of the narrator, in whom he takes possessive pride, as if she exemplifies his own wisdom, taste, and youth.

Suddenly the narrator and William both realize that the patriarch ought to die and that they should help. To the horror of the siblings and with the blessing of his mother they embark on a plan to feed him everything he likes but should not have—and lots of it. Perversely the man improves. The story culminates in a fishing trip where the original sin was committed.

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Popova is still in deep mourning seven months after her husband's death. She stays alone at her country house, refusing to go out or to see anybody. Suddenly, Smirnov arrives and rudely insists on seeing her. Popova's late husband owed him 1200 roubles and he demands the debt be paid at once because his creditors are after him.

Popova delays. Smirnov insists, makes light of Popova's mourning, and refuses to leave. They angrily vie with one another: "Men are rude and inconstant!" "Women are fickle and manipulative!" (It turns out that Popova's husband was actually a liar and cheat, but she remains true to his memory just to show him how faithful a woman can be.)

Smirnov challenges her to a duel for insulting him and Popova brings out her husband's pistols. At this point Smirnov realizes that he has fallen in love with this tough, spunky woman. Popova vacillates for a moment, but they end up in each other's arms. (All this in 12 pages.)

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This remarkable collection of short writings, introduced by renowned poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who visited the Sutterwriters (of Sutter Hospital in Sacramento, California) to offer a workshop, provides a broad, compassionate, imaginative window into the life inside and around an urban hospital. Patients, staff, and all interested in healing through writing are invited to come and participate-with an accent on the latter: no one is invited who isn't willing to write.

Chip Spann, the editor, came to Sutter Hospital with a Ph.D. in English, and has the privilege of coordinating this fluid community of writers as part of his work as a staffmember. His conviction, voiced in an engaging introduction, is that literature is a powerful instrument of healing--both the literature we read and the literature we create--and that the experience of literature belongs in community. The individual pieces are accompanied by photographs and short bios of contributors.

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This film combines light-hearted scenarios of poor to absurd communications with patients on issues of death and dying, with measured advice from physicians expert in such communications. In addition, a scenario of a woman physician and her patient with advanced breast cancer models a positive example for doctor-patient communication on issues of planning for death and choosing life-sustaining options.

The film opens with a madcap grim reaper dancing and singing a message from Dr. Fletcher to a patient at home: you have six months to a year to live. These same actors morph through a series of roles sprinkled through the film: a physician using medical jargon with a non-comprehending patient, an ad for a phrase book to "speak like a patient," another doctor-patient scene with the physician now graphically describing cardiopulmonary resuscitation using wild gestures, and a waiter advising a patient/patron on item selection from the Terminal Cafée menu (no vegetables!).

The experts discussing death and dying are: Michael Clement, MD; Lisa Capaldini, MD; Doriane Miller, MD; Bernard Lo, MD and Kate Christensen, MD. They offer sage advice on communication, avoidance of medical terminology (even words like 'diagnosis' and 'procedure' can be misunderstood), pain management, informing patients of anticipated poor outcome with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, asking patients what is important to them, goals of treatment, who should make medical decisions, and the setting of such discussions. Cultural sensitivity is briefly discussed, with an emphasis on respecting the patient's individuality rather than assuming a fit within cultural expectations.

The exemplary scenario demonstrates positive qualities and key points: both physician and patient are seated and dressed; the physician asks the patient if she wants another person present for the ensuing discussion and also inquires as to the quality of discussions with the spouse, whom the patient designates as the one to potentially make medical decisions; the specific fears and desires of the patient are sought; and the physician recaps what the patient says and asks her if the summary is correct. In addition, resuscitation is explained in detail. The visit concludes with the doctor encouraging future discussions and allowing decision changes.

The film ends with the finale to the opening scene. The patient slams the door on the grim reaper, who, beset by dogs, returns to Dr. Fletcher and advises the doctor to talk to his patients himself.

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Hicok begins the poem with a statement and jocular rhetorical question that set the tone and pace: "There are two kinds of people and five hundred / seventy-one thousand, three hundred / ninety-six species of beetle but who's / counting?" Immediately we wonder what are the two types of people and who would take the trouble to write out a species count while also joking about it.

The engagement with the poem continues as we learn about the narrator's platonic friend, an entomologist, freshly returned from the Amazon with a bottled beetle and a raging fever. The narrator, alarmed at her delusional state, rushes her to the hospital ("driving / in a way that proved you can be / in two places at the same time") and good medical care. After several days she has regained enough strength to say one word--jar--which refers to the jar containing her beetle specimen. The narrator restores the jar to her, she recovers and returns to the life she loves, a life in the treetops of the Amazon jungle.

Through the course of the poem, the poet plays with all manner of philosophy and religion. The beetle's body is likened to Michelangelo's image of the finger of God reaching towards Adam. The poet plays with numbers as well, rearranging the numbers of types of people and beetles (and throwing in the number of "delicatessens where you can get a fried- / tuna sandwich on waffles"). This lightness is a disarming way to shed light on the heart of the poem--the narrator's deep caring for the scientist and the scientist's deep caring for her work of discovery.

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