No comments about Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage, and Peace.

5 comments about Fields and Pastures New: My First Year as a Country Vet.

1. This book relates some of McCormack's adventures as the new vet in a southern country town during the early 1960s. McCormack grew up on a farm in Tennessee. His college roommate, a pre-vet major, interested him in veterinary science. Once he earned his veterinary degree and had a few years of experience under his belt, he set off in search of a town where he could hang up his shingle with an independent veterinary practice. At the time, Butler, Alabama had no licensed vet, so it seemed like a reasonable place for a new vet to make a start. In this book, McCormack describes the characters he met, both human and bovine, during that first year in Butler.
   
   McCormack is a master storyteller. With his careful choice of words, he conveys the character of the place with all its color. While chatting with some locals at a general store, McCormack quipped he went into veterinary rather than human medicine because he didn't like dealing with people. But he tells us that this is absolutely not true-if there's one skill that a vet must have above all others, it's the ability to deal with people, to understand their needs and character. In this book, McCormack regales us with tales of how he came to learn this lesson.



2. I really enjoyed this book. It was well written and entertaining. I loved the Herriot stories so much, this is another great book about vet stories. It will definately be worth your time.



3. I own the hardback copy of this book...actually I have owned it for a few years now. It is one of those books that become a literary treasure in your bookcase. I was so hooked on this book when I first got it, I read it from cover to cover in one day...I just couldn't put it down!

   Dr. McCormack in the US can be likened to James Herriott of England. His stories of animals that he treated and the start of his career in the 1960's makes the reader feel they are right along side him assisting in whatever procedure needs to be done to his animal patient.

   I am a person of great compassion for animals and as a reader, I was truly appreciative that the love and compassion that Dr. McCormack has for his animal patients shines through to the reader's soul. I laughed with this book..I have cried with this book...I have pulled for the sick animal in this book...I have rooted Dr. McCormack through as he treated tough cases in this book.

   There are books about animals and then there are the special books about animals because the respect, compassion from the writer is there and the animal patients become real as one reads along the journey in the book.

   If you are a James Herriott fan or an animal lover who is a reader, I highly, and I stress highly, suggest getting this book and reading it!




4. My people are not from Choctaw County, but we're from "around there." This is not only a sympathetic and heartfelt account of a rural vet practice in the sixties; it's a very accurate look at the folks you were likely to meet then and there, both the good and the bad. I have met most of the folks he talks about, or at least their near relations. Dr. McCormack's extended meditation on the verbal mangling of his job description by his neighbors is alone worth the price of admission, although the account of his visit to the Governor's Mansion driving the "rounds vehicle" and a too-long-delayed boar cutting run it very close. Excellent book.



5. I really enjoyed this book. It had good detail, and you really felt like you were going on the rounds with Dr. McCormack. I have read it several times since I bought it, and it is hard to put down each time, even though I know the outcome!

   I enjoyed reading how tough it was to convert some of the farmers to the methods of modern veterinary medicine, and it was interesting to read the different methods the farmers had preferred to treat the illnesses in their livestock and pets until their was more modern help available.

2 comments about The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West.

1. After reading Hearts West and enjoying it so much, I looked into other books by this author and discovered this jewel. It was an incredibly informative and interesting read. Chris Enss is a gifted writer. She gives the reader insight to a world that was so vastly different from that of today. After reading each woman's story in the book, I longed for more. That is my only disappointment; that I can't know more about each of these women Ms. Enss writes about. I highly recommend it to anyone who is even remotely interested in what life was like for women in the Old West.



2. I picked this book up to read around 8pm in the evening. I didn't put it down
   until I was finished reading it at 2:15am. Although I am able to speed read
   this book was so interesting and entertaining that I couldn't miss a single
   word. This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in the Old West.
   It combined humor, struggle and determination to give a very insightful and
   educating book. The book gave a very vivid picture of female doctors in the
   Old West. As a bonus it has a wonderful collection of "Frontier Medicine"
   listed in the back of the book. Remedies such as carrying an onion in your
   pocket to prevent smallpox and owl broth to cure whooping cough are just
   a few. If you pick up this book...clear your schedule because you won't be
   able to put it down until you have read every single page.

5 comments about Shaman, M.D.: A Plastic Surgeon's Remarkable Journey into the World of Shapeshifting.

1. I bought Shaman, MD because I had seen Dr. Bruce for a consultation for a breast reduction, and I wanted to know more about that word, "Shaman" and how it related to the surgeon who was to perform my breast reduction. What a great read! I really loved the fact that I had found a surgeon who was open-minded and it was nice to see another side to "practicing medicine." I really recommend this book to anyone interested in learning what shapeshifting means and how it can help to improve your life. Dr. Bruce is not only a great surgeon, but a talented writer, as well. Her book has definitely peaked my interest to learn more about shapeshifting and Shaman techniques.



2. Shaman MD is a compelling story of a journey into one of the last refuges of human and planetary mystery. This is a journey not for the weak of heart. The risks can be life changing, or life threatening. Hiking along the high jungle deep into the Amazon forests of Ecuador with Jaguar, Anaconda, and hundreds of species of poisonous snake hidden from sight, is not always something many in our domesticated culture would care to risk. Or high in the Andes entering into poisonous fume producing caves seeking knowledge and power.
   
   Bruce's story unfolds as autobiography on the plains of Africa where she grew up in a family not afraid to march to its own beat by abandoning the comforts of western culture. With great courage, Bruce, tells her own story as a fifteen year old girl getting pregnant and choosing to keep her baby. The astonishing story unfolds in her return to America by entering college and then medical school followed by completing a surgical residency no other women had achieved to that point.
   
   The story eventually takes her into the world of indigenous healing and cross cultural norms on many different continents working with elders, shamans, sangomas, and sages. The story underscores the personal transformation she finds in these simple and honest communities still honoring our Earth Mother and those who remain conversant with her language.
   
   As someone who has walked this same path, I can only attest to its power to transform lives. The question, of course, can you let go of your cultural inhibitions, to enter into another way of knowing?
   
   This is a great book, by a modern visionary. My only regret is that Bruce has not written another book.



3. Dr. Bruce busts some myths that the right brain can't be in harmony with the left brain. A board-certified physician AND a shaman, Dr. Bruce is living proof that one can expand their view of transformation beyond what is "logically possible". Logic only takes one so far, the rest requires an ability to see other angles, and other ways of perceiving reality.



4. This is my second copy. . . There's so much to grasp in this book that I need a second reference copy. . .. Just the notion that we have the ability to shapeshift our life from moment to moment and with an enormous heart. . . . what a great gift!!!



5. Dr. Bruce likes to refer to "scientific studies" to substantiate some of her claims without citing the source of these supposed studies. The most preposterous being the "study" about the "randomized" trial to test the effectiveness of long-distance prayer, presumably the Harris et al study done in 1999. These and other studies such as the Columbia Miracle study in which it was reported that women prayed for from thousands of miles away by strangers were more likely to become pregnant than those who weren't are studies that have turned out to be a fraud.
   Although the book is interesting when Bruce talks about her family and her reasons for studying shamanism, her details and descriptions of the visions are just too freaky.
   I also don't buy what she says about a person being able to genuinely change from without before changing from within. I think this claim is only used to justify her career.

5 comments about Just Breathe Normally (American Lives).

1. A beautiful book...snapshots threaded together with lyrical prose, rich and textured. With soul and heart. You'll dog-ear pages, you'll underline revelations, you'll keep it on your nightstand, you'll want to share it with the world...but only if the world gets their own copy. You won't dare part with yours. And you shouldn't.



2. Without hype or hysterics, this is a memoir of the perfect form. Deceptively simple in its prose structure, the many emotions, the many stories and the many desires build to a very powerful story. A must read for format and for the story.



3. Peggy Shumaker is an English professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of several books of poetry, including Blaze and Underground Rivers. Her poetry background is evident in every carefully sculpted sentence of her memoir, Just Breathe Normally. This book is more than just pretty prose, though. It's a gripping account of one woman's struggle through a potentially life-ending accident and through her chaotic childhood. The wounds are on the body and in the mind. This is a book I will read again and again to decipher how Shumaker makes her magic happen. Clearly, this is a seasoned writer with an intriguing story to tell.
   
   The beginning sets up the hardy Norwegian stock that Shumaker descends from, and, more importantly, the history of women in her family marrying because they were pregnant. In the case of her great-grandmother, a birth resulted in her death, and with her mother, it figuratively ended her life. The impact of this history is felt in Shumaker's decision not to have children and to marry later in life. Sadly, another child almost ended her life; a careless one driving a three-wheeler on the same bicycle path on which she and her husband were cycling.
   
   The title of Just Breathe Normally relates to her mother's lifelong asthma, as well as Shumaker's own problems breathing after her accident. The image of breath ripples throughout. One of my favorite passages is this one about her mother's asthma: "The reason she quit eating. The reason she loved quiet more than her own kids...The reason she didn't want to be here. The reason she left. The reason we buried her breathless." So many passages are lyrical, succinct, and see into the heart of her characters and their situations.
   
   Aside from difficult breathing, Shumaker's life-threatening injuries also resulted in sight and memory problems. This off-kilter feeling is used throughout the book, as well as switching time periods between her accident, present day injuries, and her childhood. This fluctuating time mimics the way memory and breathing work. In trying to piece the details of her accident together to understand it, Shumaker says, "It takes months before my mind can see these nuggets not as separate chunks, but as part of one vein, as story." This sums up her memoir's structure as well, and those little sections add up to a satisfying whole.
   
   The heart of Just Breathe Normally is about Shumaker's unstable childhood with a wonderful, supportive grandmother, and young, immature parents that couldn't stay together. Even though these character types are familiar, each of them manages to surprise throughout. Shumaker is a generous narrator, towards the boy who almost ended her life with his careless driving, towards the mother who neglected her, and towards her absent father. There is no whining about her life or her circumstances, and there isn't a single false note. This is a narrator who knows herself, and her family, and lays it all out for us in rich details and vivid writing.
   
   Her parents' marriage is introduced as My Father's Wives #1; a clever way to set the tone, as well as her father's future marriages. Shumaker describes her absent father as, "We grew around the empty place his absence left in the family. When he was in the house, everybody felt crowded. It felt like having company that hadn't called first." But even the father surprises towards the end of the book.
   
   The section of "Mother's First Words After the Birth" is also powerful:
   
   Because I was her first, no one listened when my mother cried...So I was almost born between floors, my mother clamping shut her thighs, some panicky orderly pinning her shoulders to the gurney. My father, a lanky teenager dreaming of a shovel-head Harley with a suicide clutch, paced...Face to the wall, my mother spoke from far away. "I'm sorry it isn't a boy for you, honey"...Imagine being the woman who would think, just after giving birth for the first time, that. Imagine her saying it out loud to her young man. Imagine her writing it down in the baby book.
   
   Just Breathe Normally is what a book should be: moving and multi-layered. There is a surprise in the ending, which I won't ruin, but after knowing it, the previous passages become even more interesting. Pick up Just Breathe Normally, it just might change the way you breathe, and think.



4. I thought Peggy has an awesome way of writing..at once a prose poem and then a flowing narrative. I had a hard putting this book down it was very engrossing and powerful. Thank you Peggy for a moving memoir. I really like the poem she quotes at the end of her book--it isn't hers but it very well could have been. I won't quote it here but the poem will stay with me for a long time; I have written it down as not to forget what it says and what it means.



5. At first glance the simple, short paragraphs trick you into almost missing the very profound thoughts and deep feelings of the writer. This is a marvelous read!

1 comments about The Man Behind the Mask: Journey of an Orthopaedic Surgeon.

1. What a pleasure to read Tom's book. Tom tells it like it is. The bad and the good of his profession as well about his interesting life as a Surgeon. Tom is a man a faith and this clearly comes across in his book,
   
   My step daughter who is in her third year of Med school called after reading the book to say that she enjoyed the book and that it had moved her to work toward being a surgeon.
   
   A must read for all Med students.
   
   Thanks , Tom. Your book is making a difference.

5 comments about As I Live and Breathe: Notes of a Patient-Doctor.

1. This is the best book I have ever read. Dr Jamie Weisman is my Doctor and she is very dedicated to her patians. She has really done wonders for me. Everyone should read this book to see that they are not the only ones having problems



2. Jamie Weisman is an excellent writer and a brave woman. She has been willing to accept the health problems she has been dealt and yet she chooses to grab life by the horns and live it. She acknowledges she is surrounded by a loving strong support system in her family of origin and her husband, and by giving that acknowledgement she also shows grace and strength.
   
   The warning comes from Jamie's spelling out the human mistakes that happen in the practice of medicine, even when the patient and the family advocates are watching closely.
   
   This is an excellent memoir in and of itself but I would also recommend it to anyone trying to be advocate for an ill relative or friend.



3. After witnessing the painful treatment and deaths of my in-laws recently, I was most interested in the author's account of her unbearable pain when her face was infected, and the problem she had in obtaining relief. She was a doctor herself and the staff knew her--yet she still had to beg for hours for relief. When will the medical profession treat pain adequately? I am disappointed that after enduring so much pain that she does not recognize this need. Overall, her courage is admirable, and we need more doctors who have endured chronic illness to write accounts that enlighten the general public.



4. I feel lucky to have been able to read this absolutely exquisite, yet at times gut wrenching, personal memoir, by a very gifted author who, it should be noted, is over twenty years younger than me. As one who has a very limited real life knowledge of medical life and death, it was an eye opener to (what sometimes seems) a completely different world. This is not only a sublime course in medical history and ethics, but a harrowing landscape of how the body can go wrong in myriad ways, and how the medical profession works its genius. The author has been through it from both sides too, and does not flinch in the telling. Not to be missed! Having read thousands of great books in nearly all fields, this is among the all-time best!



5. Dr. Weisman provides an insightful look into the unique life of a "patient-doctor" in As I Live and Breathe. She battles a chronic, severe immune system illness, at the same time juggling a medical career that is both rewarding and disheartening. The fight for life is sometimes won and sometimes lost, but she keeps a positive attitude through it all. This comes from the exceptional experience that she encounters everyday, through her disease. She uses the knowledge that she has gained from her own illness to create compassion and true sympathy for the patients that she treats. This is unique; this is where most doctors are lacking. She shows both the understanding and knowledge that is rare in the medical profession.
   This autobiography is not only about health and medical experience. It is about everything any human being encounters: marriage, childbearing, dealing with the loss of a loved one, and all the trials that comes with them. Dr. Weisman simply puts a spin on life, expressing it to the audience from a different point of view. She ponders on the unique perspectives of all the patients and families that she treats, and finds a positive force in all of them. She learns from her mistakes to help them better their lives. In a way, it is a sort of cycle, both parties feeding off the other.
   The power of family is important, she says; it provides an amazing support system for a patient that is much needed. She speaks fondly of her own family and the support that they provide, giving them credit for their undying courage and love. In wonder, she says, "I have never had to stand by and watch a loved one suffer the way my family has stood by me." She also admires her husband, saying, "[There was a] mix of joy I felt at asking another human being to share in the ambiguity of my life. I credit my husband with tremendous courage in loving me, someone whose future is from the start more fragile than others'." The relationship between family and patient is extraordinary, and Weisman does a wonderful job of depicting this with the sheer honesty that comes with an illness.
   This book is truly inspirational; the author takes the incredible situation that she is in, and turns it into a masterpiece of insight into the human mind. It expresses the core of the human spirit and everything it can endure. It shows the reader that one can overcome any obstacle and make light of a seemingly dark situation. It also proves that "bad days" are acceptable and "good days" are even better. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in a good, honest read.

5 comments about Over My Head : A Doctor's Own Story of Head Injury from the Inside Looking Out.

1. I was told to Read the book Over My Head By Claudia L. Osborne. I Like Her Was in a Bad accident in which I also had a closed head Brain Injury. I was in a coma for over 7 weeks in late August of 2006. I would agree with the writers synopsis that all you want to do is get back to your old Self, To be the same personyou were and do the same things but so many things changed in that split second that it is not only better to forget the Who you were and to Start basically a new Life. It is the only way to look positivly and to go on with life a new. A lot of the things in life will stay the same and yet there are so many things that I can no longer do. I could Bitch and Moan and get on hating My New Life or I could accept what has happened, Thank God Daily that for what ever reason I was spared: that He has a plan for Me and I must look at the positive and not the negative. I make it a goal now to work on putting a smile on My face every day by the time I close my eyes and go to sleep. That is of course after I have thanked the Dear Lord For The things that I can still enjoy among those things are the greatest Family and Friends a person could have. You have to look at life as a whole New life; separate and different in so many ways from who You used to be, but The same in social aspects where things ar still the same.



2. I first read this book at the recommendation of my neuropsychologist following a closed-head injury 8 years ago. I think it saved my sanity! Closed-head injury can bring about a panoply of just plain WEIRD symptoms that can make the patient (and their family, for that matter) feel as if they're losing their mind. The insanity is explained by a doctor who went through the same experience after an accident. She talks about it in a very non-technical way and helps the patient and those around the patient understand what's happening, why, and that NO, you're not nuts!



3. I suffered a ruptured aneurysm this summer '07, and read this book while recovering from brain surgery. It prepared me for the worst regarding other's responses to my temporary slower mental functioning. The book also helped me to be more sensitive to other people in general regardless of whether an infirmity is obvious or not. I.e., people were very compassionate toward me when my head was shaved and my scalp was full of staples, but now that my hair has grown back and the staples have been removed, that sensitivity has disappeared even though I am still recovering and will be for a long time.
   
   I was inspired by Dr. Osborn's strength and her determination to overcome her deficits. I admire her for writing this book to help others in her situation. Because of this book, I knew to ask my neurologist about cognitive therapy and am now enrolled and working with a occupational/speech therapist.
   
   I don't recommend reading this book early in the recovery process if you have had any kind of brain injury. I did, and it caused severe depression to overcome me. For lighter, more humorous material about brain injury survivors' ordeals, I recommend Susie Becker's book, "I had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?"



4. I have had Encephalitis twice, recieved rehabilitation in Occupational, Physical and Speech therapies, and currently work full-time, yet will forever be aware of my physical & mental limitations. In this book a doctor explains her acquired brain injury and the rehab process she and her famuly and friends dealt with, along with the positive strategies she has gained to deal with her life today. This book clearly clarified for me the diference between TBI and simple brain injury and brought to reality the fact that other people have dealt with similar rehab situations as myself & survived successfully! A must read I found hard to put down.



5. Osborn does what is virtually impossible. She translates the fog of a damaged brain's function into vignettes that an undamaged brain can comprehend.
   
   In her case, this translation is from experiences which were by definition wordless, disorganized, incomprehensible, frightening and often completely mindless to their opposites. The level of Dr. Osborn's skill in doing this may be best understood by readers who have some experience (as I do) in being with brain-injured people.
   
   Whether one appreciates Osborn's achievement in communicating the uncommunicable is unimportant. What is valuable is that she succeeds so well in giving us insight into the "being" of at a subset of the injured.
   
   Most of the incidents recorded in the book are too long to quote in illustration of my point. Their length is a necessary consequence of Osborn's wish to reveal her floundering. Nothing in her life was straightforward. A relatively short excerpt follows:
   
   BEGIN EXCERPT (page 33)
   
   "I left soon after for the bookstore, but with the force of old habit and despite Marcia's written reminder dangling from the dash, I drove directly to the hospital. And then home again. Three times.
   
   "It was noon when I drove out of the hospital parking lot for the third time, I was determined it wouldn't happen again.
   
   "Now, as I turned onto the main road, Marcia's note clutched in my hand, I chanted, "Book store, go to the bookstore.'
   
   "I was still saying it thirty minutes later as I turned into our driveway.
   
   "When I got into the house, I reread Marcia's note. Lord, the bookstore.
   
   "Well, I would definitely get the book tomorrow. Right now, I could still do the second item on her list - water the lawn."
   
   END EXCERPT (page 34)
   
   Needless to say, Osborn forgot to water the lawn.
   
   The book is also notable in illustrating the lack of insight (in regard to her limitations) that Osborn (as others) experienced for quite some time. Then, once insight was gained, she writes about her struggle with a sorrowed sense of lost self.
   
   One incident that helped to her to understand the scope of her lost abilities (which apparently were exceptional) is recorded on pages 205-206. She was not able perform even so "simple" a cognitive exercise as making a telephone call to obtain a patient's medical information.
   
   The book provides a generalized understanding of how rehabilitation is accomplished. This includes learning stratagems for partially replacing lost structural functions.
   
   BEGIN EXCERPT (page 145)
   
   "Now my notes ordered me to [begin italics] really look in the mirror. Hair combed? Teeth cleaned? Collar straight? Earrings match? Expression alert, smiling? [end italics] It began to make a difference."
   
   END EXCERPT
   
   For the most part, the rehab portions of the book are most useful for providing a patient's view of rehabilitation. "Over My Head" certainly does not provide an overview of rehabilitation techniques. Osborn does, however, include a concise review of the generalized deficits that rehab and therapy have to address.
   
   By the end of the book, Osborn manages to return to teaching medicine, but in a format and in situations where she can proceed more or less by rote and under controlled circumstances. Osborn emphasizes that adult brain injury generally imposes permanent limitations upon post-trauma performance. You will not be who you were. Part of the rehabilitation process requires coming to emotional grips with whom you have become.
   
   I recommend "Over My Head" without reservation. It will be of most value to people new to dealing with brain trauma. It also has worth for those of us who lost figurative pieces of ourselves, but do not have brain trauma to blame. The "coping with loss and less" element of the book has universal appeal.
   
   Throughout, Osborn shines as a human being.

1 comments about All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Tattoos.

1. This book will make you laugh and cry, and cry while your laughing. But most importantly it will show you that you can overcome any of life's obstacles if you put your mind, and sense of humor, into it. It's a book about a breast cancer survivor, but it is an inspiration to anyone who has a difficult journey ahead of them. I would definitely recommend this book. Thanks Patty for sharing your stories with us.

5 comments about A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning.

1. Four not five because it won't change my life; four not three because I'm happy to own it and suspect I'll be wanting to read it again. Local libraries didn't have a copy within reach, and I was impatient after two people recommended the book to me in two days.
   
   Life = recovery from major injury is like that (like what Gretel describes in the book). My own path involves art, and a lightning strike, and doctors who thought Ativan was appropriate treatment, and a long winding trip back where every stage feels like progress, only until more progress is made.
   
   Lightning changes the way you process the world. That experience is conveyed in the book but it's possible some readers might not recognize that is some of what they're reading.
   
   Agreed, there's not a lot of hard science. That wasn't available in 1994. The book wanders. Forcibly re-wired brains do that. Skim the part that doesn't catch your attention; the topic shifts are generously marked. The book is self-centered. Illness and injury will do that to you. Stories of recovery that trace the reality of how long and slow the journey can be are useful. Match to the Heart may well be a book that gets passed on to friends in need of that knowledge.



2. This stunning book is about a woman who was struck by a bolt from the blue and lived to learn from it--and to teach others what she has learned. As a story, the plot is simple: a woman is walking with her dogs on her Wyoming ranch when she is struck by lightning. Gravely, almost fatally injured, she begins a two-year battle back to health, helped by parents, friends, a doctor, and a dog.
   
   But this almost surreal plot, compelling as it is, is not the most fascinating aspect of this quite remarkable book. What happens when you're struck by lightning? Here is how Ehrlich tells it:
   
   "I woke in a pool of blood, lying on my stomach some distance from where I should have been, flung at an odd angle to one side of the dirt path. The whole sky had grown dark. Was it evening, and if so, which one? How many minutes or hours had elapsed since I lost consciousness, and where were the dogs? I tried to call out to them but my voice didn't work. The muscles in my throat were paralyzed and I couldn't swallow. Were the dogs dead? Everything was terribly wrong. I had trouble seeing, talking, breathing, and I couldn't move my legs or right arm. Nothing remained in my memory--no sounds, flashes, smells, no warnings of any kind...When thunder exploded over me, I knew I had been hit by lightning."
   
   Erlich spent the next months on the brink of death, her nervous system seared almost beyond repair, trying to find a doctor who knew enough about the effects of electrocution to help her heal. That part of her search was facilitated by her parents, who took her to California and located an extraordinarily caring cardiologist who began to work with her. With his help, Ehrlich began to understand the physical consequences of a lighting strike. As a reader, I was fascinated with this aspect of her experience: what happens in the heart, in the brain, and throughout the body when millions of volts of electricity surge through the human system, short-circuiting the delicate human network. Her need to know became so strong that it later led her to witness open-heart surgery, to become a "traveler, a Marco Polo who had arrived in a place so exotic, few had seen it before."
   
   In her effort to satisfy this compelling need to understand and explain, Ehrlich explores the phenomenon from all angles. She studies the thunderstorms "that keep the global circuits going." She talks with others who have been similarly injured and found a growing network of survivors. She attends a conference and listens to the stories of 65 others, many far more disabled than she, all committed to the need to share, to transform society's ignorance about the dangers of electrical shock. Afterward, she reflects on "those humans who had awakened after being hit and became shamans and healers, and wondered what this new life of mine would be, carved from a ruined body and a ruined marriage, and what special passageways I could hollow out as in a labyrinth of dead ends."
   
   Lightning always follows the path of least resistance, Ehrlich says. It certainly struck her when she was most vulnerable. Separated and preparing for divorce, she was about to leave the ranch where she had lived for fifteen years. Her efforts to recover from the lightning strike took her to Santa Barbara. As she points out, it was an uncanny coincidence: the city is named for a woman whose murderer was struck by lightning, and who later became a saint, the protectress of those threatened by lightning and fire. With her was her dog Sam, who had also been struck, and whose devoted love carried her through the darkest hours of the next few years. "The role of supernatural helpers--guides, ferrymen, or harnessed dogs--stands for the guardian who carries the human spirit forward, whether from death back to life or the other way around....Sam is my guide, my Virgil through these never-ending gaps...that seem to lie before me."
   
   Like those others who became "shamans and healers" after their lightning strike, Ehrlich comes to her own awakening, understanding and valuing in new ways the fragile but durable body in which we all live this human life. And for her, as for many of us, it is the writing process itself that becomes the vehicle for enlightenment. If you are looking for a story of true grace under fire, you must read this. It will show you how to go deeply into the experience without being swallowed by it, how to explore the pain without being consumed by it, and how to open the wound and see the beauty of it.
   
   Susan Wittig Albert
   for Story Circle Book Reviews
   www.storycirclebookreviews.org



3. Not being a fan of travel books, my comments may be biased. Years ago when I wandered the globe, my desire was to live as a part of the places in which I found myself. I made a terrible tourist. I mostly wanted to go where I could speak the language of the natives and getting a letter home took weeks. The world isn't like that any more, nor maybe has it so been for a while for tourists and travel writers. The four books by Gretel Ehrlich I have read run the gauntlet. "This Cold Heaven", tells of her visits to Greenland between 1995 and 2001. It best conveys a feel of what life is like for, maybe the last generation of, Inuit hunters who use dogsleds. And out on the sled is where Ms Ehrlich most wants to be. It is a beautiful book interspersed with Rasmussen's, diaries and descriptions of his life in the north. The reader gets a sense of how the Inuit world is put together, its roots, some differences between various groups and the challenges it faces, at the edge of the internet age. The greatest changes, to a relatively remote First Nation in Canada I am familiar with, were brought about by television. A kind of passivity set in: no more making music and living by one's body became less central. When dogsled, hunting Greenlanders tell Ehrlich that they just want to give their children the experience of the hunt and that the children will decide in their turn whether they will live that way, I sense she is documenting the last of the dogsled hunts. In my First Nation, the elder who last used dogs is now too old, so four wheelers and snow mobiles are a way of life.
   
   What I lose patience with in Ehrlich's writing is most manifest in her book, "Questions of Heaven." She goes to China in search of Buddhism during the early stages of "getting rich is good." I don't quite understand her purpose except relating the difficulties of travel, telling anecdotes about some Chinese and their experiences from "let a thousand flowers bloom" to the cultural revolution, and her frustrated search. She goes to decayed monasteries which are just beginning to be opened to tourists. She is overwhelmed by the density, filth, poverty, pollution, etc. of China. Had she done some homework, all this wouldn't be such a revelation. In the Tibetan areas, she mentions the existence of Tibetan speaking westerners but does not explore who they are and why they are there even though she says she practices Tibetan Buddhism. The most interesting part of the book are her descriptions of the old man who was tortured during the cultural revolution and survived to resurrect traditional forms of music with a rag tag bunch of people from his valley. She doesn't explain why where he lives is more prosperous and happy than other places she visits.
   
   What I find difficult in many nature/travel writers she pours on in this book. Flowery language describing clouds, hills and landscape doesn't do much for me. I have spent much time out of doors. I could wax poetic about the blood red bark of an old manzanita in contrast to the peeling orange brown of a madrone, or the stages of a slime mold or a clown nudibranch grazing urchins. The silence of the redwoods, desiccated by summer dryness just before the coming rains, filled my yesterday's walk. No signs of animal life but a few dragonflies and a fleeting flock of bushtits. A few days earlier I had used "dead" to describe it to a walking companion, and she was a bit offended. A precontact California Indian would have known what I meant. Ehrlich evens makes mention of it during her recovery in California related in book four. But it takes more than poetic adjectives to convey a scene in nature. Reading lengthy passages of romantic descriptions of nature becomes tedious. I want to know why Ehrlich travels and writes, how the places she goes are assembled, the role landscape plays, their history, their challenges, the differences among their inhabitants, etc. If her book is the journey of an American Buddhist, there is very little critical relating to Buddhism except that either nobody she meets practices meditation, even chanting, or she doesn't inquire about it.
   
   The other two books, "Solace of Open Space," and "A Match to the Heart," fall somewhere in between. The former is good in the beginning, particularly in the descriptions of sheep herding, but becomes spotty after her marriage and life ranching. Ehrlich has really lived in Wyoming. She earned her spurs. But it would be great to know more about the strong, silent herders and ranchers: who are they; what is their inner landscape like; what are the tensions and rewards of working as they do? How does machinery effect their lives? During my brief stint as a cowboy, besides pushing cows between gigantic pastures, and sorting out the non-pregnant ones, I spent days building fences and hours in a four wheel drive pickup bouncing off-road. The chapters on the rodeo and Sun Dance give us far too little information on what these institutions are really like and what makes them tick. Ehrlich is also a tease when it comes to her personal life. We learn of the tragic death of her boyfriend which leads to her to stay in Wyoming, but the stuff of her one affair and her marriage are only hinted at. She is a beautiful woman in cowboy country. There has got to be more to it.
   
   In the last of the foursome, "A Match to the Heart," she is truck by lightening and relates her torturous recovery. It is a touching book. I have a lot of empathy with her struggle. Her descriptions of the deep humanity of her cardiologist are beautiful. But the book also leaves me a bit unsatisfied. The husband who doesn't seem to care, her trip to London, which seemed so inappropriate given her physical condition, the people with whom she connects but also seems distant from---I want to know more about her inner processes, her meditation practice. "A Match to the Heart" has aspects of a travel book, a chapter about being on a boat in the Alaska Panhandle without any sense of why she is there: a paying tourist; a guest of scientists or friends? When Ehrlich is on the way to recovery she lays out a map of the world pondering where next. It is hard to fathom, that she runs off from her Wyoming ranch to far distant travels and undertakes similar jaunts during her absences from Greenland. When she casually mentions these, the style of life implicit in so bouncing around the world seems inconsistent with the sense of place she is trying to convey. I am deeply attracted to what she has to say when she really inhabits the places in which she spends, as they say, quality time. I guess I want more of that from her.
   Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World



4. This is a strange book. The terrible accident this woman suffers is heart-breaking. Her recovery is slow and she suffers much. Still, reading this book was a struggle for me because the author writes too well, if one can say that. Nothing is ever just described. Each action must be documented in detail, creek crossings must be described with color, texture, recollections of other creek crossings. Finally, it just became too much.
   One other thing that was off-putting for me: as you read the book, it slowly becomes clear that her greatest achievement was leaving Berkeley and moving to Wyoming and working on a ranch. somehow, one bond was broken and another forged. While of obvious importance to her, it is not compelling enough to keep me interested.



5. In this book, Ehrlich uses many different techniques that all work together to make a good book. Basic ground rules of writing command us to ?show, don't tell? and keep the reader as involved as possible in the story. In general, Ehrlich uses special techniques where the story of her journey might become too abstract, too metaphysical, or too obtuse, or too personal to sustain us as readers. Here are a few techniques I found interesting.

   If I understand Ehrlich's intent, this is a book about a journey. But the journey isn't just a physical journey (Wyoming to California to North Carolina to California then back to Wyoming), it's also a spiritual, religious and emotional journey. In this sense then, this is partly a book about ideas.

   Interestingly, Ehrlich does not begin the book with a big set of ideas. She begins in the present tense, a voice and tense of intimacy and immediacy. She places us at the beginning in a dream or a dreamstate she experienced at the moment of the lightning strike. It seems to me, this sets Ehrlich up nicely to deal with the potential problems of a ?talky, head-game? narrative. My guess is she knows she's got a long journey ahead of her, filled with speculation, thoughts, feelings, readings, science facts, and what not, so she looks for devices to keep the narrative grounded and interesting. Her first technique is the present tense opening. Another technique she uses is to concentrate her details on the natural world. Although we learn about the physics of lightning, Ehrlich spends countless paragraphs describing every species of plant and animal one can encounter in California or Wyoming. With such a heavy dose of color, shape, sound and smell details I never encounter the accumulated feeling that I am too much absorbed in the narrator's head.

   Ehrlich's attention to the sensory details around her help us trust her as a narrator on subjects we don't understand. We trust her when she tells us how kelp smell, how fish look and feel, how the birds fly, the feeling of snow between her toes. Likewise, when she tells us something about lightning, about it's electrical charge, about the currents it follows, or tells us something about Tibetan philosophy, we believe her. Her credibility as an observer of nature carries over to her explanation of abstract or unobservable phenomenon. This makes the whole story much more believable, richer, and more concrete to us readers.

   In one section, Ehrlich talks about a legend she read about a lighting victim always being thirsty. In the next paragraph she switches to a scenic description of her filling water bottles because she's always thirsty. She goes on to cite some more similarities between her situation and the legend she read. This works to her advantage as a credible narrator because now, in other places, I will subconsciously project the description of other legends onto her.

   In Chapter 24, Ehrlich comes right out and tells us why the book is structured the way it is. She says it is shaped like a convection cloud, and that inside the narrative would zigzag like lightning. When I read this page, I admit it did make the structure of the book clearer to me, but I have to admit I don't like it. First of all, she says she dreamed this. I don't believe it. It seems incredible that in the middle of this search for peace and health, she would dream about the structure of a book. This bothers me most because, now I doubt all her dreams. When is she really dreaming and when is she dreaming for the convenience of putting something interestingly metaphysical at just the right place in the book.

   By contrast, the surgery scene is told mostly in straightforward scene. We hear the dialogue, see the things she sees without too much reflection and very little mysticism. This strikes me as a wise move, because by that point in the book, I needed a break from thinking too hard. It was nice to get a straightforward dose of scene, something fascinatingly interesting, yet at the same time as presented in scene form, it remained very present and accessible to me. I enjoyed just sitting back and watching the show. This let me catch my breath before hurtling into the thicker and thicker mix of narratives coming together at the end of the book.

   All in all, Ehrlich pulls off a masterful collection of writing techniques to tell a compelling story.