Five Days at Memorial

Five Days at Memorial

By Sheri Fink

This was an incredibly gripping book on the doctors, nurses, and patients at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent investigation into the numerous deaths there and accusations that patients were being euthanized (just as rescue helicopters were evacuating people again).  It's less concerned about pointing fingers or assigning blame than it is in warning how American social mores and patient care practices can break down in less than five days and how it might be prevented (or likely to occur) in the future.

Do I think that Dr. Anna Pou and her two assistants murdered at least nine and potentially eighteen patients? Yes.  Am I going to second guess her actions? Probably not.  However, although I was sympathetic to the conditions in Memorial (and in fact, all over the city, as this was not the only facility facing "suspicious" concentrations of morphine and midazolam in the bodies left behind), and I understand that the potential murder charges hang over her head, what I most aggrieved by was the complete lack of remorse, guilt, or doubt expressed by them and by their supporters after the fact.  Yes, you did what you thought was right at the time, and I don't doubt that you were despairing, after five days in post-Katrina conditions, fear, rumors, and foul smells, but when you left that hospital and realized that help had been available, that not everyone descended into chaos and death, I think that should have given you pause.  You made a mistake.  And it was life or death, and you chose poorly.  Face it.

It was only as we near the end of the book and you realize that not only did she have tunnel vision at the time, she's become entrenched into her position that I lost my sympathy for her.  Maybe it's a defensive mechanism to avoid having to examine her own actions more closely, but Fink's argument that this attitude of refusing other perspectives in end-of-life decisions can cause more harm than it purports to solve is a fairly persuasive one. There's a good argument that doctors, unfortunately, are human like the rest of us - (over)confident in their own skills, brought low by disaster, unending work and stress, and, while willing to make the "hard" decisions, unwilling to open that decision to criticism.  Of course, other actors in the justice process fucked up too, and maybe it could have been an opportunity for a discussion, but instead the whole indictment just screwed everybody over. This review is a bit longer than intended, and the book is no novella either, but it's worth a read.

The Cruelest Miles

The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic

By Gay Salisbury and Lainey Salisbury

When a deadly diphtheria epidemic swept through Nome, Alaska, in 1925, the local doctor knew that without a fresh batch of antitoxin, his patients would die. The lifesaving serum was a thousand miles away, the port was icebound, and planes couldn't fly in blizzard conditions—only the dogs could make it. The heroic dash of dog teams across the Alaskan wilderness to Nome inspired the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and immortalized Balto, the lead dog of the last team whose bronze statue still stands in New York City's Central Park. This is the greatest dog story, never fully told until now.

I was actually set to read something else for this prompt (Overnight Float, if you must know) but as the Iditarod rolled around and I found myself reading the Wikipedia page about the original Serum Run and sobbing, I thought, well, why not just completely wallow in it?  What better than to really immerse yourself in the shared terror of small choking children slowly dying without life saving medicine which is only available through gale force winds, 60 degree below zero chills, and the luck of some dogs' noses?

Actually, the Iditarod truly is a phenomenal feat of athleticism, by both dog and man.  It is also one of those things which, avoiding excessive commercialism and set in some of the country's wildest territory, manages to still feel pure in the sense that watching the World Series definitely does not. The Cruelest Miles manages to take the story and bog it down with facts and history and reality, which all distracts from the feel-good sports win mentality of the thing.

That can be a difficult thing with books about specific historical events: you want to get more detail and background than you can with, for example, a deep dive through Wikipedia, but you also want to keep things zippy, or else you're going to lose readers.  Killers of the Flower Moon kind of runs into the same problems: it's an incredibly interesting situation and events, but in an effort to make it novel-length, the pacing can get dragged out and lose suspense.  Which I know is a ridiculous thing to say about a non fiction account of a historical event that you can definitely just look up and see how it ended.  But still!  One I read last year, Destiny of the Republic, manages to straddle this line well, I think partially because it really did take that long for Garfield to die (spoiler alert!), but it too got draggy there towards the end.

Anyway, if you want to know all about turn of the century and 1920s Nome, this is the place to start.  Honestly, nothing about how it is described sounds appealing.  Not only are you encased in snow for seven or eight months months and cut off from outside contact, contagious diseases also run rife through town.  

Once we skip past the introductory information and get to the dogsled race against death, it does pick up the pace, pun very much intended.  What's interesting is that, because the authors were working with whatever historical materials were available after the race, you can kind of see how some of racers get overlooked for the "celebrity" ones.  I have to assume that some of this was probably because of the native heritage of the non-celebrity dogsledders.  (I know that there is a better term for that but I already returned the book to the library, so we're sticking with "dogsledders").  There were twenty plus racers on the route, but only a few are highlighted.  Maybe the Salisburys had more they didn't want to include for fear of bogging it down, but I would read all twenty racers' recollections and not be satisfied.  From the accounts included, a lot of them also felt that it was simply a necessary task, and perhaps didn't know at the time just how much publicity it was getting in the lower 48, but stoicism is the bane of the historical record.  You gotta get out there and get those memories down, because everyone dies. 

The dogs get their proper dues in the book as well.  Due to the kerfuffle between Balto and Togo (and Seppala and Kaasen), the authors definitely have to explore that aspect of it, but since they don't really come down on one side or the other, I think in an effort not to tarnish anyone's efforts or memories, it doesn't really add much to the story.  The authors do discuss the second batch of serum, but don't really go into that relay at all.  There's definitely also a sense that they spent a lot of time on airplanes for nothing, since they were never used in the Serum Run, and I can see that they were trying to foreshadow the Serum Run as the last hurrah of the sleddog era, but it's an unnecessarily long detour away from the real action.

Anytime you have sleddogs and unforgiving nature, you want to spend as much time as you can on that story.  You have only to look at this year's race, where the front-running team decided to go on strike to realize that the dogs, loyal, clever, and brave, are the real heroes.  Which is what Seppala was arguing about all along - without them, would Nome still be on the map? Or would it be another ghost town, a cautionary tale about living beyond the edge of the world?


Cancer Ward and The Cruelest Miles have been, well, not depressing, exactly, but definitely not as light and frothy as some of my other selections (ahem, My Lady's Choosing) have been.  As a preemptive strike against gloominess, I'm now reading two very silly books: a YA crime mystery and a chick lit epistolary novel.

21: A Book By Two Female Authors

Little Princes

Little Princes, by Conor Grennan

In search of adventure, 29 year-old Conor Grennan traded his day job for a year-long trip around the globe, a journey that began with a three month stint volunteering at the Little Princes Children's Home, an orphanage in war-torn Nepal.

Conor was initially reluctant to volunteer, unsure whether he had the proper skill, or enough passion, to get involved in a developing country in the middle of a civil war. But he was soon overcome by the herd of rambunctious, resiliant children who would challenge and reward him in a way that he had never imagined. When Conor learned the unthinkable truth about their situation, he was stunned: The children were not orphans at all. Child traffickers were promising families in remote villages to protect their children from civil war - for a huge fee - by taking them to safety. They would then abandon the children far from home, in the chaos of Nepal's capital city, Kathmandu.

For Conor, what began as a footloose adventure becomes a commitment to reunite the children he had grown to love with their families, but this would be no small task. He would risk his life on a journey through the legendary mountains of Nepal, facing the dangers of a bloody civil war and a debilitating injury.

I am completely biased when it comes to this book. Almost three years ago now, in 2008, although I can't actually believe it's really been that long, I spent the summer working in Kathmandu, attempting to do my part to help Nepal get back on its feet after the ten year civil war between the Maoist rebels and the monarchy debilitated the country. I have many fond and less than fond memories of my time there, including the time I attempted to find the Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction despite not knowing any Nepali. If you're in need of some excitement in your life, I recommend trying to get into a guarded compound in a foreign country which has just recently had a civil war, where you don't speak the language and have to make your way around by showing random people a piece of paper where you've written what you really hope is the right name for this place and not just some random phrase that was on the website, in whatever mangled mess you've made of their alphabet. True story: one time I tried to cheer up my roommate by writing "Happy Birthday" in Russian, and she told me later that she thought a child had written it. Writing in a foreign alphabet is hard.

P.S. Isn't that website great? I love the picture of the old Ministry. I have no idea why the old Ministry was in the middle of what appears to be in a forest, on a mountain, but I appreciate their moving it into the city, because otherwise it would have been a much longer walk from my hotel.

Anyway, this is all beside the point, which is not unexpected, so whatever. The book. Little Princes is one of those books which is not so much about the writing as it is about the story and the problem, and the shedding of light on a previously dark corner. It's like Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea (and the sequel Stones into Schools), which is also about helping children in a war-torn, mountainous region in Asia. Unsurprisingly, I like both of these books, although obviously, Little Princes was more evocative to me, since I have not been to Afghanistan or Pakistan, nor do I have plans to visit in the near future, as it is very dangerous, and I would be scared to go.

In Little Princes, obviously, the problem is child trafficking and it is a heartbreaking story. Grennan does a good job of pacing the story and relating how each new circumstance brought forth the next one - from a short volunteering stint, to a longer one, to finding out the children's parents were not dead, to the discovery of the new children, and the promise made to them which was severed by the escalating violence and disruption. The book does slow down a bit towards the end - Grennan loses the urgency that powered the first three quarters of the book, and he spends a bit too much time dwelling on his burgeoning relationship with a sympathetic penpal who later becomes his wife.

What Little Princes does very well is describe the myriad and conflicting factors which surround child trafficking, and any solutions which may be attempted. Part of the problem was obviously the ongoing war, which has stopped, as have almost all acts of violence. However, during the war, getting the children back to their parents was problematic because of the risk of movement, and because parents would only want to send them away again to avoid conscription. Grennan also puts his finger on another issue: because these particular children wound up being cared for and educated and so on, the risk paid off. I would never want to be a parent and have to make that choice - to say, I can send my child away and perhaps they will be starved and left to fend for themselves or perhaps they will be found and taken care of, or I can keep them close, and perhaps they will be taken away to fight, or perhaps they will not. I can understand a parent who says: in both of those scenarios, in the worst case, my child could die, but in the best case, with me they would have to eke out a living, but in Kathmandu, they could make something of themselves, and then send them away. There are other reasons why reuniting these children with their parents does not go as smoothly and quickly as Grennan first assumes it will - the cost of travel, of having another child to feed, of reuniting after years apart.

Little Princes is poignant, as it illustrates very how just how messy war is - there are no easy choices made in this book, and even parents who send their children away with a child trafficker have your sympathy. The situation in Nepal goes unknown and unremarked too often (as is often the case with poorer countries which are not in the grips of an extraordinary violence). One of my Nepali contacts, a lawyer working with a NGO, said that things were better in 2008, yes, but that she'd seen peace before, and didn't know if it would last. I love Nepal, and perhaps if you read Little Princes you'll understand why. Or maybe you just have to go there.

(this little girl is judging you if you do not like Nepal)

For your further education:

Timeline of Recent Events

Next Generation Nepal (the organization founded by Grennan)

Pictures of Nepal (There's a menu on the left hand side of the page. I did not take these, nor do I know the person who did. But I love them, they remind me of being there. The Nepal ones basically go from Apr. 11, 2008 to Aug. 19, 2008)