Book: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The subtitle is A Biography of Cancer.

Elegantly written and fascinating, this book kept my interest through its several hundred pages. It is a detective story, a story of individuals (mostly scientists helped by lay people and politicians who supported and funded the science) along the historical byways of cancer who added pieces to the puzzle of what cancer is and what is isn't. This incredibly complex puzzle is certainly not complete but the researchers and scientists and physicians continually find and fit more pieces.

Ultimately, cancer is us; it is first a cell in our body that mutates in certain conditions, under certain influences (some known, others yet to be discovered), and the normal regulating rhythms and mechanisms of healthy cells no longer function. These mutated cells become super cells and some (but not all) outwit any attempt to eradicate them or disable them.

Because we all know someone with cancer or have cancer ourselves, this book has a compelling pertinence. Learning about this entity which threatens, terrifies and saddens us can help us understand what it is and perhaps even allow us to find solace and hope somehow.

Because this author writes so eloquently and lucidly about this subject, one can learn a lot about cancer from reading this book and can learn without losing one's way in pages of obscure science or boring disquisitions. I surely did.

He writes of his daughter's birth:

"Leela was born on a warm night at Massachusetts General Hospital, then swaddled in blankets and brought to the newborn unit on the fourteenth floor. The unit is directly across from the cancer ward. (The apposition of the two is hardly a coincidence. As a medical procedure, childbirth is least likely to involve infectious complications and is thus the safest neighbor to a chemotherapy ward, where any infection can turn into a lethal rampage...)

When I cut that cord, a part of me was the father, but the other part an oncologist. Umbilical blood contains one of these richest known sources of blood-forming stem cells--cells that can be stored away in cryobanks and used for a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia in the future, an intensely precious resource often flushed down a sink in the hospitals after childbirth. The midwives rolled their eyes; the obstetrician, an old friend, asked jokingly if I ever stopped thinking about work....Even in this most life-affirming of moments, the shadows of malignancy--and death--were forever lurking on my psyche."

The author is a staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center. He graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School. In writing this book, he combines the precision of the science and the humanity of the individuals involved in the telling of this story to make a wonderful book.

Birds: Western Grebes

Maria and I were on a road trip in mid September, driving from Montana to Michigan. We had intended to drive through Sand Lake NWR in northeastern South Dakota, but the auto route was closed, so we were driving in the general "neighborhood" and found ourselves driving east on a gravel road, just north of the refuge. Almost immediately, we realized we had hit the mother lode of Western grebe-dom.

The area was flooded and the road was actually closed to "tractors and trailers" but not to automobiles. We were surrounded by high water, and the marginal road was only a few inches higher than the surface. The sky was blue and the temperature was in the high 60s; there was no wind and very few insects. What there was were hundreds of birds, especially the Western grebes, all around us, vocalizing, swimming, diving, very close. It was magical! We could easily see the distinguishing black on the head covering the eye, which distinguishes the Western from the Clark's grebe. There were also hawks and herons and double-crested cormorants and yellow-headed blackbirds and a miscellany of shorebirds that day, including a Wilson's snipe with its improbably long bill at the edge of a pond early in the misty morning, a nice start to a memorable birding day.

There was a rookery with 100s of nests in the flooded trees to the south of the Western grebe area. A probable prairie falcon began feeding on a dead fish just up the road but a vehicle passed from the opposite direction and it flew off before we could positively identify it. We watched a pair of hawks (likely Swainson's) fly in nearly perfect symmetry for several minutes; we saw several rough-legged hawks with pale heads, perched on fence posts.

And we saw cattle egrets hanging around some cows, and great white egrets and snowy egrets in the reedy marshes, along with great-blue herons. Nice day.....

Bird: Black-capped Chickadee

This noon, on a quintessential Indian summer day, all warm sunshine and colorful falling leaves, I was sitting on Eunice's front porch. Suddenly a black-capped chickadee flew onto the porch, flailed about a bit, and awkwardly landed on her mailbox. I watched as this cute little black and white bird hung from the bottom of the mailbox by one foot for a few seconds before collecting its wits and flying off.

Book: When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle

The North Channel Islands lie off the coast of southern California. Feral pigs and rats are invasive species that are to be totally eradicated: rats from Anacapa, and pigs on Santa Cruz. Alma Boyd Takesue is a scientist working for the National Park Service, overseeing and coordinating the killing, and this is mostly her story. She has public battles with animal rights activists, especially Dave LaJoy, a nasty character who is determined to sabotage the killings. She is a also a daughter and granddaughter of extraordinary women and Alma has a private life involving choices and outcomes apart from her work on the islands.

The author makes a story of Alma and the contentious issues that arise as the planning and process of eradication evolves during this period in her life, with chapters exploring the history of the islands, tales of shipwrecks and of the sheep that once grazed on Santa Cruz; he describes the wild beauty of these islands and how an equilibrium of species is always tenuous.

While Boyle wonderfully invents and writes his characters, I did not find the evil Dave LaJoy all that credible. How such a self-indulgent, angry man could care so much about rats and pigs didn't seem reasonable to me. But the point was that this interspecies "meddling" does occur, is not universally embraced, and protestors are often impassioned folk, not above using violence or defying the laws. There are always arguments to be made in defense of or against such actions of rearranging the flora or fauna in a given environment.

While the annihilation of a specific population of fauna on these islands was the underpinning of this novel, there is so much more that makes it rich and colorful and a pleasure to read.

Book: Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

This is novel about the Vietnam War, specifically about Bravo Company and the soldiers who lived and died while fighting the North Vietnamese Army west of Cam Lo. While Matterhorn is a fictional hill rising from the jungle, much of this novel is based on the author's Vietnam experiences.

I found it compelling, informative, full of tragedy, some comedy, every page dense with the grittiness and reality of war in the jungle. But there are grace notes in unexpected places throughout the book that make it more than just a war story. The time is 1969; racial tensions are very much a part of the civilian and military psyches. The disconnect between the majors and colonels and the men they command, the men who do the actual fighting and killing, the men who live in terror and with the knowledge that they may very well not survive the next 24 hours...this disconnect is also a part of the story.

A paragraph chosen randomly:
"Mellas looked at the tableau of friends around him. Some of them would very likely be dead in an hour. Fracasso, who was barely old enough to drink, really showed his fear. He was writing everything he could in his notebook bouncing up and down in a crouch, his teeth bared in a tense grin. Goodwin, the hunter was nervous, like a runner before a race, possessing some primitive ability to lead men into situations where death was the understood payoff. Kendall, worried sick, his face pallid, his helmet already on his head, was leading a platoon that didn't trust him. Finch, at age twenty-three, had already worn responsibility that most men only debated about. He was now taking 190 kids into battle, and his decisions would determine how many came back. The kids, dreaming of R & R, remembering the R & R from which they'd just returned, some savoring a memory of smooth brown skin pressed against their own, a few remembering wives left behind at antiseptic airports. And Mellas: In less than an hour there could be no Mellas."

For those of us who support wars and for those of us who don't, this book tells us what exactly war is, who the servicemen are, and how and why as young men they find themselves in a jungle (or desert) fighting for our country.