Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Book: Breaking Night by Liz Murray

A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard.

Liz and her sister Lisa grew up with parents who were hard-core drug abusers. They lived in New York City. There is one B & W photo of her mother who looks a bit like Janis Joplin but with dark hair. Her parents used drugs intravenously every day.

"A man had beaten Daddy's head into the cement just down the block...and it had taken him almost an hour to stagger home. But by the very next day, Daddy was out of the house again, copping drugs. Like Ma, has addiction was so strong that he gambled his safety night after night....he climbed the stairs to smooth out Ma's crinkled dollar bills, giving them over to the drug dealer in exchange for the packages of powder that ruled my parents' world."

Liz grew up somehow but almost never went to school. For years and years she ran the streets with her street family, a group of friends who cared for her and she for them. Many also had compromised lives but they struggled together, helped each other and were her salvation. She became adept at avoiding trunacy officials, at working off and on in marginal non-official capacities, at doing everything she could to help her mother. For a long, long time, their dirty disorganized apartment was a haven for her. Her parents would occasionally emerge from their drug hazes, and there would be a semblance of normalcy and love that sufficed for Liz. She became their protectors, especially looking out for her mother, watching from the window at night for her to stagger home from the bar.

But then her Ma gets sick with AIDS and also has periodic mental breakdowns requiring hospitalizations. She would return home and be clean and sober for short periods of time, but always quickly relapsed. Her mother sold herself for drugs and finally moved in with a brutish man named Brick, off IV drugs but not off alcohol.

Liz finally is forced to live on the streets, on park benches, sleeping in subway cars, on landings in friends' apartment buildings, or hidden in friends' rooms, arriving after a parent had gone to bed and leaving before they got up. She stole food to survive; she was dirty and tattered and cold and hungry much of the time. And then, at age 17 with ONE high-school credit to her name, she hears about Humanities Preparatory Academy and gets accepted, although this meant, among other hurdles, that her Dad needed to sign papers to register her. Her mother had died and her Dad was living in a shelter by this time, but he comes to the school and fills out the papers.

And as they leave the school:

"He didn't ask questions, and I hoped it would stay that way. What I was avoiding in every way possible, was for him to know what I was really going through. Because if he found out, I knew it would hurt him. Then he'd be living in a shelter and worrying about me too. Then I'd worry about him worrying about me, and what good would that do either of us?" An amazing and poignant reaction to a man who had done so little to nurture his daughter. That she had the wisdom at age 17 to accept and forgive and love her parents is also why Liz' story is remarkable. Seldom is this the case with such messed up parents.

Liz perseveres and does go to Harvard and eventually she has her Dad move in with her and some friends in Cambridge.

"Just a month before Daddy died, Ed and I took him a on long-awaited trip to San Farncisco...Ed and I just followed Daddy to his favorite spots: Haight-Ashbury, Alcatraz, and his beloved City Lights Bookstore..."

He died 3 weeks later; he too had AIDS, but had been 8 years sober by then.

One's heart aches for Liz and her sister and even for her pathetic addicted parents, but this is a compelling story of the human spirit, determination, discipline and love emerging from chaos.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Book: A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer

This a little book of essays about viruses written "to help people understand more about viruses and virology research." There are 12 chapters and a lovely photo at the beginning of each chapter showing viral forms:

1. The Tobacco Mosaic Virus was discovered by Dutch scientists Mayer and Beierinck in the late 1900s by filtering diseased and ground-up tobacco plants through a fine filter that trapped plant cells and bacteria. The juice that got through the filter still infected plants. "Beijerinck could add alcohol to the filtered fluid and it would reman infective. Heating the fluid to near boiling did it no harm. Beijerinck soaked filter paper in the infectious sap and let it dry. Three months later, he could dip the paper in water and use the solution to sicken new plants." He first used the word virus "to describe the mysterious agent in his contagious living fluid."

2. The Uncommon Cold - Rhinovirus. A virus with only 10 genes and spread by contact. Wash YOUR hands and don't touch your face. Nothing much works to "cure" the common cold.....yet. Scientists are always working on vaccines.

3. Influenza virus. "In 1918, a particularly virulent outbreak of the flu killed an estimated 50,000,000 people. Nowadays, approximately 300,000 people die worldwide from the influenza virus. H1N1 is a flu virus that, fortunately, was not all that virulent. Wash your hands and don't touch your face. See Contagion (movie) if you want more information about how a flu pandemic could (and probaby will) eventually happen.

4. Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Can cause cervical cancer but there is a vaccine. "Of the 30,000,000 American women who carry HPV, only 13,000 a year develop cervical cancer."

5. Bacteriophages. A possible alternative to antibiotics, bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that attack bacteria, which is noteworthy as antibiotics continue to become resistant to the organisms they target.

6. Marine Phages. Interesting chapter about viruses living in the oceans. Among other facts is this one:"By one rough calculation, 10% of all the photosynthesis on Earth is carried out with virus genes" or "The genetic makeup of marine viruses...matches almost nothing...Only 10% showed any match to any gene from any microbe, animal, plant or other organism--even from any other known virus. The other 90% were entirely new to science." (This from seawater samples from Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and the northern Pacific.)

7. Endogenous Retroviruses. Things get more complicated. I think these are viruses that acquire and add DNA from a host. It's all about exchanging DNA and mutating. "Each of us carries amost 100,000 fragments of endogenous retrovirus DNA in our genome, making up about 8% of our DNA."

8. HIV. Most likely spread from Kinshasha, and HIV probably came from chimpanzees. As our world becomes more a global community, viruses come along with us, moving more freely than ever, down rivers and roads and over the sea and land in airplanes, buses and trains. Do not have unprotected sex and wear gloves when encountering bodily fluids.

9. West Nile Virus. Spread by mosquitoes from infected birds to people. "Between 1999 and 2008, US doctors recorded nearly 30,000 cases of West NIle virus." One gets fevers, rashes and headaches but 85% infections do not even cause symptoms. Nevertheless, in those 10 years, 1131 people died, about 110 per year. There is no vaccine at this time. Warm, muggy, rainy weather are optimal conditions for mosquitoes and the time to be most cautious. Try not to get bit by mosquitoes.

10. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrom (SARS) and Ebola or Predicting the Next Plague. SARS "started in Chinese bats....and began to spill over into a catlike mammal called a civet...and then evolved the ability to leap from human and human." The virus was discovered relatively quickly and measures were taken (quarantines, banning civets) and the virus "disappeared, but did cause 900 deaths.

Ebola virus, while horrific, "is just too good at making people sick and so it kills its victims faster than it can find new ones. Once an Ebola outbreak ends, the virus vanishes for years."

11. Smallpox. An interesting chapter on the history of a virus that "may have killed more people than any other disease on Earth." A vaccine was developed and smallpox was totally eradicated on Earth although there are small stocks here and there to be used by scientists (or bioterrorists). There is controversy about preserving this lethal virus of course.

12. Mimivirus, a gigantic virus with 1262 genes (usually viruses have about 10 genes) first found in a water cooling system. They are 100 times bigger than other viruses and are puzzling scientists once again on how and where to classify these organisms...where to place them on the life forms continuum.

So, very briefly, viruses are ubiquitous; minuscule (way smaller than bacteria) and are not killed by antibiotics. They have potential to kill us; they mutate; they move between humans and other fauna, changing as they go in order to stay alive.

Wash your hands; don't touch your face, and keep doing everything your can to promote your own personal healthy effective immune system.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Book: 2030 by Albert Brooks

The Real Story of What Happens to America

This is a funny provocative book. Funny because Albert Brooks is gifted at writing humor and provocative because 2030 is only 18 years from now. Technology has continued to define the lives of Americans, and as a result people are living much longer, are healthier, more energetic, more vital and are using too many resources...or so say a growing group of younger (20 to 40-year-olds) who fear nothing will be left for them. And, perhaps that is true. Groups like Youth for Equality begin protesting and acting against the "olds." A devastating earthquake pretty much levels Los Angeles, and the US is way too broke to fix LA. Ah....what to do about all this. The President turns to China and tries to borrow even more money but the Chinese say no. They, however, do offer something.

And then the President's mother (whom he never liked all that much) becomes one of the elderly who "live" several years in a coma. Facilities warehouse those kept alive on machines, but the rooms are tastefully decorated, the tubes and lines are mostly hidden, and the staff always tells visitors that the "patient" seemed to smile the other day.....anything to keep false hope alive in the families.

Random examples of Brooks' writing:

"Compassionate Care was a very successful business, housing thousands of older people who needed sophisticated machines to keep them in their comas. Hospitals certainly couldn't handle them, and nursing homes had no place for people living on machines only. "

"He believed that many of the pro-lifers never thought about life as an entire journey. Just get human beings here any way possible and the rest will be figured out. Who would do that? Who would figure it out?...The pro-life movement only cares about the human while it's still in the mother. As soon as it's born, the pro-choice people have to take care of it."

"A new infrastructure has been built up around the electric car. One of the things that really caught on was the modern-day drive-in, known as the Charge N' Eat. Gasoline could only be sold by the oil companies, but electricity could be sold by anyone, and it was...As their cars were charging, customers could order food and cute roller-skating girls delivered it...If people needed to get going in a hurry, they could charge their cars with the ultrafast electrical pumps, but that cost more, like premium gas. So most people opted for the cheap thirty-minute slow charge, and they had to have something to do while they waited. Why not munch burgers and fries?"

And on and on....

This is an entertaining, funny novel. I laughed a lot while also realizing Brooks is laying out issues our nation will surely face sooner than later.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Book: Nightwoods by Charles Frazier

Nightwoods is a wonderful novel by the man who wrote Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons. It is set in the 1960s in the hills of North Carolina.

Luce is a young woman, living in an old lodge, generally satisfied with her life, although she is isolated, and has limited social contact. The lodge was once a successful vacation destination, situated across a mountain lake from the nearest town. It is now only a relic, empty except for Luce. The owner was an elderly gentleman who died and left his property to a wandering, footloose grandson named Stubblefield. When Luce's sister is murdered by her brutal low-minded husband, Luce becomes the caretaker of a young niece and nephew, nearly mute and feral children who love to start fires and who settle in with Luce, but reluctantly.

The book is beautifully written, evoking so clearly the seasons and landscape of North Carolina, the creeks and twisting mountain roads, the woods and trails, the weather and fauna. There are flashbacks to Luce's adolescence and Frazier has also drawn fine characters: the children, the murdering husband, the lawman with his addictions, the small town folk, along with Luce and Stubblefield and Maddie, an old woman of the hills, surviving on her own, who becomes part of the salvation. The story has a beginning, a middle and an ending, all satisfactory, and along the way, tells of a time and place in our country in vivid prose.

The book is rich in description and narrative--a love story that moves in several directions enveloping the memorable characters.

"She sipped Scotch considerably older than she was, the taste of time in its passing in harmony with the outer world, where poplars were already half bare and long grasses drooped burnt from the first frost. The call of an evening bird, and the sun low. Bands of lavender and slate clouds moving against a metallic sky, denoting the passage of autumn. Fallen leaves blown onto the porch. The planet racking around again towards winter."

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Book: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

William E. Dodd was offered the position of ambassador to Germany by President Franklin Roosevelt (after several others declined as Dodd learned later, tempering his pride somewhat). In 1933, he travels by ship across the Atlantic to Berlin with his wife and two grown children, Bill and Martha. He becomes a disillusioned, sad and frustrated man as he witnesses the changes happening to a Germany he loved and remembered fondly from his student days in Leipzig years before.

Martha Dodd was a very modern woman, flirtatious, intelligent, not overly concerned with propriety, and Larsen had the benefit of her many written observations during their stay in Germany.

What fascinated me was how reluctant the United States was to believe and censor Germany as Hitler began his rise to power as chancellor and then became the supreme leader after the death of President Hindenburg. It is a strange and barely comprehensible story even to this day. Dodd was eventually forced to quit his post, a bit earlier than he would have left Germany anyway. His predictions of Hitler's evil intentions vindicated him later in life, but he was never accorded his due as ambassador since a few high-ranking officials in the US government just did not like this quiet, unassuming man, a man who wanted to live within his means and not fritter time and money, a man who kept trying to alert the US to the reality of what was happening in Germany. Dodd thought for awhile that the common sense of the German people would surely prevail and Hitler would be ousted but, when that did not happen, he felt powerless to effect change and was revolted by what was becoming more and more obvious to him.

Slowly and inexorably Hitler and his henchmen moved to the status of monsters, appealing to German pride and nationalism, but also exploiting the darker urges and unexpressed thoughts of the German people.

The Dodd family at first was inclined to not meddle in Germany's internal affairs. This was the prevailing reason (along with a pervasive anti-Semitism) that many in the US offered when they looked the other way. And times were different without today's instant communication from nearly any spot in the world, so events were likely diluted and diminished by the passage of time. What is immediate today would be month-old news 80 years ago.

The book is not a history of those times; it merely glances at them through one American family, albeit a high-profile family, whose members and acquaintances documented their experiences in the cafes, restaurants, salons and streets of Berlin in the mid 1930s.

Can most of us ever understand anything about the rise of Nazism and Hitler? Not if we don't make an attempt. Reading this book, I learned a a bit about the years leading up to WWII. I was wandering through the library stacks at Herrick the other morning and happened on a book titled My Wounded Heart or The Story of a Jewish Mother and Her Children in Hitler's Germany. There is black and white photo on the cover...of a family: a mother and father and four children. These specific memoirs often can make history more vivid, more real, more terrible or heroic or mundane, than any "history" book.

Larsen's book also has a subtitle: Love, Terror and and American Family in Hitler's Berlin.