Saturday, June 4, 2011, at 2 p.m.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese. There is some brief biography at the front of the book, but also I found his website, where you can find out more about the man himself and his books and articles. From the website:

Born of Indian parents who were teachers in Ethiopia, he grew up near Addis Ababa and began his medical training there. When Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed, he briefly joined his parents who had moved to the United States, and worked as an orderly before returning to complete his medical education at Madras Medical College. he later retured to the U.S. for his residency as one of many foreign medical graduates. Like many other foreign medical graduates, he found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him, an experience he described in one of his early New Yorker articles, The Cowpath to America.

From Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was a resident from 1980 to 1983, he did his fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine, working at Boston City Hospital for two years. It was here that he first saw the early signs of the HIV epidemic and later, when he returned to Johnson City as an assistant professor of medicine, he saw the second epidemic, rural AIDS, and his life took the turn for which he is most well known -- his caring for numerous AIDS patients in an era when little could be done and helping them through their early and painful deaths was often the most a physician could do.

What does "cutting for stone" mean? I had to look up the origin of the phrase "cutting for stone," because it was obvious in the novel and from the various contexts in which it was used, that it had some cultural reference outside of the novel itself. It turns out that it is from the Hippocratic Oath, "I will not cut for stone, even in patients in whom the disease is manifest..." which is widely interpreted as drawing a distinction between being a physician and being a surgeon and a proscription against a physician performing procedures for which he is not qualified, even if it seems like easy money.


Ethiopia and Eritrea

Those of us at the meeting last month, who had already started Cutting for Stone remarked about what a fascinating place Ethiopia sounded like, so I rounded up some pictures from the internet.

Addis Ababa: The modern capital of Ethiopia, the setting of much of the novel, and the city of Marion Stone's (and Dr. Verghese's) youth.






























Axum: The ancient capital of Ethopia and the location of the treasury which houses what is claimed to be the original Ark of the Covenant. The first picture is the old St. Mary's church. The subsequent pictures are from in or near the new St. Mary's church (built by Haile Selassie). The last picture is of the treasury.





























Lalibela: This is the site of ancient churches carved from the surrounding rock hills. The last picture is the largest church in the world carved out of a single piece of stone.



































Eritrea: Now a sovereign nation, in the novel it was part of Ethiopia, the homeland of Rosina and Genet, and the country of rebels.

































Tizita (see pages 227 and 228): This is the song that Almaz sang as young Marion held her breast. It is the song that is synonymous with Ethiopia to the older Marion as he is living in the United States. As it says in the book, there are many versions. This is my favorite of the versions I found on YouTube.

You Know, I Don't Remember the 80's at All

For those of you who came looking for the book suggestions we're going to vote on Saturday, they're in the post down below.

Otherwise, it's time the get your 80’s groove on (via Sag Harbor).

First, pull on your Cosby sweater...

People we knew started wearing sweaters with mind-melting patterns, in tribute to the Coz Himself, and the barber shops buzzed up versions of Theo’s latest haircut, whatever he and his friends sported on set, in their brief careers, those handsome boys who went nowhere. The young men marched out of barbershops to all coordinates with flattops, fades, hi-tops of Pisan ambition: Theo’s army. “They’re a real Cosby Family,” people said, when acquaintances broke the atmosphere to better orbit. A term of affection and admiration. Page 193

...I walked in just in time to hear the newscaster say, “A surprising announcement about an American classic.” Somehow I knew. I stayed through the commercial break and watched as Roberto Goizueta, the CEO of Coca-Cola, cheered the end of the world. It was inconceivable, like tampering with the laws of nature. Hey, let’s try Gravity-Free Tuesdays, buckle up, motherfuckers. From this day on, water is incredibly flammable, see how that goes... Page 127

You Cha-Ka lookin’...

You could also preface things with a throat-clearing “You fuckin’,” as in “You fuckin’ Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost–lookin’ motherfucker,” directed at Bobby, for example, who had light brown skin, light brown hair, and indeed, shared these characteristics with the hominid sidekick on the Saturday morning adventure show Land of the Lost. Page 52


Here We Go...

Bobby turned on his MC voice, “One Two Three, in the place to be,” and Reggie said, “Alright!” They started their routine and I rolled my eyes in the darkness. Bobby and my brother had memorized the lyrics to Run-D.M.C.’s “Here We Go” and had to perform it at least ten times a day. Page 169



The highlight of the summer was the U.T.F.O.– Lisa Lisa concert...

Lisa Lisa was shorter in person, but her chest was bigger. I signed off on that. Page 253



U.T.F.O. (Un Touchable Force Organization) represented teen striving, youthful perseverance against the odds, and goofball personas that made our own stabs at reinvention look like genius. Page 235



Everybody Hated WLNG...

...All I could do was succumb to the LNG Effect. It proceeded thusly: out of the speakers emerged a song you’d heard only once before in your life, one that left such a faint record in your brain that it was a memory of a memory. Paralyzed by confusion, you wondered, “Where have I heard that before?” The answer was, Nowhere important. Page 269.

Time to Pick Books for October–January

New Nominees

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (fiction)
From Bookmarks Magazine: Critics loved Egan's newest novel, describing it as "audacious" and "extraordinary" (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the hands of a less-gifted writer, Egans's time-hopping narrative, unorthodox format, and motley cast of characters might have failed spectacularly. But it works here, primarily because each person shines within his or her individual chapter that offers a distinct voice and a fascinating backstory. A few reviewers mentioned the uneven nature of the chapters and the different stylistic experiments within them. Yet, hailed as "a frequently dazzling piece of layer-cake metafiction" (Entertainment Weekly), A Visit from the Goon Squad is a gutsy novel that succeeds on all levels.

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (fiction)
Amazon.com Review, Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2010: It is nearly impossible not to be drawn into horseracing cliches when describing Jaimy Gordon's novel Lord of Misrule, especially since it came out of the pack as a dark horse (there you go) to win the 2010 National Book Award for fiction the same week it was published. It's a novel of the track, and Gordon embraces racing's lingo and lore and even some of its romance of longshot redemption, though she knows those bets never really come in, at least the way you think they will. Her story is set at a backwater half-mile track in West Virginia in the early '70s, the sort of place where people wash up or get stuck or, if they're particularly cruel, carve out a provincial fiefdom. The horses there are washed up too but still somehow glorious, and they're as vividly and individually defined as the people who build their lives around them. Between horse and handler there's a sort of cross-species alchemy that, along with Gordon's gorgeous language and wise storytelling, provides the central beauty of her mud-caked but mythic tale, which Maggie, one of her most compelling characters, comes the closest to describing: "On the last little spit of being human, staring through rags of fog into the not human, where you weren't supposed to be able to see let alone cross, she could make a kind of home." — Tom Nissley

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen (nonfiction)
From Publishers Weekly. Starred Review: At first, the worst week of Janzen's life—she gets into a debilitating car wreck right after her husband leaves her for a guy he met on the Internet and saddles her with a mortgage she can't afford—seems to come out of nowhere, but the disaster's long buildup becomes clearer as she opens herself up. Her 15-year relationship with Nick had always been punctuated by manic outbursts and verbally abusive behavior, so recognizing her co-dependent role in their marriage becomes an important part of Janzen's recovery (even as she tweaks the 12 steps just a bit). The healing is further assisted by her decision to move back in with her Mennonite parents, prompting her to look at her childhood religion with fresh, twinkling eyes. (She provides an appendix for those unfamiliar with Mennonite culture, as well as a list of shame-based foods from hot potato salad to borscht.) Janzen is always ready to gently turn the humor back on herself, though, and women will immediately warm to the self-deprecating honesty with which she describes the efforts of friends and family to help her re-establish her emotional well-being. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones (fiction)
From Bookmarks Magazine: Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Overall Prize for Best Book and short-listed for the Booker Prize, Mister Pip delighted critics with its beautiful prose, compelling characters, and humane exploration of literature's power. They especially lauded Matilda, who learns to identify with Pip and, in the process, heals the rift with her mother. Not every scene is heartrending, however: this story is framed by rape, murder, and civil war. Some reviewers noted a few whiffs of paternalism from the author, some awkward dialogue, too much foreshadowing, and an odd ending. But in its exploration of how literature can bring joy amid great suffering, Mister Pip is a heartwarming and worthwhile coming-of-age novel. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (fiction)
Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2010: In this vivid and visceral work of historical fiction, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey imagines the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political philosopher and author of Democracy in America. Carey brings de Tocqueville to life through the fictionalized character of Olivier de Garmont, a coddled and conceited French aristocrat. Olivier can only begin to grasp how the other half lives when forced to travel to the New World with John "Parrot" Larrit, a jaded survivor of lifelong hardship who can’t stand his young master who he is expected to spy on for the overprotective Maman Garmont back in Paris. Parrot and Olivier are a mid-nineteenth-century Oscar and Felix who represent the highest and lowest social registers of the Old World, yet find themselves unexpectedly pushed together in the New World. This odd couple’s stark differences in class and background, outlook and attitude—which are explored in alternating chapters narrated by each—are an ingenious conceit for presenting to contemporary readers the unique social experiment that was democracy in the early years of America. — Lauren Nemroff

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (fiction)
From Publishers Weekly, Starred Review: Shteyngart (Absurdistan) presents another profane and dizzying satire, a dystopic vision of the future as convincing—and, in its way, as frightening—as Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's also a pointedly old-fashioned May-December love story, complete with references to Chekhov and Tolstoy. Mired in protracted adolescence, middle-aged Lenny Abramov is obsessed with living forever (he works for an Indefinite Life Extension company), his books (an anachronism of this indeterminate future), and Eunice Park, a 20-something Korean-American. Eunice, though reluctant and often cruel, finds in Lenny a loving but needy fellow soul and a refuge from her overbearing immigrant parents. Narrating in alternate chapters—Lenny through old-fashioned diary entries, Eunice through her online correspondence—the pair reveal a funhouse-mirror version of contemporary America: terminally indebted to China, controlled by the singular Bipartisan Party (Big Brother as played by a cartoon otter in a cowboy hat), and consumed by the superficial. Shteyngart's earnestly struggling characters—along with a flurry of running gags—keep the nightmare tour of tomorrow grounded. A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart's best yet. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Held Over Due to Popularity

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (fictionalized nonfiction)
From Publishers Weekly: For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith, the narrator of this true-life novel by her granddaughter, Walls, lived in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose megaselling memoir, The Glass Castle, recalled her own upbringing, writes in what she recalls as Lily's plainspoken voice, whose recital provides plenty of drama and suspense as she ricochets from one challenge to another. Having been educated in fits and starts because of her parents' penury, Lily becomes a teacher at age 15 in a remote frontier town she reaches after a solo 28-day ride. Marriage to a bigamist almost saps her spirit, but later she weds a rancher with whom she shares two children and a strain of plucky resilience. (They sell bootleg liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a baby's crib.) Lily is a spirited heroine, fiercely outspoken against hypocrisy and prejudice, a rodeo rider and fearless breaker of horses, and a ruthless poker player. Assailed by flash floods, tornados and droughts, Lily never gets far from hardscrabble drudgery in several states—New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois—but hers is one of those heartwarming stories about indomitable women that will always find an audience. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Just Kids by Patti Smith (nonfiction)
Amazon.com Review, Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2010: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren't always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late '60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices--or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe discovered he was gay, they divided their dimes between art supplies and Coney Island hot dogs. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his metier, with a Polaroid and then a Hasselblad, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her friend's delight, from a poet into a rock star. (Mapplethorpe soon became famous too--and notorious--before his death from AIDS in 1989.) Smith's memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and artful, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous, with the oracular style familiar from her anthems like "Because the Night," "Gloria," and "Dancing Barefoot" balanced by her powers of observation and memory for everyday details like the price of automat sandwiches and the shabby, welcoming fellow bohemians of the Chelsea Hotel, among whose ranks these baby Rimbauds found their way. — Tom Nissley

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (nonfiction)
Amazon.com Review, Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? — Tom Nissley

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister (fiction)
Product Description from Amazon.com: A "heartbreakingly delicious" national bestseller about a chef, her students, and the evocative lessons that food teaches about life. Once a month, eight students gather in Lillian's restaurant for a cooking class. Among them is Claire, a young woman coming to terms with her new identity as a mother; Tom, a lawyer whose life has been overturned by loss; Antonia, an Italian kitchen designer adapting to life in America; and Carl and Helen, a long-married couple whose union contains surprises the rest of the class would never suspect... The students have come to learn the art behind Lillian's soulful dishes, but it soon becomes clear that each seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen. And soon they are transformed by the aromas, flavors, and textures of what they create.

Colson Whitehead on Sag Harbor

Miscellaneous Somewhat Relevant Lit News

I'm sure many of you have heard about the critical "60 Minutes" segment last Sunday and the controversy that is swirling around Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea (our book selection in November 2008). If not, here is a link to a San Francisco Chronicle article about the controversy. The article also has links to Greg Mortenson's response to the accusations.

Also related to one of our earlier selections (1906: A Novel by James Dalessandro from January of this year), on last Sunday, in honor of the 105th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake, the Chronicle printed the first of two articles containing excerpts from the diary of Leonie von Zesch, a resident of San Francisco, at the time of the quake. 23 years old, and a practicing dentist. The story of the woman herself and how her diaries were almost lost is almost as interesting as her observations of the quake. Check it out.

Related to yet another of our past selections (Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro from January 2007), they made a movie out of it. Silly me, I did not know that. Here's a comment from Mick LaSalle's column:

Dear Mick LaSalle: I was amazed that "Never Let Me Go" was not one of the 10 best nominees of 2010. Why didn't it get any nominations?

-- Bob Zimmerman, Lafayette, Calif.

Dear Bob Zimmerman: It can't have helped that it's about the most depressing movie imaginable. Academy voters get DVDs of the Oscar contenders, and a movie's chances go down if viewers feel like killing themselves after an hour.

Here's the official trailer.



In news about a book we didn't read but which was nominated at one time to be one of our selections, Water for Elephants has just been released as a movie. Here's the trailer for that.

News from Farm City

Linda spotted this article in the San Francisco Chronicle: Oakland gardener questions need for permit to sell produce.

I remember when Novella Carpenter spoke here at the library, she said she never paid much attention to permits and zoning regulations. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I hope the law gets changed.

NOLA Links

The following is an excerpt from "When the Levees Broke," a documentary series that Spike Lee produced for HBO. I just got disc 1 from Netflix and am hoping to be able to watch it tonight


This second video is the trailer from "Treme," a series that debuted last year, also from HBO. It was produced by the same people who produced "The Wire," which may be my all-time favorite TV series ever. I have "Treme" in my Netflix queue and look forward to watching it as soon as it is available.


Finally, a link to the web page of The Zeitoun Foundation, to which a portion of the profits of the book will be donate.