I write this during the final hour of the week, having once again (just barely) attained the four-book goal. All the selections were non-fiction and quite good, actually. I’ve had a very decent year so far in terms of liking what I’ve read. Considering the near-randomness of the choices up to this point (admittedly, some titles were settled upon for their brevity), I’ve done rather well in the picking.
Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
was the first - read, for the most part, in a clinic waiting room. Sacks is a neuroscientist who shares his most interesting patients with the reader, recounting the tales in a 19th-century style. My favourite is entitled “Phantoms”, about the sensation of still having body parts no longer there because of amputation. It’s really fascinating.
I read Elie Wiesel’s Night because it was long overdue. I had planned on reading it for a few years now, but never got to it. Since our library got the new and crispy Oprah Book Club edition, I figured it was time. It is as excellent as everyone says, not because it’s well-written, but because it’s haunting. A couple of things stand out and set it apart from other Holocaust memoirs. The first is that one of the men in Wiesel’s village had warned the villagers of what would happen to them in lurid detail. He had, you see, been transported early, and watched every person he was with get killed. He managed to escape, and then returned to tell the tale. Nobody listened; nobody believed; most perished because of it. The second disturbing thing is that Wiesel essentially abandoned his father in the end, a decision he regrets still. This book ranks as one of the essential Shoah texts, along with the Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz(also called If This Is a Man).
The next book was Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. I really liked it, and it fits very nicely with Theodore Dalrymple’s incredible Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses (a must-read, emphasis on the 'must'). The author, a Brit, wrote it to show how the values of the Enlightenment have been essentially abandoned in favour of superstition, religious zeal, relativism, and emotional hysteria. His arguments are well-formed and convincing.
The last book of the week, and the night for that matter, is Blood & Guts: A Short History of Medicine, by Roy Porter. This is a fine primer on medical history, covering everything from blood-letting to hospitals, replete with quackery, dissection, and cures. How can one resist a title like this?
I sign off for now, requiring the 'sleeping cure'. A demain.
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