Brain Storm

Brain Storm / Elaine Viets 305 pgs.

Angela Richman is having a bad day...she is beset with migraines and working a death scene with a young, beautiful teen as a victim and others with horrible injuries.  She ends up at the E.R. where a doctor tells her she is too young to suffer from a stroke and sends her home.  There, she proceeds to have multiple strokes and wakes up 19 days later in the hospital post brain surgery, head shaving, and feeling pretty bad.  During her recovery, the doctor who made the horrible misdiagnosis in her case, is murdered.  Angela isn't really up to investigating but the prime suspect is the Dr. Tritt who saved her life and operated on her brain.  She is determined to save Tritt from being framed even though he is the obvious perp.  With a tough talking best friend, a love of a decent margarita and a brain that is having a little trouble telling fact from fiction, Angela is a great character.  Set in a fictionalized St. Louis, I was sad to read the idea for the misdiagnosis and later multiple strokes is based on the author's actual experience.  I saw Viet's speak once at a library and she is great.  This book is, I believe, the first since her personal medical travails.

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of the President by Candice Millard

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of the President by Candice Millard, 339 pages.

I was lucky enough to get a signed copy of this award-winning book at last year's ALA. It was written by a woman who is widely known not only as a great writer, but also as the most beautiful of all historians. My copy, unfortunately, was replaced in transit through the Post Office's "we reserve the right to replace any books that fall out of boxes that we accidentally destroy with randomly selected other books from our lost book pile" policy, so I had to read a library copy instead.

Millard, the author of River of Doubt, does an excellent job illuminating the tragedy of Garfield's shooting by Charles Guiteau, a crazy, crazy man, the subsequent malpractice by eminent physician D. Willard Bliss, a self-promoting know-it-all, and Garfield's two months of suffering before his death. She also weaves this all into the larger narrative of the United States during the 1880s, with James G. Blaine, Roscoe Conkling, and Vice-President Chester Alan Arthur featuring prominently.
An interesting book, that moves along smartly.

Check our Catalog.

Downloadable Audio.

Ebook.