Taking Turns

Taking turns: stories from HIV/AIDS care unit 371 / MK Czerwiec, 231 pgs.

A wonderful example of non-fiction graphic lit which gives a history of Unit 371, a HIV/AIDS care unit that treated patients like family and made a difference in their lives and deaths.  M. K. Czerwiec started her nursing career on the unit and her experiences there informed everything else in her life.  This is a history of her experiences but deeper in that she interviewed surviving patients and coworkers to come up with a beautiful history of the unit and the time.

The Ninth Hour: a Novel

The Ninth Hour: a Novel / Alice McDermott, 247 p.

Jim is an Irish immigrant to Brooklyn who, one dreary February afternoon, closes the windows of his tenement and turns up the gas, setting his young pregnant wife on an unexpected course, along with the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor who come to her rescue.

I love McDermott; she is one of very few fiction writers who depict American Catholic experience without kitsch.  In this case, a family saga provides the backdrop for an up-close look at the lives and work of women religious in their heyday, at the turn of the last century when in Catholic neighborhoods they were nurses, social service workers and teachers and lived in intimate connection to the families they served.  McDermott is not uncritical or dewy-eyed in her portrayal, but she draws vividly the unceasing physical labor, skill and grit that characterized the work of these women.  The Ninth Hour makes a lovely homage but as a piece of fiction I prefer Charming Billy and After This.