What is better than reading a good book on a chilly evening in front of the fireplace. Below are 4 co-worker recommended books with reviews that you may find worthwhile and pleasurable reading.
1. Recommendation by Pat Murphy
In the Land of the Grasshopper Song by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed.
In 1908 two young women -- the authors of this book -- accepted Indian Service appointments as field matrons for the Karok Indians in the Klamath and Salmon River country of northern California. Although the area had been the scene of a gold rush some fifty years earlier, they write in the Foreword, "the social life of the Indian -- what he believed and the way he felt about things -- was very little affected by white influence. The older Indians still had the spaced tattoo marks on their forearms, by which they could measure the length of the string of wampum required to buy a wife . . . . The white men we knew on the Rivers were pioneers of the Old West . . . . All around us was gold country, the land of the saloon and of the six-shooter. Our friends and neighbors carried guns as a matter of course, and used them on occasion. But the account given in these pages is not of these occurrences but of everyday life on the frontier in an Indian village, and what Indians and badmen did and said when they were not engaged in wiping out their friends and neighbors. It is also the account of our own two years in Indian country where, in the sixty-mile stretch between Happy Camp and Orleans, we were the only white women, and most of the time quite scared enough to satisfy anybody."
Quite interesting.
2. Recommended by Jane Lynch
Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
“A splendid book.”
It goes full circle, from the protagonist (Jakob Jankowski) joining the circus as a young man at the beginning of the story to his "escape" from a nursing home at "age 90 or maybe 93," when he departs with a kindly man on a modern circus train. Such a perfect ending!
The interim is filled with the gamut of human emotions and interactions, good and evil, funny and tragic, love and hate, in a milieu filled with circus animals and "circus freaks."
3. Recommended by Nancy Mendoza
The Whistling Seasons by Ivan Doig.
This novel takes place in Montana during the early 1900s and centers around the lives of a widowed father and his three 3 school-age son, the town’s one room schoolhouse, a hired house keeper, and the housekeeper’s intellectual and interesting brother.. A refreshingly wonderful story.
4. Recommended by Mary Jaeger
My Sisters Keeper by Jodi Picoult.
The story addresses a family who has a child who develops a rare type of leukemia. They cannot find a donor match for her so they have another child, a "Genetic Match" so she can be a "cord blood donor" for her sister
But as the years go on, the little girl is expected and needed for many procedures and to be an ongoing donor. Now at age 15, her parents want her to donate a kidney. She hires a lawyer to become medically emancipated from her parents. The book is written from each person’s perspective and their roles in the matter. It addresses many ethical issues in medicine today.
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