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Good Books List

Good Books

2005 Archive


NON-FICTION

The Truth About the Drug Companies
By Marcia Angell, MD

The former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine makes a very strong case regarding our conflicted relationship with pharmaceutical companies.

On The Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health
By Jerome Kassirer, MD

Another former editor of the NEJM reviews the influence of drug companies and other medical suppliers on the moral compass of physicians.

The Great Unraveling
By Paul Krugman

Once help arrived in New Orleans after the destruction by Katrina, the TV talking heads shifted their focus away from the failures of the evacuation and relief effort to whether this catastrophe would effect major change in our cultural and political lives.

Paul Krugman is a better writer than talking head and he rarely appears on the Sunday morning news programs. An economics professor at Princeton, he is also a columnist for the New York Times. This book is a collection of columns he wrote between 2000 and 2003.

His central theory is that the Bush administration is a "revolutionary power" committed to replacing the post-New Deal order with an undiluted plutocracy. He writes clearly about complicated issues and offers plenty of data to support his theories regarding the intersection of business, economics and politics.

Many will think this book is all just Bush bashing, and there is plenty of that. But the book also compels us to think seriously about the proper role of government.

Many on the left would argue that the racial and economic divide revealed in our recent national disaster, likened to the sinking of the Titanic, argues for more government. Safety net? What safety net, and what should be the weave and who is holding the ends?

Others ask if we can't trust government to respond with appropriate urgency, coordination and fairness, how can more government be the answer?

The subtitle of Krugman's book is "Losing our Way in the New Century." To find our way will require national reflection regarding what we expect from government, and how we can make it more effective and more accountable to the greater good.  This lively and superbly informed book is a compelling start.

The World is Flat
By Thomas L. Friedman

This is the best book I read this past summer. You may remember From Beirut to Jerusalem, about 15 years ago for which Friedman won a Pulitzer Prize. In this latest book Friedman describes the convergence of technology that allowed India, China (and many other countries) to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the world's two most populous nations. Friedman translates complex economic and foreign policy issues so that even I could understand the implications. An economist, he clearly believes that globalization can benefit all of us, but we need to be aware and prepared, and we need to face our relationship to a much wider world in a less self-satisfied way than we have to date. There are plenty of implications here for business, for politics, for your personal budget and for careers for our kids. Buy this book.

Pillar of Fire
By Taylor Branch

Published in 1999, this book is a sequel to Parting the Waters, America in the King Years and will be followed by a third. It covers 1963-1965 and is a fascinating and detailed account of the civil rights movement at its height. Since I was about 8 years old at the time, I have only vague recollections of the violence of that era. But as we have witnessed the manslaughter conviction this summer of a Ku Klux Klansman for the murder of three civil rights workers forty-one years ago, the history of that time is still relevant. And we can appreciate the fragile coalition around Dr. Martin Luther King, and the amazing regular people, black and white, who were a part of this movement. 

FICTION

The Corrections
By Jonathan Franzen

If you missed this when it came out, it's a wonderful late summer read. It made Amazon.com's Best of 2001 list. The members of the Lambert family  have a host of "issues"-among them incipient dementia, denial, an inability to stay out of hot water and an arid marriage-that Franzen spins into a remarkable and very entertaining novel.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
By David Sedaris

Dr. Jeff Graham of Bellingham recommended this collection of short essays to me. Sedaris's fans are legion. He is prolific writer and is well known for his essays on NPR's "This American Life." In this book, he writes primarily about the odd and poignant Sedaris family, yet some chapters are laugh-out-loud funny.

Disgrace
By J.M. Coetzee

This is a powerful novel about a South African white professor whose career unravels after a complaint by a female student. He relocates to the countryside to live with his daughter, where the real disgrace occurs. There are a series of complications involving his career, his family and a number of black citizens of South Africa. The novel is filled with the dynamics of power, struggles between men and women, blacks and whites, even humans and dogs. Ultimately, the author manages to weave themes of power, redistribution, reformation, forgiveness and more into a tight and disciplined 200 pages. Coetzee, the author of numerous novels, in 2003 won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Indian Killer
By Sherman Alexie

This novel is several years old but really worth a look. A murderer is stalking and scalping white men in Seattle. John Smith, an Indian adopted into a white family, is driven into madness. A white ex-cop, attempting to pass as part Indian, exploits the killings for the benefit of his own novel. As fear builds in the city and among the Native American community, an unexpected climax. This is a beautiful, easy read, poignant and at times surprisingly funny. Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA, about 50 miles northwest of Spokane.

Another book recommendation

Jonathan F. Tait, MD, PhD, University of Washington professor of laboratory medicine, offers the following:

Never Let Me Go
By Kazuo Ishiguro

Is set in contemporary England, but an England subtly changed from what we know by medical and scientific decisions set in motion some sixty years ago. At one level, this novel is an enjoyable and simple story about three children growing up at an exclusive boarding school, and how their lives continue to intersect once they leave. At another level, it is a very troubling reflection on how a society can go terribly wrong in pursuing the consequences of medical advances. There is much for physicians to reflect on here-how the state can take over medical and scientific advances for its own purposes; how everyone yearns to know their origins; how those at the outermost margins of society still hope for love, children, and fulfilling work. 

There is some comfort that our own society has managed reasonably well in the areas of medical ethics touched on by this book; but one also realizes how we could also go far astray if we allow technology to trump ethics.

   
 

This list was taken from the 2005 WSMA Reports newsletters. To see current book selections, go to the Good Books List. To see past book selections, go to the Good Books List archives—2006, 2007 and 2008.


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