Friday 5ive- September 9, 2022

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly-ish post featuring five things that caught my attention this week. Ive been off for the last few weeks, my family took a trip to Scotland and Ireland, and I will be posting about that separately. (It was an amazing trip!)

1)  I visited the new location of Bookstore1 in Sarasota, Florida last week. It's a wonderful bookstore, and the most inpressive part of the store is their Staff Recommends display. It is the largest Staff Recommends display I've ever seen. They have a huge two-sided unit filled with books and as you wander the store, you'll find more recommendations throughout mixed in with their regular displays. They must be a very literate staff! I chatted a bit with Roxanne, and picked up a Staff Recommended novel- Carter Bays' The Mutual Friend. If you ever visit Sarasota, you must stop by.

2)  Everyone in NYC loves to watch the US Open, and I confess that I have not been bitten by that bug- until this year. Watching Serena Williams win her match against the number two ranked player was thrilling, one of the most exciting sporting events I have ever seen. Now I am pulling for Frances Tiafoe to win on the Men's side, he has an incredible story. 

3)  Like everyone else I was saddened to hear of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. She had a remarkable reign spanning 70 years and her devotion to duty and her country will long be remembered. When we were at Edinburgh Castle a few weeks ago, we saw not only the Crown Jewels, but also the Stone of Destiny. The stone will be placed under the throne at Westminster Abbey at King Charles III's coronation as is tradition. And we saw it in person! (But we couldn't take photos.) 

4)  We're watching Five Days at Memorial on Apple TV+, based on the book by Sheri Fink. (We both thought the book was so powerful.) The true story takes place in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, when Baptist Memorial Hospital was left to fend for themselves after New Orleans flooded. They lost power, ran out of food and water, and had no plan or way to evacuate their hundreds of patients, staff and community members who sought safety from the hurricane. When the New Orleans Police Department finally shows up after five days, they are there to enforce an evacuation order, and doctors and nurses are forced to leave patients behind who cannot be evacuated. How some of these patients died is the question to be answered. It's riveting television with amazing performances led by Vera Farmiga and Cherry Jones. 

5) I've read alot recently, including some terrific historical novels based on real people and events from two books I loved in 2021. Lauren Willig's Two Wars and a Wedding  follows a character from last year's Band of Sisters (one of my favorite books from 2021). Smith College graduate Betsy Hayes studies archeology at the American School in Greece in 1896 and desperately wants to go on a dig, but women are not allowed. When a war breaks out between Greece and Turkey, Betsy ends up as a nurse and proves herself to be an outstanding nurse. Having seen the horrors and dangers of war up close, Betsy travels to Cuba in 1898 to stop her best friend Ava from joining Clara Barton's Red Cross nurses, but ends up again in the throes of war as a nurse. Once again, Lauren Willig's brilliant writing and detailed research into historical events I knew little about had me enthralled. Betsy is an unforgettable character, and watching her grow from a single-minded young student into a strong, brave and caring woman was a wonderful journey . I'll be buying this book when it publishes in March of 2023. 

Susan Elia MacNeal's Maggie Hope WWII mysteries is one of the few series I will always read, and her latest book, Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, is a standalone novel. The last Maggie Hope novel, The Hollywood Spy, had Maggie in WWII Los Angeles, where Maggie tangled with Nazis. Mother Daughter Traitor Spy tells the story of Veronica and her mother Violet during WWII. When Veronica makes a bad personal choice, she loses her job in New York and she and her widowed mother move to Los Angeles. Veronica unintentionally finds herself as secretary for someone who is heavily involved in the Nazi movement in the United States. Meanwhile, Violet's lovely embroidery catches the eye of a Nazi leader's wife, and soon she is designing and sewing clothes for many of the women's friends. Horrified by the things they are hearing, Veronica and her mother go to law enforcement and end up working as spies for the US military. I found myself wanting to know more about this time period in Los Angeles after reading The Hollywood Spy, and was so happy to see that Susan Elia MacNeal was continuing this fascinating story in Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, based on two real women. As I read this terrific story, I could not help but see the connections between what was happening politically in the 1940s and what is happening in our country in the last few years, and that adds to the importance of this book. This one publishes on September 20th, and if you like historical fiction, this is one you must read. 

Have a good, safe, healthy week.

Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink
Published by Crown Publishing ISBN 978-0-307-71896-9
Hardcover, $27, 448 pages

A good narrative non-fiction can be as satisfying and gripping as a novel. An example of a recent one is Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lack, which has spent over two years on the best seller. Skloot brilliantly tells the tale of a poor black woman from Baltimore, Lacks, whose cancer cells were harvested and used in many medical breakthroughs in the last half of the 20th century.

Although Lacks contribution to medical science saved countless lives, her family didn't give permission for their use and received no monetary compensation. Skloot shows the reader that many of her descendents could not even afford health insurance and had many medical issues of their own because they lacked adequate health care.

Like Skloot, Fink takes on a story with moral and ethical overtones- what killed 45 patients at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans in the days following Hurricane Katrina, in her incredibly fascinating Five Days at Memorial. Fink interviewed dozens of people who were there- doctors, nurses, aides, family members, patients, hospital administrators, rescuers, police investigators, coroners and more to tell her gripping story.

Fink drops the reader right into the hospital during the hurricane and in the horrific aftermath of the storm, when the levees failed and the hospital was completely surrounded by floodwaters. The reader feels the rising panic as generators fail, toilets stop working, medicines run low, cell phones die and communication is lost with the outside world.

Close to 200 people were evacuated from the hospital by helicopter and boats, but 45 patients died, most of them either terminally or gravely ill, the most of any hospital in the city. And most of them died of an overdose of morphine and Versed, allegedly by the hands of Dr. Anna Poe, a surgeon at the hospital. She and two nurses were arrested for killing those patients after a lengthy investigation.

Fink methodically lays out what went on at the hospital during those days. The corporate owner of the hospital, TenetCare, had an emergency plan that lacked some key elements. After 9/11, hospitals had to beef up emergency plans.

"The doctors at Memorial had drilled for disasters, but for scenarios like a Sarin gas attack, modeled that April, where multiple patients arrived at the hospital at once. Not in all his years of practice had Thiele drilled for the loss of backup power, running water, and transportation."

They had no contract with helicopter companies to evacuate the hospital (as other hospitals did) during a flood in a city where hurricanes and floods can be devastating. The person left in charge in the home office of Houston had no disaster experience or training, and the lack of communication with the hospital during the crisis was unconscionable.

The staff at Memorial felt they had been abandoned by their owners, as well as by their government. There seemed to be no one in charge at a local, state or federal level who could give them information as to when and how they would evacuate. All they heard were rumors of rampant looting, and the gunfire they could hear in the neighborhood made them fear they would be overrun by criminals looking for drugs.

When the evacuations begin, with boats commandeered by an older couple looking for a family member, and helicopters fly in, the triage that took place was the opposite of most; instead of the sickest going first, the healthiest patients were evacuated first. That decision had repercussions that had to be answered for later.

The first half of the book will have you on the edge of your seat, and the people who stayed behind to help the patients were heroic in their efforts. Fink sketches them with deserved empathy and compassion. As you read, you may ask yourself, "could I have done that?"

The second half of the book deals with the efforts by investigators and the state attorney general, who was looking to make a name for himself, to bring murder charges against the three women. Most of the general public did not feel this was warranted, and support for the women was strong.

But there were people, including doctors from Memorial, who were appalled at what happened and wanted to see justice for the people who died. They felt that these women violated their oath to do no harm and took matters into their own hands.

The one overriding theme of Five Days at Memorial is that governments and healthcare facilities must have effective disaster planning. There were so many failures on the part of government and corporations that allowed this to happen when it did not have to happen.

You may think you know how you feel about this situation, but Fink skillfully shows you all sides, and you will most likely come away from this book with more questions than answers as I did. This is a must-read book.

rating 5 of 5

BEA 13- Editor's Buzz Panel Books

This is the first year that I missed the Book Expo's Editor's Buzz Panel, where six editors each present a book that people will be talking about in the fall. Luckily, the next day, Ron Hogan moderated a panel where the six authors of the books each had a few minutes to talk about their books to an eager audience.

I got to attend that, and I enjoyed hearing these passionate writers speak about their books. The first one up was a book I really wanted to get (and I'm totally absorbed in it right now)- Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. Fink is a physician who has worked in emergency situations in natural disasters (like Haiti) and her book sounds totally fascinating.

She writes about Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Patients and staff were trapped there and doctors were later arrested for euthanizing patients who were very ill. She interviews people who were there to get their stories, but it is also an indictment of how hospitals and medicine have become big business. It was my one  must-have book of the show. (I didn't get it there, but did get it through Edelweiss.) Five Days at Memorial publishes in September from Random House.

On a similar note, Katy Butler wrote a book Knocking On Heaven's Door- The Path to a Better Way of Death. Her premise (and I agree with it) is that our society does not know how to die. We spend so much money prolonging lives, thinking of the quantity of years, not the quality of life.

She spoke passionately of her father, who had a pacemaker put in at the age of 79, and how his years after that were spent dealing with chronic illnesses; he led a very unhappy, unhealthy few years. When her mother became older and frail, after seeing what her husband went through, she chose a different ending. No extraordinary measures were taken, and her last years were a life filled with joy. Knocking on Heaven's Door publishes in September from Scribner. Butler's website is here.








Wendy Lower's Hitler's Furies: German Women on the Nazi Killing Fields is about a subject not extensively studied- there were German women who worked with the Nazi's as secretaries helping to decide which people lived or died in the Eastern front. Some of these women even personally shot women and children themselves. The book is from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and publishes in October.

Still another non-fiction book is Jennifer Senior's All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. Senior says that there are many books out there that discuss how parents affect their children, but none on how having children affect parents. It's an interesting premise, and she interviewed many people on the topic. It publishes in January 2014 from Harper Collins.

There were only two fiction books on the list this year, the first one is The Facades by Eric Lundgren. Set in a fictional city that the author says is a "cross between Kafka and Gotham City", a man searches for his famous opera singer wife, who has gone missing. The city itself is an important character in this provocative novel. Overlook Press publishes this novel in September.

Lastly, Amy Grace's novel The Affair of Others tells the story of a young widow who buys a small apartment building. She carefully chooses her tenants, expecting to be left to her grief. But when a female tenant moves in and turns things upside down, bringing sex and violence into their quiet lives, everything changes. This one looks like it would appeal to fans of The Other Typist, a book I just loved. Picador publishes this in August.

Ron Hogan did a great job keeping things moving along so that we could hear from all of the authors in the allotted time slot. I can't wait to read these buzzy books.