St. James Book Club: Five Days at Memorial, 11/8/2017

We had a nice discussion of Thunderstruck when last we met. We thought the book was interesting in parts but none of us loved it.

However, we did agree on what to read for the next 2 sessions:

• November 8: Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri Fink
• December 13: Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

And that will take us through the end of 2017!

Below, find information from Amazon about our next books. As always, you can borrow book club reads (typically available in several formats) from your local library (or follow this local library link), or purchase them from your local independent book store, or on-line from sites such as Amazon, where they are doubtless available in a variety of formats and editions.

Five Days at Memorial
“In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and maintain life amid chaos.

After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several of those caregivers faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.

Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.”

A Confederacy of Dunces
“A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole’s hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is “huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans’ lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures” (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).”