#14 - Another Brooklyn - Jacqueline Woodson

Title:  Another Brooklyn

Author:  Jacqueline Woodson

Genre:  Fiction

Performed by:  Robin Miles

Publisher/Date: Harper Collins/2016

Dates listened to:  4/10/17 – 4/16/17

CDs/Hours:  3/2.75

ISBN:  978-0-0625-7375-9

So familiar are the characters in this work of fiction, that if you’ve met Woodson in print, you’d swear you were reading her memoir.  As the back cover tells us, Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative years when being a kid gives way to adulthood and the promise and peril of growing up.  And exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that unite four young girls.

#13 - All Over But the Shoutin' - Rick Bragg

Title:  All Over But the Shoutin’

Author:  Rick Bragg

Genre:  Memoir

Performed by:  Frank Muller

Publisher/Date: Recorded Books/2016

Dates listened to:  3/10/17 – 4/16/17

In a book dedicated to his mom, Rick Bragg touches on the bases of his family – dad, mom, and two brothers.  Raised in Alabama close to the Georgia border, Rick and his family were poor.  Rick credits his mother to giving up material things for herself so that her sons would not want from lack of clothes, food and the basics.  

Rick was the boy in the middle.  Sam was about 3 years older, Mark, three years younger.  The father was absent much of the time – yet left a love of books to Rick.  When Rick reached adulthood and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, for Feature Writing that covered stories among which are about the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, and later that year of the woman named Susan Smith who killed her two young sons.

Later, Rick wanted to give back to his mother for her years of hardship and bought her a house.   He struggled with wondering if he was buying the home for the right reason -- to help his mom or because of the guilt if he didn’t buy it.   Rick married once but that didn’t work out.  Rather than settle down, he would rather be flying to an assignment and writing from his heart the stories of people he met. 

#12 - Awakenings - Oliver Sacks

Title:  Awakenings

Author:  Oliver Sacks

Performed by:  Jonathan Davis and Oliver Sacks

Genre/Category:  Non-Fiction/Memoir   616.832

Published: originally/1973

Published: currently/Audible, Inc./2011

ISBN: 978-1-4805-3037-9

CDs/Hours:  11/13.25

Dates Listened to:  3/25/17 – 4/10/17

Encephalitis lethargica.  This phenomenon reared its ugly head after World War I.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of people, men and women alike, suffered from this trance-like state from which they were not to awaken until Dr. Sacks came along.  He had seen how patients with Parkinson’s disease had rallied from taking Levodopa or L-DOPA.  From 1966 to 1991 Dr. Sacks worked at a hospital in the Bronx and it is during this time that he ministered to about 60 patients with this condition.  

The book covers the case histories of some of these zombie-like creatures.  While many of them responded to some degree from the use of L-DOPA, it was short-lived.  Some reacted favorably like one man who went on to live a productive life, others less so and were constantly having the dosage changed or regressed to their early stage of their condition.  Each patient, of course, has their own story of how encephalitis lethargica affected their lives and it is in the compassionate telling of each of these vignettes that we see the humanness of both doctor and patient emerge.

It is a fascinating book, one that may be more to the liking of those with a medical background.  The prelude that describes, in medical terms, what the epidemic is all about, was far over my head but I enjoyed the case studies.  Since the original publication of the book in 1973, Dr. Sacks has updated the book five more times.  The edition I listened to includes information about the movie based upon the book.