Week 8: Nonfiction, or "Try it, you'll like it!"

Assignment 3:

Crime (Dewey Areas: 362s-364s mostly, a few outliers in the earlier 300s and biographies): The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder, by Charles Graeber (364.1523 G)

Science (Dewey Areas: mostly 300s and 600s, depending on the topic): Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, by Kristen Iversen (363.1799 I)

Contemporary Social Issues (Dewey Areas: really all over –environmental/medical [like the book I chose, which is cataloged in the medical section], sociology, even some in the 900s – I’ve read a few about the fallout of 9/11, one about the Abu Ghraib trial): Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children, by Philip Shabecoff (618.9298 S)

Food (Dewey Areas: 641s) : Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell (641.5 P)

Assignment 4:

The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder, by Charles Graeber

A true-crime thriller that reads with a sense of urgency. Charlie Cullen hopscotched from one hospital to the next in NJ and PA, killing patients with drug overdoses. Readers will be on the edge of their seats as detectives race to find enough charges to bring against Cullen before he is hired at yet another hospital. Readers will also feel disbelief and outrage as they learn about how the hospitals lied and covered up Cullen’s history to keep a good public image, at the expense of patients’ well-being. Graeber provides histories with the main “characters”, so readers feel they know these people. Cullen’s friend, Amy, is an especially likeable person: frank, hard childhood, ends up being the informant for the detectives and standing up to the hospitals at the risk of her own job. Graeber also built a relationship of sorts with Cullen and interviewed him, so there is a lot of first-hand knowledge and insight into Cullen’s thoughts and deceptions. Perhaps most mysterious and intriguing: no one, including Cullen, knows the true number of victims. I would recommend this to anyone who likes true crime and thrillers: it really does read like a story, so if you like classics like In Cold Blood or Helter Skelter, which are written by people with insider knowledge, this is a good read-alike. And because detectives were really in a race against time to arrest Cullen, it has that thriller element: anyone who likes fiction authors such as Michael Palmer, Michael Connelly, Lisa Gardner, or John Grisham would like this book.

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, by Kristen Iversen

This book combines a lot of elements: environmental pollution, dysfunctional families, social justice, Cold War history – so it has wide appeal. Rocky Flats is a place most people are not familiar with, so it’s an eye-opener in that regard. It was a top-secret nuclear facility opened after World War II; neighborhoods sprung up around the plant, in large part to house plant workers and their families. Although Iversen’s father didn’t work there, her family lived near to Rocky Flats and Iversen herself later worked at the plant briefly.  Iversen does a good job describing members of her family, so readers feel a connection there – it’s a little like The Glass Castle or The Liar’s Club if the dysfunctional family piece is a draw for you. Normal family? Appears to be, but they are slowly self-destructing. Anyone interested in environmental issues will be outraged: how the government and plant officials covered up what was going on, the number of times horrific accidents nearly happened, the amount of sickness and contamination that resulted, the careless practices of disposing of nuclear waste. There’s a lot of information, but Iversen does a good job with keeping it lively; she switches between her family’s story and the plant’s history, so the stories don’t drag. Since this is coming from someone with first-hand knowledge, there is a lot of description about the neighborhoods, how people lived and what seemed normal at the time about the situation, and how the Cold War era unfolded and the secrecy associated with that time period. For those who like social justice, you’ll cheer when the EPA and FBI finally raid the facility, although the result, like with many environmental disasters, is bittersweet (think A Civil Action). I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the above topics, because it is such an intriguing, mysterious, disbelieving true story of devastation. Fiction readers who like David and Goliath-type stories (John Grisham comes to mind) or family dysfunction, like Ordinary People, will also like seeing how things unravel on both fronts.