The Seaside Library

Author: Isabel Allende Acquired in: October 2021 Some of the best literature ever to grace our libraries was spawned by wars and the ensuing trauma. Memorials and remembrance days are the only things those born in peacetime have to remind themselves of life-altering moments of the past. Is it, then, possible for us to fathom how deep are the wounds inflicted by bereavement and suffering? This is where books like  A Long Petal of the Sea  become important - they take us back in time to relive life as it once was, in this case, amid national turmoil and partisan conflict.  Isabel Allende is no stranger to displacement. The coup orchestrated by Auguste Pinochet in 1973 toppled the Chilean government and lead to the death of the former president Salvador Allende, spelling disaster for leftist sympathisers and relatives of the late president, including Isabel's family. Narrowly escaping the gallows, Allende made Venezuela her refuge for more than a decade before settling in California. 

Author: Robin Cook Acquired in: October 2017 My previous review of Robin Cook's  Blindsight  would have told you that the downsides of the book negated any good things about it. Overcoming my initial hesitancy, I decided to try another — Host , a story about two medical students uncovering a major pharma scam.  Lynn Pierce and Michael Pender are fourth-year medical students at a university in North Carolina. Despite the well-known daily grind med students go through, they do well and have ordinary lives until things go south quickly. When Lynn's boyfriend goes into a coma after rather a routine surgery, both search for a solution relentlessly and accidentally stumble upon a secret that could endanger the hospital's reputation and even cost them their lives.  As you might have gathered from the short synopsis, the story was so spine-chilling that this book belonged to the horror genre than medical fiction. In the storyline that ran parallel to Lynn's and Michael's li

Author: Robin Cook Acquired in: October 2017 courtesy Goodreads There's a world of difference between medical fiction and other genres. The mounting horror creeps up your spine and finally reaches its zenith at a masterfully written showdown. When you finally set the book down, you either look at hospitals with a wary eye or stare in awe at the intricate beauty of medicine. I warn you that reading medical fiction is not for the faint-hearted. With the warnings over, welcome to the world of clinically planned gore! Blindsight  is a familiar mix of the New York Italian mobster scene and their insidious yet barely detectable reach over people's lives. Yet would they go so far as to use their power to manipulate organ donors? This book is the first to feature a firebrand forensic pathologist, Dr Laurie Montgomery. As she goes about her job at the New York City Medical Examiner's office, sexist behaviour often comes her way, from 'isn't forensics too gruesome for a woman

Author: Paul Kalanithi    Acquired in: August 2020 I read a book two days ago that affected me in ways that very few books have. Franz Kafka once said that a book should be like an axe for the frozen sea within us. Well, this book was like Zeus' thunderbolt. I'm talking about When Breath Becomes Air, a memoir written by 36-year-old Paul Kalanithi, a brilliant neurosurgeon who died of stage 4 metastatic lung cancer. This pandemic has forced all of us to at least acknowledge our mortality, but how would it be like to anticipate a bright future and then face a crisis that blows everything out of proportion? Life would never be the same again. Kalanithi was a prime example of an educated individual- BA and MA in English Literature and BA in Human Biology from Stanford University, MPhil in history and philosophy of science and medicine from Cambridge and graduated with honours from Yale School of Medicine. Besides that, he was aiming to be a neurosurgeon cum neuroscientist at Stanfo

Author: AJ Cronin Read in: October 2019 The Citadel is an intriguing book; more so because of its name. The title in relation to the book may be understood in many different ways, but I would like to think of it as a kind of fortress built of ideals, which is kept safe zealously but for occasional compromises which lead to its downfall. The book details the shortcoming every person makes – comprising on their ideals. The Citadel is thus not just the story of a doctor’s life in the 1900s, but it is one which reflects all our lives- spent in the pursuit of happiness- in a few hundred pages. Andrew Manson is a textbook doctor; released from college with pretentious training derived from outdated tomes and fully unequipped to handle real patients with troubles extending beyond health, a life quite different from dissecting cadavers. Despite giving us an initial perception of ineptness, his efforts to stick to his passion for research and his duty towards his patients gives him respectab