Ronald Munson

This is a quick moving novel about a young, beautiful news reporter who becomes the obsession of a deranged fan once she takes the job of "Nightbeat" co-anchor in St. Louis. At first, Joan Carpenter is amused by the awkward advances from the fan who signs letters as "The Watcher". As the Watcher's communiques become more frequent and personal, Joan realizes that she is not dealing with normal fan mail.

Ronald Munson's epistolary style of presenting this book is a little offsetting at many points throughout the novel making it sometimes tedious to plow through. I will say that the story moved rapidly and sufficiently contained enough plot twists to keep me reading. I wasn't surprised when the Watcher's identity was exposed, but it was adequately explained and believable.

This would be a good beach or plane ride book.… (mehr)

This is a book of medical ethics - all case studies and all interesting.

The first story is that of a young mother with very small children who has not responded well to chemo and is offered a bone marrow transplant. Because of the lack of response to chemo, the bmt is not likely to do as well as if she had although it will give her some years, but not many. She ultimately turns it down and decides to die. She feels her husband would never cope with two children by himself and it is better than she dies soon and he remarries and gives their children a mother and a happy upbringing. She knows that her 2 year old will never remember her and the five year will only have a dim picture in her mind of her mother, but she doesn't want their memories to be of a seriously ill woman on whom all time and attention in the family is focused.

I couldn't have made that decision. I would have wanted to try everything to stay alive so my son could have a mother.

The book is written very sensitively from medical, moral and legal viewpoints and leaves you with plenty to think about. Whether the selfless lady in the first story or the total and utter scum of the last one.

The last story covers many complex issues and is particularly American. A murderer, a young guy who killed both the mother of his child and their child (*if I remember correctly), is brought from prison to the hospital in the last stages of heart disease. Without a heart transplant he will die in the very near future.

The questions are, should he be listed for a heart transplant? Should he be listed (as he medically needs to be) right at the top of the heart transplant list? Should the state pay for this extremely expensive operation? Should the fact he is a convicted murderer (who has found religion, of course) be considered? Should the fact that if he is listed at the top of the list someone else, almost certainly not a murderer, will probably die because they didn't get the heart?

The resolution was that as the State had incarcerated him, it had taken over full responsibility for his care, whether this was feeding and clothing him or getting him medical attention. The fact that he was a murderer was not to be considered because this was a medical issue. The State had sentenced him to life imprisonment, and not given him a death sentence, so it had a duty to keep him alive. And so he was listed at the top, got his heart transplant and duly returned to prison to live out the rest of his life.

What left a bad taste in the author, the bioethicist's, mouth and mine, a bad and bitter taste, was that this being America, if an honest and worthy person, say a young mother with toddler children to bring up who had no medical insurance or savings had needed the transplant, she would have died. If she couldn't pay, then tough, you die. But if you are incarcerated, one of the worst of human beings, the State has a duty to pay for your treatment. There is something really and truly morally wrong there. When a good, hard-working but relatively impecunious person is condemned to death by the system and an evil, murderous bastard is saved by the best care money can buy, there is, as Hamlet said, something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Brilliant book, well written, much to consider, makes you examine yourself and what you would do or decide for others if placed in any of these situations varying from switching off a life support machine, to organ donation, live organ transplants and many more, all decisions we, or people close to us, might need to make.

If you read it, it will really help you sort out priorities and what your response should be should you find yourself in one of these situations, and sadly, we all probably will.
… (mehr)

I found the concept of this book very interesting, which is why I wanted to read it. The book is told entirely through faxes, emails, newspaper articles, transcriptions of tape recordings, etc. However despite an interesting concept, the book fell flat.

It was WAY too predictable. I read the whole thing, but it was a bore, as I'd figured it out in the first 1/4 of the book. I also found it annoying that the main character preferred faxes to emails. I'm not really sure why, even if it was 1993. That annoyed me a lot.… (mehr)