Medical Related Non-Fiction

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back is a book on the American healthcare system by Elisabeth Rosenthal. The author explains how our system of healthcare went from a caring endeavor to a convoluted and highly profitable industry in a few short decades. Rosenthal breaks down this behemoth system into its various components--hospitals, doctors, and insurance and pharmaceutical companies. She discusses how hospital systems that are managed by business executives act like predatory lenders and hound patients and seize their homes. Patients receive coded bills from doctors they never saw. Research charities get into bed with pharmaceutical companies and surreptitiously profit from the donations made by hard working people in good faith. Rosenthal offers hope by spelling out exactly how we can decode medical double speak, avoid the perils of the pharmaceutical scheme, and get the care you and your loved ones deserve.

Inferno: A Doctor's Ebola Story is by Steven Hatch, M.D. As an infectious disease specialist, Dr. Hatch came to Liberia in November 2013 to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians he had served with were dead or unable to work and Ebola had become an international worry. Hatch returned with the aid organization International Medical Corps to help establish and Ebola Treatment Unit. In this hastily built structure in the middle of the jungle, he witnessed the selfless care given by the unit's physicians, nurses, and other caregivers. He explores this deadly virus as well as the afflicted country of Liberia to reveal how the Ebola outbreak stoked anxieties that were exploited for political gain around the world. He discusses how generations of inequality left Liberia vulnerable to this crisis and how similar circumstances could fuel another plague elsewhere. Hatch feels that by understanding and alleviating these stressors, another outbreak in other countries could be curtailed more quickly.

A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa is by Tony Bartelme. Dr. Dilan Ellegala goes to Tanzania and is shocked to find that there are only three brain surgeons for its population of forty-two million people. In Haydom Lutheran Hospital, even the most basic surgical tools are absent, not even a saw to open a patient's skull can be found. Here, people with head injuries or brain tumors are left to heal on their own or die. Dr. Ellegala is confronted with a villager suffering from severe head trauma, so he takes it upon himself to buy a tree saw from a farmer, sterilize it, and then uses it to save the man's life. Ellegala realizes that there are far too many neurosurgery patients for a single person to save and he will soon be leaving Tanzania. The only solution is to teach someone the skills necessary to perform these complicated and dangerous procedures. He finds his first potential student in Emmanuel Mayegga. Though he has no formal medical degree, Mayegga is a stubborn and determined medical officer who possesses the dexterity and intelligence to do brain surgery. As he guides the Tanzanians in their studies, he also challenges the Western medical establishment to do more than send vacationing doctors on short-term medical missions. He offers a solution that could potentially transform the care of more than two billion people around the world.

Don't Forget About Our Online Resources!

School is back in full swing!  Do you or your children need some homework help?  We have the following resources to help :


MAGNOLIA - An online database of scholarly journals, newspaper archives, and literary critiques.  Ask at the Reference Desk for the address and password to access this extensive collection.

World Book Online - The online version of the popular encyclopedia and more.  Ask at the Reference Desk for the ID and password to access.

Gage Cengage - Online reference books, including the Contemporary Black Biography series.  Patrons with a Google account can sign in and be able to save articles and citations to Drive as well as print and email (with any email account).  Highlighting, note-taking and audio options are also available.  Ask at the Reference Desk for details on how to access their site (GVRL has free apps for Android and IOS devices called Access My Library).

Salem Press Online - A selection of reference books specifically for high school age and up.  Patrons can set up a free account to save search information, citations, and articles.  There is also a feature to allow you to print and/or email articles and citations.  Ask at the Reference Desk for details on how to access the site.

Two Books; One Title

This week, I'm featuring two books that share the same title and both are mysteries. That is where the similarities end, however, as each is by a different author, each takes place in a different time period, and each has a very different plot.

The first book is What the Dead Leave Behind: A Gilded Age Mystery by Rosemary Simpson. Set in New York City during the Great Blizzard of 1888, this story follows heiress Prudence MacKenzie; who waits impatiently in her Fifth Avenue home for her fiance's safe return. As morning breaks, more than two hundred people are found to have died in the icy winds and freezing snowdrifts. Unfortunately for Prudence, her fiance, Charles, is one of the deceased. He is found with head crushed by a heavy branch and he is holding an ace of spades playing card in his hand. Prudence knows that the playing card was a code that Charles shared with his friend, Geoffrey Hunter, a former Pinkerton agent and attorney from the South. Convinced that Charles was murdered, Prudence turns to Geoffrey for help to find the killer and to help protect her inheritance from her shady stepmother who seems to be more interested in the money than Prudence's well-being.

The second book is What the Dead Leave Behind: A McKenzie Novel by David Housewright. Former St. Paul, Minnesota police detective Rushmore McKenzie is the unlikeliest of millionaires. He does the occasional unlicensed private investigation, mostly doing favors for friends and those in need. When his stepdaughter, Erica, asked for just such a favor to help out a college friend, Mckenzie doesn't have the heart to refuse. Her friend's father, Malcolm Harris, was murdered a year ago in New Brighton, just outside of the twin cities and the case yielded no clues and has gone cold. When McKenzie starts nosing around in the case, he turns up another case that is tangentially related to Harris's and both cases lead back to a group of friends with whom the victim was close. His case is full of odd, suspicious coincidences and nothing more, until someone decides that McKenzie is getting too close and decides to make things very personal.

August New Adult Fiction!

These are some of the new titles that we added to our New Adult Fiction section in August!

 The Baker's Secret by Stephen P. Kiernan

After her kind mentor is arrested because of his Jewish heritage, a young baker's apprentice in Normandy engages in discreet resistance activities, baking contraband loaves of bread for the hungry using surplus ingredients taken from occupying forces.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

In these short stories it's the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket. 

Indigo by Charlaine Harris

Investigative reporter Nora Hesper spends her nights cloaked in shadows. As Indigo, she's become an urban myth, a brutal vigilante who can forge darkness into weapons and travel across the city by slipping from one patch of shadow to another. Her primary focus both as Nora and as Indigo has become a murderous criminal cult called the Children of Phonos. Children are being murdered in New York, and Nora is determined to make it stop, even if that means Indigo must eliminate every member.

Love Story by Karen Kingsbury

Decades ago, John and Elizabeth Baxter lived a love story that is still playing out in the lives of their adult children and grandchildren. But few of them know the exact details of that story or the heartbreak that brought the two together.