Welcome backbone from Thanksgiving break, everybody. I promise it was an pleasant one.  You did pretty recovered on food for thought choices?  Personally, I'm still bloated.  Bought reams of salad yesterday for the "cleansing" peroid 🙂

In some case, what I wanted to parcel was that I spent some time this weekend with James River S. Hirsch's new reserve, Cheating Destiny: Living with Diabetes, America's Biggest Epizootic.  I'm almost halfway through IT now, but it entirely took me about halfway finished Chapter 1 to make that this is the book about diabetes I like I wrote myself (all except the part about flipping the car with his toddler son in the back seat).  But still, Author Enviousness in a big way.

What makes this book so great?  Clearly the solution of "large research and rafts of interviews," it reads like an piquant narrative of the highest rank.  In other language, how do you turn scores of statistics and personal testimonials about suffering from an unpleasant disease into a book of account so compelling it's hard to put pile?  Hirsch has cleverly woven together everything from the carnavlistic commercialism of the annual Adenosine deaminase Expo to the life of "insulin's poster girl" Elizabeth Evans Ted Hughes to the trials of United States's leading embryonic biologist.

In a chapter called "The Burden of Control," he writes about the fingerpointing that has long crippled diabetics with guilt — dating book binding to the stern methods of Dr. Elliott Joslin himself.  Ugh.  But how refreshing to discovery this phenomenon ordered out clearly for love or money to find out and realise.  "All diabetics walk on a easy precipice," he writes. "But for some the path is narrower, the ridge closer, the descent steeper."

It helps that James Hirsch is a former newsperson for the New House of York Multiplication and Surround Street Journal, and already an accomplished author as well.  He's also the pal of reknowned diabetologist Irl Hirsch, medical checkup conductor of the Diabetes Care Center at the University of Washington.  Both brothers have had Type 1 diabetes since they were children, and James River' vernal son Garrett was recently diagnosed as well — which plays out dramatically in the book (and was plastered recently by Parade magazine).

btw, I met James at a Holocene epoch book reading here in San Francisco, an knowledgeable event held in a private home.  We chatted briefly. A mid-size guy with scruffy haircloth and smiling eyes, he was and so modest I'd never have picked him come out of the closet of the crowd as the author; atomic number 2 didn't look like the kind of guy cable World Health Organization'd write such eloquent prose.  But then again, non may of us look the like we have a chronic disease, instantly do we?  Lucky us.

Two thumbs raised for Cheat Destiny.  Houghton Mifflin, November 2006, $16.50 on Amazon River.