Latest reaction to my Ruthie Leming book review
I think it's cool when people leave comments—especially positive ones—on my book reviews. Here's the latest comment in its entirety which was left on my review of TLWoRL:
This is a very perceptive review. At times, we tend to take what authors write at face value but you have read between the lines and looked at what was left unsaid as well. In life, over-analysis can be a curse and as someone once rightly said: the unlived life is not worth examining.
Whoaa... "The unlived life is not worth examining." I had never heard that little juxtapositioning. I have a feeling this will inspire some thoughts from people over here.
There's news from Dreher on the Amazon front, BTW. He took the time out from his 20,0000-word cut-and-paste due today to take this bite at one of the hands that used to feed him and could again:
ReplyDeleteNFR: ... I admire your trashing Bezos. Do you know that you cannot buy The Little Way of Ruthie Leming at Amazon.com anymore (except, I imagine, through Kindle). Yes, they're still fighting with that book's publisher, and have cut off sales of many Hachette titles. -- RD]
A quibble on one issue discussed:
ReplyDeleteThe GP in Zachary, La. may or may not have been 'inept'. She had no history of smoking cigarettes, had never worked in an asbestos plant, and by virtue of local geology and building practices, almost certainly never spent substantial time in a radon infected building. Lung cancer is about the last thing you'd expect in a woman that age with that history. The number of cases of lung cancer diagnosed among pre-menopausal women and men of a like age is just a few thousand a year and it's a once-in-a-career event for a GP; such a case in someone with no known risk factors is something most GPs never see; I'll wager there are 800 primary care physicians in the counties around Baton Rouge and you're likely to find maybe 50 who've ever seen such a case.
And I'll wager the initial misdiagnosis made little difference. Lung cancer is virulent and only a modest minority survive more than a few years and it sounds from the summaries as if her's metastasized quickly. Now and again, they can treat metastatic testicular cancer, thyroid cancer, colon cancer, leukemias, or lymphomas with chemotherapy and radiation and run them out of your system, but, as a rule, when a cancer is Stage IV, it's a terminal diagnosis (and with colon cancer, you've one shot in twelve).
Art, someone else made that point. I removed the word "inept" from my review. Realize that in calling him inept I had been merely restating the book's verdict.
DeleteOne said you'd confounded one doctor with another and another made a point about what she did or did not tell her doctor. Not quite my point. I'll wager Mr. Winham is wrong, and it was too late the day she started coughing.
DeleteRD has a history of lobbing accusations at people without stopping to consider whether the bill of particulars is all that credible or (in other sorts of cases) whether the supposedly negligent party actually had at hand the necessary materials to make an informed decision. He usually is not graceful when his mistakes in thinking are pointed out.
RD has a history of lobbing accusations at people without stopping to consider whether the bill of particulars is all that credible...
ReplyDeleteReally