Books

Catching My Breath

A first-person attempt to understand asthma that addresses two questions: why did I suffer a near-fatal asthma attack, and why is asthma on the rise across the world as a whole? The book begins with what has been described by experts as the best account of a severe asthma attack ever written, and includes material that will be valuable for anyone suffering from this chronic disease.

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Signs of Life
When my father died of cancer, it was the classic hospital death: he was given misleading information about his condition and the prognosis, he was advised to have invasive and physically debilitating treatments, and the experience was impersonal yet ghastly for all concerned. When I first heard about hospice, with its radical and humane approach to caring for the terminally ill, I was determined to investigate it and write about it. Then my mother was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas, and the question was no longer journalistic or academic–we were right in the middle of it. During the last six months of her life, my family and I learned more about each other and about the nature of living than any of us could have expected. Still my favorite book.

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A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow
In 1973, as a 20-year-old Oxford student, I did what everyone did: I hitch-hiked around North America. Twenty-five years later I set out to do it again, to see how America had changed–and how I had changed. Everyone I knew, even those who had been avid hitch-hikers in the Sixties and Seventies, told me I was insane, and that I’d be killed. Yet everywhere I went, I found kindness and generosity. How did America become so afraid of itself? And what is it about hitch-hiking, an act of making oneself deliberately vulnerable, that brings out the best in people? (This book was chosen by Booklist and the New York Times as one of the best travelbooks of 2000, and a shorter form was published as an article in the Millennium Edition of National Geographic: January 2000.)

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Behind the Mask: How the World Survived SARS
SARS was the first great pandemic of the 21st century, and for a tense couple of months it looked as though this new virus, with an unusually high mortality rate, might sweep the entire planet. In order to write this account, published by the American Public Health Association, I went to some of the epicenters of the outbreak, such as Toronto and Hong Kong. I even stayed at the hotel in Hong Kong where the virus first leaped from a single sick person to as many as 18 new victims, and visited the animal market in South China where it first jumped from animals to humans.

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Guitar: An American Life
When the hand-made guitar that had been my constant companion for more than 20 years was destroyed by airline baggage handlers, I decided to order a new one from master luthier Rick Davis–and watch over his shoulder as he made it. At the same time, I became fascinated by the history of the guitar, which a century ago was a minor folk instrument yet rose to outsell all other instruments behind. The book follows both the making of the guitar to completion and the history to the present day, asking what makes this instrument so popular, and our relationship with it so intense and intimate? (This book was selected by Library Journal as one of the Best Books of 2005.)

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The Driveway Diaries
When my family moved out from Burlington to a dirt road in rural Essex Center, our life immediately began to suffer the series of challenges and small disasters that quickly sort out the clueless city guy from the true Vermonter. This collection of stories is mainly about those challenges, almost all of which I failed–and about the most important, most evil challenge of all: our driveway. A gravel driveway, especially a steep one, is an umbilicus between home and the outside world, an index of change that can wash out or burst into flower overnight, and the cause of more sweat and backache than all the rest of the property combined. If Thoreau had read this book, he would never have made the mistake of moving to Walden Pond.

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A Warning Shot: Influenza and the 2004 Flu Vaccine Shortage
What happens when a single episode of contamination in a pharmaceutical plant in England cuts the U.S. supply of flu vaccine in half? In a word, chaos. The 2004 flu vaccine shortage taught the world in general and the United States in particular many, many important lessons about how unprepared for a pandemic we were, and in many respects still are.

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The End of Polio?
The campaign to eradicate polio from the planet has been the greatest enterprise in the public good–in terms of the number of countries involved, the number of hours of work, and the amount of money raised and spent–that humankind has ever undertaken. The end of polio has been predicted ever year since the mid-1990s, yet the virus is still circulating, still crippling or even killing people, mostly children. Why? I went out with the vaccination teams in the slums of Karachi and the war zone on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to find out what obstacles were holding up the campaign, and why massive injections of funding, technology and goodwill may never be enough to change the world.

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Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment

What started out as an assignment for National Geographic–to watch the monsoon make landfall in India, and then write about the almost mystical art of monsoon forecasting–went horribly wrong when a misunderstanding led to me being banned from every meteorological office in India. In desperation, I set off across southern India in a car provided by an Australian named Faith who ran spiritual guided tours.

My spiritual tour turned out to be a quest for the meaning of water. It took me through the spice villages high in the Western Ghats, to a Hindu wedding that left all the major participants drenched and finally into a holy river where the temple elephants bathed.

Along the way I discovered the history of the umbrella and the spiritual dangers of plumbing, I heard about rituals in which donkeys and frogs were married in order to induce rain, and finally, as my resistance was finally crumbling, I was granted a glimpse into the meaning of water.

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