Top Rated Stories in the last month in Literature

(via TBTL, who are in the midst of their TBTL-athon)

Author Sherman Alexie has parlayed his Colbert Report appearance into real fame, as he's booked on TBTL today. With Colbert he discussed his opposition to a digital media that doesn't protect authorial ownership. With Luke Burbank, today at noon, he gets into "the plan he's hatched for monetizing art in the digital age, and how (on a totally unrelated note) pickup basketball is the only way for grown men to express their love to each other." [UPDATE: Twitter just sent me this link to three new poems by Alexie.

Kirkus Reviews calls Matthew Flaming's debut novel, The Kingdom of Ohio, "impossible to resist," praising its "marrying poetic prose with hints of steampunk aesthetics." Closer to home, the Stranger's Paul Constant labels it "just deadly dull," adding that "There's nothing in the central mystery to entice the reader on."

So clearly it sparks differences of opinion. For me, this Booklicious review nails down the general outlines, and discontinuities, of the work: "Part historical fiction, part alternate reality, and wholly romantic, Flaming’s novel is a conglomerate of popular publishing trends and timeless storytelling elements."

The daily life of a turn-of-the-century New York subway construction worker is vividly evoked; the Kingdom of Toledo's founding by French pilgrims is carefully footnoted; the unlikely romance between young engineer Peter Force and math genius Cheri-Anne Toledo springs up amid their opposition to a powerful cabal starring J.P. Morgan and Thomas Edison.

All is recounted by a peculiar old historian, closing up shop in Los Angeles, who is less convincingly elderly than reminiscent of that stodgy younger man you know who annoyingly litters his speech with literary archaisms. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, young men fond of archaisms, it's just not as significant of advanced age as it is of advanced bookwormery.)

There's an ambition to this agglomeration that isn't actually to write the ultra-selling novel, but to powerfully reimagine a splintering world as worlds of possibility colliding--this, sadly, is a task that exceeds Flaming's abilities, as yet, as a novelist. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride....

Atul Gawande speaks Sunday, January 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall, 8th & Seneca. Advance tickets are $5 [brownpapertickets].

Atul Gawande, the Checklist Manifesto. At Town Hall on Sunday.

One of the most passed-around, must-read articles this summer among those interested in the future of health care was Atul Gawande's examination of McAllen, Texas, which has the distinction of being one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. [New Yorker].

Comparing the town's health care delivery system to that of its less pricey neighbor El Paso and to the Mayo Clinic, he revealed how entrepaneurial spirit, affinity for procedures, and reimbursement structures contribute to the county's extreme medical expenditures.

His conclusions were reassuringly frustrating (more doctor-patient time, less testing, and a centralized responsibility for the totality of patient care results in lower costs and better outcomes) and ominous (this model seems to be winning, nationally).

The article is emblematic of the lucid, evidence-based writing that Gwande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard associate professor, has regularly contributed during his decade-long tenure as a staff writer for The New Yorker. He appears as part of Town Hall's Future of Health Lecture Series tomorrow in support of his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto [amazon], a simple and effective response to the enormous strains resulting from the demands to make sense of the increasing complexity of scientific discovery.

Opening with surgical anecdotes sure to grab the attention of lovers of grisly medical mysteries and spanning beyond the operating theater to other fields, he aims to show the pivotal role of the checklist. The topic, while perhaps not the most riveting on its surface, has powerful and wide-ranging implications and seems especially timely in this month of resolutions for self-improvement.