Thinking about how insulated we are from so many realities. Weather, for instance. Under ordinary circumstances, central air provides a cocoon of comfort, keeping heat and humidity at bay. I’m conscious of this at the moment because our AC decided to take a break. This is really a minor inconvenience. The repair people will be out this morning, and things will get back to normal.

Not such an easy fix for the people in New Orleans after Katrina. I’m in the process of reading Five Days At Memorial by Sheri Fink. I’m not sure I can do justice to describing this book. Compelling, horrifying, gripping. I’m having a hard time shaking it off when I’m involved with other things. That’s really a credit to the author who has taken well documented fact and woven it into a something as compelling as fiction.

I wish it were fiction. But I remember the news accounts and magazine articles and pictures well enough to know it’s fact. So much came into glaring light at that time. The poverty, the politics, the desperation. The book focuses on the nightmare of dealing with hospitalized patients under unimaginable conditions. Temperatures that reached 110 degrees, no electricity, rationing of what little care was available. And at its core, the question of whether some deaths were deliberately hastened by drugs.

This is obviously not light beach reading, but I feel that a book that can grab you and take you into a time and place so completely has tremendous value.