FACES reviews Station Eleven and other health and medicine related fiction books.
Station Eleven
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
In Station Eleven, one snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as is known begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time – from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theatre troupe known as the Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains. Station Eleven charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Travelling Symphony.
Microbe Hunters
Author: Paul de Kruif
This book is a timeless dramatisation of scientists, bacteriologists, doctors, and medical technicians who discovered microbes and invented the vaccines to counter them. De Kruif reveals the now seemingly simple but really fundamental discoveries of science -for instance, how a microbe was first viewed in a clear drop of rain water, and when, for the first time ever, Louis Pasteur discovered that a simple vaccine could save a man from the ravages of rabies by attacking the microbes that cause it.
Magic Hour
Author: Kristin Hannah
In the rugged Pacific Northwest lies the Olympic National Forest, which is almost a million acres of impenetrable darkness and impossible beauty. From deep within this old forest, a six-year-old girl appears. Speechless and alone, she offers no clue as to her identity, no hint of her past. Having retreated to her western Washington hometown after a scandal left her career in ruins, child psychiatrist Dr. Julia Cates is determined to free the extraordinary little girl she calls Alice from a prison of unimaginable fear and isolation.