Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9502010012
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: B5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: book review
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
By Barbara D'Amato. Scribners'. $20.
In "Hard Case," Barbara D'Amato has crafted a vivid high intensity page-turner set in the frantic world of a big city trauma center.
Free-lance writer Cat Marsala is on assignment in one of Chicago's six remaining trauma centers. Although these centers are known to save lives by initiating good care immediately in cases of accident, budget cuts are closing them down. Cat's job is to go behind the scenes and write a feature article that shows the effectiveness and necessity of these centers. She has been on the job less than one shift - a shift full of automobile accidents, burn victims and gunshot wounds - when she finds Dr. Grant, the woman who has been supervising the center, dead in the lounge. Cat's assessment of the detective in charge is not positive; and that, added to her personal interest in one of the suspects, leads her to investigate.
D'Amato creates a believable setting with attention to detail. Cat's final confrontation with the killer is unusual and the conclusion is credible.
-ANNA WENTWORTH
Pieces For Emma.
By Rita Sizemore Riddle. Occasional Publication Series, Radford University. $8.75 at the RU Bookstore.
Rita Sizemore Riddle's little book is only about as long as a night of tales around the wood stove - 85 pages - and often takes the same circuitous form. But "Pieces for Emma" gives you a clear view of a life pulling its strength from the bedrock of Southwest Virginia mountain roots. From the moment the narrator starts to "pilfer through" the orphan jar lids and rusted can openers of her parents' kitchen cabinet as a small child until she moves that cabinet into her home in 1988, "for the smells," we understand that this is a person who carries her past within her like a prize.
Her memories of a Daddy who cries as he gives his daughter her first bob cut and a Mommy who gets the PTA to buy all the books her daughter can read contrast sharply with the dysfunctional families in many recent autobiographical works. Even so, Riddle doesn't shy away from the sadness - a hidden parental divorce, rumors of a murder, and the pain of her own first marriage.
You must be prepared to meander when you read this book. A chapter entitled "The Funeral" is as much about the Stallard funeral, the Robinette funeral, the Holiness Church, and Granville McCoy's sister-in-law, as it is about the Granville McCoy funeral promised in the first paragraph. But if the route were direct, you'd miss the apple-crisp Sunday School teacher, molded country butter, and the tragic young mother whose only opportunity to wear silk came in the casket.
This is a heart-warming read for anyone who wants to remember what life was like when a neighborhood was truly a community.
-SU CLAUSON-WICKER
The Origin of Humankind.
By Richard Leakey. Basic Books. $20.
Voyage to the Great Attractor.
By Alan Dressler. Knopf. $25.
Two books about beginnings - the beginning of humanity and the beginning of time - join the profusion of books on both subjects recently published. Unfortunately for both, neither offers revolutionary insights into either subject.
In "The Origin of Humankind," Richard Leakey rehashes old arguments and theories about how man may have evolved. With the lack of new material, it seems that the only reason for this book is to continue the long feud between Leakey and Donald Johanson, another paleontologist of international repute. The rancor between the two men is evident when Leakey describes the discovery of Lucy - the oldest hominid skeleton yet discovered - by a "joint French/American team, led by Maurice Taieb and Johanson." Johanson led the team and has received the credit from every paleontologist save Leakey. Nothing new here, not even the professional jealousy.
Since the publication of Steven Hawking's best seller "A Brief History of Time," cosmology (the study of the beginnings of the universe) books have been generated faster than politicians slamming space station development. The number of these books which offer new material is directly proportional to the number of copies of "Brief History" remaining unread on bookshelves around the world.
"Voyage to the Great Attractor" is solidly within that company. One theory of universal movement is that all bodies in our known universe are being inexorably drawn "toward a distant continent of matter" to explain the apparent non-uniform distribution of stellar material after the big bang which began time as we think we know it. The arguments supporting this theory are pedantically explained with little of the literary grace required to make arcane science interesting to lay readers. Please, enough derivative cosmology. For fascinating science, read Jonathan Weiner's "The Beak of the Finch," a better book explaining complex science elegantly.
- LARRY SHIELD
Anna Wentworth also reviews books and plays for WVTF-FM.
Su Clauson-Wicker, a native of Cayuta, N.Y. - a mill town in the northern tip of Appalachia - is the editor of Virginia Tech Magazine.
Larry Shield trains dogs and horses in Franklin County.
by CNB