October

The Tennis Partner: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Loss by Abraham Varghese, 1998

Abraham Varghese is a beautiful writer. I read Cutting for Stone decades ago and was captivated by his writing. Before writing fiction, Varghese wrote non-fiction books, including The Tennis Partner.

Tennis Partner reflects on Varghese's move to El Paso, TX where he befriends an intern. With his marriage falling apart and in a new city, Varghese turns to an intern for companionship.

The intern is David, an Australian who was briefly on the professional tennis circuit before turning to medicine.

Varghese discovers that David is a recovering cocaine addict, sober for two years and re-admitted into the Texas Tech internship program despite crashing out earlier due to his addictions.

Fresh from rehab and struggling with being back in an environment with haunted memories from the bridges he burned as an addict, David also seeks companionship.

One of Varghese's talents is writing complicated medical terms in simple language. Despite the highly clinical content, a non-clinician can still follow the emotion of the story. 

Filled with lessons about addiction, mainly that David is responsible for David, that we can not force or influence others to behave in a certain way. This was freeing considering my tendancies to take over and control, problem-solving problems as I see them.

Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning of American West by Kelly Ramsey, 2025

Kelly Ramsey is a bad ass. She trained intesively (hiking, lifting weights) to join the Rowdy Rivers Hotshots firefighting crew. 

Once she made the team, the hard work really starts. Despite her best efforts, she is one of the weakest and slowest on the crew of men, which frustrates her.

As the only female, she needs to handle having her period and finding a place to pee when the team is out in a flat field with no trees.

She starts to become part of the Hotshot crew as the team realizes her grit. She never gives up, volunteers to carry a heavier load and soon finds herself accepted by the team.

Intertwined with her troubled childhood growing up with an alcoholic father, Ramsey grows up as an insecure woman but finds solace in nature and her strength in challenging and pushing herself to become a Hotshot firefighter. 

A good example of a picture is worth a thousand words, a diagram of the firefighting gear  (Nomex yellow shirt & green pants) and tools (Pulaski ax, chainsaw, Fiver to carry five gallons of water) is included to provide a sense of the challenges of being a Hotshot firefighter.