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4 comments about Tales From Calamity Corner Clinic.

1. The author really lets you feel a sense of life in every page.



2. Really cool! I come from a small town back East and it was interesting to see the care and concern I experienced with small town doctors back home. Hilarious too!



3. This book is interesting reading for those short times one must occasionally spend waiting during the day. Personally, I have used this book as my "bathroom reader" on a number of occasions. The stories are amusing and fairly captivating. This is a book that may not have caught my eye at a bookstore, but once opened, would have held my attention.



4. I volunteer at the local zoo. On "slow" days, I sometimes have pauses between crowds to show around. On these occasions, one or two chapters hilariously filled the gap. In fact, I think the keepers thought I was about in need of being caged, I laughed so loudly. WONDERFUL light reading, and educational also.

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5 comments about In the Failing Light: A Memoir.

1. Terribly written -- Tillman needs to go back to the day job! Sounds like it was written half asleep on the train -- definitely a waste of time to the reader.



2. Dear readers, I apologize for the bogus review I entered below as "A reader from Ohio." I've been in a jealous rage because of Mr. Tilman's success and let my anger get the best of me. Below is the review that I originally wrote:

   David, this was a beautifully written and heart-wrenching book, and I applaud you for your usual excellent writing. I would be happy to be write a short review of this book, and am honored to have been asked.

   "Dave Tillman is that rare writer whose work has the power of universality. His In the Failing Light touches a consciousness shared by all, for everyone has experienced the loss of someone beloved. Beautifully-written and bittersweet, the author - as with all his work - reminds us that even when day slips closer to night, and the light fails, life is to be savored and lived to the fullest."




3. I was privileged to know David Tillman and to briefly meet his wife Minda as he was writing this book about her seven year battle to survive breast cancer. The story is incredibly moving, delivering all of an almost old fashioned love that flourished under the heavy burden of dying. There is humor, and outrage, and love that survived the battle with cancer--and survives in this book even when the battle is lost. The previous reviewer, a nameless entity "from Ohio", is wrong, and is obviously a person who knows Mr. Tillman and his journey to write a story that bares that most vulnerable part in all of us; that part that holds our deepest loves and fears we rarely let out to see the light of day, that so few of us could hope to be put in such loving and tender words. It is clearly a perversion of one's deepest humanity that someone hiding behind anonomity could use such a poignant moment in the live of any other to express his own jealousy and anger. And sad that another could use the brillant forum provided by Amazon.com for such a nasty and personal vendetta.



4. A beautifully told memoir by a husband who learns on his third wedding anniversary that his wife has advanced breast cancer. Doctors give her just months to live, which stretches to seven years. She's able to watch her only child grow up and balances dance recitals and PTA meetings with one therapy after another, including bone marrow harvesting. While she manages the disease, her husband manages the "zoo" of the medical system: the callous doctors and twisted logic of insurance companies. Through it all, his mantra becomes "you'll live to be 100," while his wife accepts that she will not. Especially good for any couple struggling with terminal cancer.



5. 11/21/99 - Montaigne was prompted to write his great work by the death of his best friend, the only man with whom he felt he could truly commune. Indeed, the death of someone close is a great prompter of memoirs as a way of filling the silence. ''In the Failing Light'' by David Tillman (Creative Arts Book Company, $16.95, paperback) is a husband's memoir of his wife's battle with metastatic breast cancer, diagnosed at an advanced stage when their only child was an infant. Though expected to die within months, she in fact survived for more than six years.

   Tillman's memoir of this time is filled with justifiable outrage at a few high-handed doctors, a ruthlessly close-fisted insurance company, and a couple of other officious bodies. But for all this, the book is a sweet and melancholy tale, bracingly lacking in self-pity. Tillman invests the life that goes on around the suffering family with that poignancy that ordinary activity acquires when ordinariness is gone forever. Waiting in a hospital for his wife to emerge from an operation, he observes the cleaning staff: ''The women, their mops abandoned by the doorway, spoke Russian amongst themselves while the little Puerto Rican man stood silent, leaning on his broom, smiling to himself as he watched their large rumps.'' It is Tillman's mixing of humor and sadness that elevates his memoir above the pedestrian.

No comments about Wartime Nurse: One Hundred Years from the Crimea to Korea 1854-1954.

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