I never thought of myself as a memoirist until a friend said it. But of course, I am. My Dr. Bookworm “gonzo book reviews” discuss books, yes, but also describes how my life, actions and outlook change because of those books. I’ve long wanted to – felt obligated to – write about my family and my experiences […]
Category: Non-Fiction
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Pumping Iron Under Protest
I have long contended that only men in prison enjoy lifting weights. That’s because their lives are so boring! And for self-protection, of course. Still, why would the rest of us who have other options – like getting a root canal or reading War and Peace or just aerating the lawn – want to lift weights? I […]
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Climate Change and Me
In December of 2015, torrential rains caused parts of the St. Louis area to be evacuated. Bill and I were on vacation and saw it on TV. “We made the national news,” I exclaimed. I was dismayed when we arrived home. A great swath of the wall-to-wall carpeting in our basement had been soaked in that […]
Wildfires! Floods! Hurricanes! Heat waves! Droughts! And each catastrophe a record-breaker! Weather news these days sends me into a tailspin of despair and anxiety. And guilt. What is my duty? Do I have to give up air-conditioning to keep the planet from self-destructing? Would I? Reading science journalist Madeline Ostrander’s 2022 book At Home on an Unruly […]
What Matisse and Cézanne taught me about color, pattern and creating order This is Susan Caba’s fourth blogpost for Dr. Bookworm. Her others are “where you headed from here,” “i sleep with other people’s dogs,” and “The Bear on the Stairs: Tales of the Prairie, with Paintings.” Glossy, glamorous and lush with photos and generally sparse […]
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Covid Virgins
Should Bill and I continue to guard our Covid virginity like medieval maidens? Do we stay in the tower? I am wracked with cognitive dissonance. One minute, I think, “I am going to die, and take Bill with me!” And then I go, “I should just enjoy my life.” I am jealous of my friends’ trips […]
“We fed thousands of people. They kept coming, running from the Japanese soldiers. We had to find food for them.” My uncle Zachary Luh (陆德林), Dad’s older brother, spoke with animation, his words expressing excitement, fear, and also resolve and courage. The plight and flight of Ukrainians being terrorized by Russian soldiers, tanks, and rockets have […]
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Sleepless in St. Louis
Do I have an Ambien habit? I am twenty years over the “short-term use” recommendation for these sleeping pills. I worry about running out before the refill date. I fantasize about having a stockpile against the day my doctor cuts me off. Ambien doesn’t even work well! I get sleepy, yes, but only for a […]
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Natural World Musings
I feel like a voyeur. On the pond down the hill, Canadian geese have paired off for mating. I watch them from my kitchen window. Couples circle around each other, splashing and bobbing their heads in and out of the water. I do not avert my eyes when he pounces on her back, his beak […]
I’m going to let you in on a secret. The reason I can claim over 11,000 views on my blog this year is because husband Bill – God bless him! – stacks the deck by running up my numbers. Come on! What are the odds that some person reads over twenty essays every morning before […]
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Rice and Race and Politics
“In the 1700s, South Carolina was the largest exporter of rice in the world.” So read the display at the Rice Museum in Georgetown, South Carolina. That must be a mistake. I remember my disbelief, even now, over twenty years later. Which part of the statement was wrong, though? Rice! I am Chinese. I know […]
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Inspiration
Not long after I started my Dr. Bookworm blog three years ago, I found out what I really wanted to do with my life. I aspire to blog about a book the way each episode of the podcast Aria Code cracks open a single operatic aria. This is my first podcast review. In Dr. Bookworm, my goal is to introduce the reader […]
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Frantic Flight
The boat in the title of Helen Zia’s book, the Last Boat Out of Shanghai, is not a literal boat. It stands for the desperate rush of millions of people fleeing the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949…
Well, my mom missed that boat. And with her, me and my baby sister.
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Stranded in America
My parents lived together for two years after they were married. Then they did not see each other for the next seven. For some of that time, they couldn’t even write letters. Dad was in America. Mom, my sister and I were in China, and then Hong Kong. Our family was separated by 8,000 miles […]
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Ben Franklin and My Covid Year
I seem to have the soul of an 18th century Yankee — industrious, leaning toward practical virtue, and optimistic. Then again, that is not unlike the striving, entrepreneurial spirit of my Shanghainese parents. I’ve been thinking about these traits in the context of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and my Covid year. In this memoir, Franklin (1706 […]
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Finding Hope in the Trump Era
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death that late September Friday seemed too much to bear. For about twenty-four hours, I numbed myself by watching “Monk.” Events in our country were taking their toll: The epidemic. Black killings by police. Four year’s worth of Trump’s tromping on Kurdish and European allies; Muslim and Central American immigrants; birds, wolves, […]
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Crosswords: A Love Letter
The summer of 1972 was a sizzler. It was 100 degrees the July day I got married. It was also the summer that an interest was sparked that has only grown hotter and brighter over the years. That summer, I discovered crossword puzzles. A paperback of crossword puzzles had somehow come into my possession. Margaret […]
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What Women Want
When I started medical school in 1976, my class was 15% women. St. Louis University was quite proud of being so broad-minded. Yet, two years later, when the chief of surgery at St. Louis City Hospital found out that he had two medical students with the same first name in the operating room, he called […]
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23 and Thomas Jefferson
What? Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved concubine, in the parlance of the day, was half-sister to his deceased wife Martha? What? Sally and Thomas’s children, legally slaves, were 1/8 African and 7/8 white? WHAT? At his death, all but five of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves – some of them, Sally’s great nephews and nieces – were sold […]
Remember when you had homework? I do. I brought home a pile of books: my intentions were so lofty. In those days before backpacks, I bundled them in my arms. The books often slid out of my grip. It was annoying. Come Friday night, I wanted to relax. On Saturday, pangs of guilt nibbled at […]
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