FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL

FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL
  Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
  By Sheri Fink
  Illustrated. 558 pages. Crown Publishers. $27.
  Eight years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Floodwaters rose in the Uptown streets surrounding Memorial Medical Center, where hundreds of people slowly realized that they were stranded. The power grid failed, toilets overflowed, stench-filled corridors went dark. Diesel generators gave partial electricity. Hospital staff members smashed windows to circulate air. Gunshots could be heard, echoing in the city. Two stabbing victims turned up at this hospital, which was on life support itself, and were treated.
  By Day 4 of the hurricane, the generators had conked out. Fifty-two patients in an intensive care wing lay in sweltering darkness; only a few were able to walk. The doctors and nurses, beyond exhaustion, wondered how many could survive.
  When evacuations were done, 45 patients had not made it out alive. The State of Louisiana began an investigation; forensic consultants determined that 23 corpses had elevated levels of morphine and other drugs, and decided that 20 were victims of homicide.
  In her book “Five Days at Memorial,” Dr. Sheri Fink explores the excruciating struggle of medical professionals deciding to give fatal injections to those at the brink of death. Dr. Fink, a physician turned journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for her investigation of these events in a 2009 joint assignment for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. This book is much more than an extension of that report. Although she had the material for a gripping disaster story, Dr. Fink has slowed the narrative pulse to investigate situational ethics: what happens when caregivers steeped in medicine’s supreme value, preserving life, face traumatic choices as the standards of civilization collapse.
  This approach is a literary gamble,

Mrs. Dalloway

Mark G

In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance

From Wilbert Rideau, the award-winning journalist who spent forty-four years in Louisiana prisons working against unimaginable odds to redeem himself, the story of a remarkable life: a crime, its punishment, and ultimate triumph.

After killing a woman in a moment of panic following a botched bank robbery, Rideau, denied a fair trial, was improperly sentenced to death at the age of nineteen. After more than a decade on death row, his sentence was amended to life imprisonment, and he joined the inmate population of the infamous Angola penitentiary. Soon Rideau became editor of the prison newsmagazine The Angolite, which under his leadership became an uncensored, daring, and crusading journal instrumental in reforming the violent prison and the corrupt Louisiana justice system.

With the same incisive feel for detail that brought Rideau great critical acclaim, here he brings to vivid life the world of the prison through the power of his pen. We see Angola’s unique culture, encompassing not only rivalries, sexual slavery, ingrained racism, and daily, soul-killing injustices but also acts of courage and decency by keeper and kept alike. As we relive Rideau’s remarkable rehabilitation—he lived a more productive life in prison than do most outside—we also witness his long struggle for justice.

In the Place of Justice goes far beyond the confines of a prison memoir, giving us a searing exposé of the failures of our legal system framed within the dramatic tale of a man who found meaning, purpose, and hope in prison. This is a deeply moving, eloquent, and inspirational story about perseverance, unexpected friendships and love, and the possibility that good can be forged under any circumstances. (amazon) - 

Random Family

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner, $17). LeBlanc spent a decade following a South Bronx, N.Y., family in order to create this beautiful book, a riveting tale that captures the human drama of poverty’s challenges. [Reporter Emily Brady embedded in an insular community for a year to produce “Humboldt,” her book-length portrait of a California region getting rich on marijuana farming. Here, she names some favorite books that served as inspiration.]

Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House, $27)

 “Novelists get called master storytellers all the time, but Curtis Sittenfeld really is one,” said Maggie Shipstead in The Washington Post. A tale about clairvoyant twin sisters may sound like an excursion into soapy melodrama, but the author of Prep and American Wife makes readers feel as if they’re listening to the long, candid outpouring of “a matter-of-fact but mesmerizing friend.” As adults, Violet and Kate Shramm have adapted to their shared gift in diametrically opposed ways—one becoming a professional psychic while the other, the book’s narrator, has chosen to suppress her premonitions and live as conventionally as possible. But after Violet appears on national TV predicting that a catastrophic earthquake will soon strike St. Louis, Kate is forced to decide what she truly believes in. In the suspenseful tale that follows, plain, likable Kate serves as an indispensable “anchor of realism,” said Trine Tsouderos in the Chicago Tribune. This is what Sittenfeld has always done best: “She makes plain riveting.”

Seeing Like Klimt on an Austrian Lake (NYTimes)

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July 4, 2013

Seeing Like Klimt on an Austrian Lake

By LAURIE LICO ALBANESE

The Viennese painter Gustav Klimt first visited the stunning turquoise waters of Lake Attersee, in northern Austria, as a young man in search of a summer refuge.

“It is terrible, awful here in Vienna,” Klimt wrote to a friend. “Everything parched, hot, dreadful, all this work on top of it, the ‘bustle’ — I long to be gone like never before.”

The leader of Austria’s turn-of-the-century modern art movement and Vienna’s most famous painter was helping to support two lovers, two children, his mother and two unwed sisters. His need for escape should come as no surprise: fond of sketching naked models in his studio, he was facing accusations of pornography even as wealthy matrons were lining up to have him paint their portraits.

At the age of 38, Klimt journeyed to the Salzkammergut region and made his way to a stone-and-turreted villa at the northern tip of Lake Attersee, at the edge of the Austrian Alps. There, he shed city clothing for floor-length robes, temporarily abandoned his city mistresses and traded stylized portrait painting for the bracing, vivid landscapes of his summer idyll.

Klimt had found his sommerfrische — literally, “summer fresh” — the extended sojourn into this lake-dotted countryside that began as a tradition with the 19th-century Hapsburg emperors and is still beloved by Austrians. He returned to Lake Attersee for 15 more summers until his death in 1918, creating more than 45 of his 50 landscapes in the tiny lakefront towns of Seewalchen, Litzlberg and Weissenbach.

“Anyone who wants to know anything about me as an artist — and this is the only thing that matters,” Klimt famously told a journalist, “should look attentively at my pictures and try to discern from them who I am and what I want.”

To even attempt to know the man behind Klimt’s masterpieces, one must first go to Vienna. And then one must visit the Attersee, which retains the same open-air charm that drew royalty and artists here more than a century ago.

After a steaming week in Vienna researching Klimt’s life and work for a novel — and finding the city as hot and demanding as Klimt did — my husband and I followed his footsteps and drove two and a half hours west, slipping into a low-key, lush countryside where extended families vacation in simple lake houses, cyclists spin through the valley on long treks and weekend sailors ply the lake waters.

We settled into a room with a sweeping water view at the Hotel-Restaurant Häupl and then headed out to follow some of Klimt’s routine, rowing in an old-fashioned wooden boat for hours, diving from a silvered wooden dock into bracing water, dining on whole fish cooked on a long stick over open coals and hiking on lush hillsides.

The new Gustav Klimt Center, perched at the lake’s edge, was our base of operations. The museum’s opening last July, timed to mark the 150th anniversary of Klimt’s birth, coincides with a renewed interest in his pastoral paintings. For decades his iconic gold- and silver-accented works, “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” and “The Kiss,” eclipsed his innovative landscapes. But in 2011 his colorful “Litzlberg on Attersee” was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $40.4 million, and last year the Leopold Museum in Vienna mounted a retrospective that gave equal weight to his landscapes. The new museum at the lake beautifully and intimately highlights Klimt’s connection to the lake and its surroundings.

“The story here is that you can see all of Klimt’s motifs,” said Sandra Tretter, a curator at the center and at the Leopold. “For 27 of his landscape paintings you can stand where he stood and see the view, see what he left out and what he included.”

The center, modestly tucked between the gated Schloss Kammer castle and the local marina, also offers a multimedia history of the painter’s summer life, and a self-guided walking audio tour along the Gustav Klimt Theme Trail, which turns the towns of Seewalchen, Kammer and Schörfling into an open-air extension of the museum. The tour led us to colorful kiosks along the water where we were treated to a recap of the artist’s career highlights, after which we climbed aboard a small motorized skiff with a local guide for a private tour we had arranged through the Attersee tourism office.

The lake water was a brilliant, almost unreal blue and the breeze was making a brisk headwind as we left the shore, eyes peeled for the highlights of the landscape Klimt immortalized in his work.

“Klimt painted here only for himself,” our guide, Katrin Mekiska, told us as we approached the private Litzlberg Island, where the artist stayed for a time. “He mostly painted from the rooms where he lived. He opened the window and he painted.”

A bulky man with a sprightly face, Klimt must have cut an unusual figure as he stomped about the area in his trademark loose-flowing robes. He often went for long walks through the foothills, sometimes carrying a sketchpad. The locals nicknamed him the Wood Goblin or Wood Gnome, and apparently laughed when they saw him rowing to the middle of the lake with art supplies in tow.

Onboard our own small boat, Ms. Mekiska gave us an exact replica of the 1.75-inch-square cardboard stencil Klimt used to isolate and frame small chunks of the landscape here. The artist called this stencil his “seeker”; it is the tool that changed the way he saw and painted the lake and its surroundings.

We were invited to look across the lake as the artist did: with one eye closed, seeking a tiny square of scenery worthy of an entire painting. Peering through Klimt’s “seeker” allowed us to understand exactly how this modest device led the painter to flatten perspective, raise the horizon line and fill a large canvas with blue water and only a sliver of sky — a revolutionary vision that he immortalized in his 1900 landmark work, “On Lake Attersee.”

“It was really kind of brave,” Ms. Mekiska said. “He wanted something new,” and he created it here by fusing a modern and boundaryless view of nature with color and emotion.

Back on shore, my husband and I made our way to the stone-and-turreted Villa Paulick, where Klimt stayed on his first trips to the lake and which continued to be the centerpiece of his social life in the Salzkammergut region.

Klimt never married, but his younger brother wed Helene Flöge, who ran a fashionable couture shop in Vienna with her sister, Emilie. Cemented by the bond of creative arts and shared affection for Ms. Flöge’s niece — Gertrude Flöge, known as Trudie — Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge became lifelong companions (although reportedly not lovers) and spent their summers together at the Attersee. Ms. Flöge’s brother married into the Paulick family, and the Villa Paulick became the three families’ meeting place.

Tucked behind a hedgerow and buttressed against the lakeshore, the villa can be elusive for first-time visitors. But after learning from a Viennese museum curator that his wife rents a room at the villa each summer, my husband and I made a few local inquiries, procured an invitation and entered the Villa Paulick through the old garden gate. We soon fell under its spell and succumbed to the charm of its spirited owner, 84-year-old Erika Messner.

“I inherited this home from Trudie 40 years ago,” Ms. Messner said, speaking through a guest who translated from German. “She left it to me instead of to her family, because she knew I would keep it as it was, in the original.”

In a long, Klimt-like robe, Ms. Messner glided like an apparition through wood-filled parlor rooms in which all windows opened to the Attersee. The spaces — full of original straw chairs, wood and metal furnishings, red velvet upholstery, cozy window seats and cool stone porches — offered the same sense of deep, eternal ease they must have a century ago. Far below us, Klimt’s refurbished rowboat bobbed in the shady lake house, awaiting a captain.

Regina Führlinger, an academic from Vienna who has returned to the villa for more than 15 summers, was kind enough to show us her jewelry box of a room under the rooftop eaves, where she sleeps in Emilie Flöge’s carved oak bed and shares a single bathroom with the villa’s other guests.

After leaving the lake in September 1913, Klimt wrote to Ms. Flöge of his trip home: “Had very mixed feelings during the journey (as if a piece of me was missing).”

For those staying at the Villa Paulick, like Romona Uhl, a professor from Linz, there are no mixed feelings.

“To me this is paradise,” Ms. Uhl said as she waited for her teenage daughter to join her in the lush garden. “Now I know where God lives in the summer.”

IF YOU GO

The Gustav Klimt Center (Hauptstrasse 30, Schörfling; 43-664-828-3390; klimt-am-attersee.at) is your starting point. Admission is 5 euros (about $6.50 at $1.31 to the euro); an additional 3 euros for a self-guided audio tour of the lakefront kiosks on the Gustav Klimt Theme Trail. Contact the Attersee tourism office at the center (info@klimt-am-attersee.at) to book guided tours and boat trips from 13 euros; private boat tours start at 140 euros.

Where to Stay and Eat

Call the Villa Paulick (Promenade 12, Seewalchen am Attersee; 43-0-7662-2412) to secure one of its seven rooms, all but one with shared bath (from 39 euros a person; includes breakfast). July and August are especially busy.

The four-star, family-owned Hotel-Restaurant Häupl (Hauptstrasse 20, A-4863 Seewalchen am Attersee; 43-7662-298-60; hotel-haeupl.at/en) offers lake view terraces and balconies plus excellent meals from the acclaimed chef Klaus Kobald (166 euros for doubles includes a breakfast buffet served tableside; dinner is around 150 euros for two, with wine).

Hotel Seegasthof Oberndorfer (Hauptstrasse 18, Attersee am Attersee; 43-7666-78640; oberndorfer.info), on the lake, has a private dock and 23 rooms (from 68.50 euros a person; includes breakfast).

Africa (travel)

“Africa is a place that, like nowhere else I know, can get you out of your own head,” said Peter Godwin inCondé Nast Traveler. For 15 years, I’ve lived in New York City and returned to my homeland only as a reporter. But my boys, Hugo and Thomas, had never been when my wife and I finally arranged a trip that would give them a deep draft of the continent. My native Zimbabwe wasn’t an option: I’d written too much about Robert Mugabe’s cruel regime to risk entering. Still, that left the rest of southern Africa—a place where “life feels more vivid,” because to walk this land is to be “surrounded by predator and prey.”

Our first stop, an island off the coast of Mozambique, delivered a view that Thomas instantly deemed the best he’d ever seen. We had climbed a giant dune: To our east lay “a palisade of churning surf” and the Indian Ocean; to our west, a narrow turquoise channel and the tree-lined mainland. We would spend our next days acclimating to a world in which six fish could be pulled from the water on a single cast and a dinner table could be laid out in the shallow ocean water as the sky darkened. And when our beach idyll ended, we braved the crowds at glorious Victoria Falls. Walking a narrow pedestrian bridge, we were soaked by spray and “wreathed by multiple rainbows.” The boys whooped in delight, “awed at the sheer power of the mighty Zambezi plunging over the abyss.”

I chose Botswana for our safari. We slept in tents at the edge of a lagoon, listening to “the great tuba blasts” of hippos. In the Moremi Game Reserve and neighboring Chobe National Park, you can get “ridiculously close” to wild elephants, and we did. Our guide taught the boys to see with new eyes every creature from the praying mantis to the laughing hyenas. Thomas correctly identified lion tracks one day and followed them for hours. Finally, as we rounded a corner, we found two large males resting in the open before us. “The look on Thomas’s face made the entire trip worthwhile.”

Uncharted Africa (unchartedafrica.com) offers all-inclusive group safaris from $7,500 a person for five nights.