Barbara's Byline

I enjoyed John Vaillant's new THE TIGER: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Knopf, $26.95) so much so that I spent an hour after I finished reading it going on Googlemaps to see satellite views of this wooded region in northeast Russia where man and tigers coexist on an edgy basis. Vaillant successfully manages to create a suspenseful tale of the hunted and the hunter - filled with the tension of love and revenge between man and beast. Like the best of mystery authors, he spices his tale with a lot of miscellaneous but fascinating information about not only tigers, but also the many colorful woodsmen who co-inhabit the region, anthropology, archeology, and the scrapping together of a life in post-Perestroika Russia. This is one of those special books that pull you in and keep you turning the pages reading about something you never thought you would possibly be interested in. - Barbara Meade

I just finished reading an unusually fascinating new book from Farrar Straus, Melanie Thernstrom's THE PAIN CHRONICLES: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering ($27).  As the title suggests, the book is partly personal, but only a very small part.  It was the author's personal encounters with pain that led her to extensively research the whole area of chronic pain, "a serious, widespread, misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and undertreated disease."  Thernstrom interviewed the most distinguished pain specialists in the country and visited seven of the top pain clinics, where "most of all [she] was struck by the contrast between the physician's and the patient's point of view: the difference between the patient's understanding of their suffering and the doctors' understanding , and the complex nature of the medical encounter."  In the medical world, chronic pain has only recently been recognized as a disease instead of a symptom, and medical research has discovered that untreated pain not only pathologically changes the central nervous system but those changes in turn cause even greater pain, even after the original cause is no longer present.  These are just a few of the discoveries in the new field of pain medicine that Thernstrom writes about it in this absorbing book.

This Saturday, May 21 at 1 p.m. my first bookstore partner from the ‘70s, Hugo Rizzoli, will be here with his wife, Carol Eron Rizzoli, to talk about her book, THE HOUSE AT ROYAL OAK (Black Dog & Leventhal, $22.95), an account of their purchase and remodeling of a B&B on the Eastern Shore near St. Michaels, Maryland.  I took Hugo into my business as a partner at the Bookstall in 1978 and sold to him in 1980.  He ran the business until 1998.One of our best customers was poet Linda Pastan, who wrote a poem about "The Bookstall", which was selected by Metro for a public service poster in the Metro cars.  I’ll bring the framed poster, along with some pictures of Hugo, Linda, and me back in the ‘70s.  The House at Royal Oak will be excerpted in the June issue of The Washingtonian and featured in the July-August issue of Preservation Magazine.