El Nino

By Douglas Anne Munson

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670831344
• ISBN13: 9780670831340
• Release Date: July 1990
• Publisher: Viking
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

Great novel for our times

This is one of the five best books that I have ever read (some of the others were the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and "War and Peace"). It captures the failing infrastructure supporting our legal system and the difficulty in dealing with the system for a caring lawyer, and seems to be more germane each passing year. Douglas Anne Munson (1948-2003) was such a lawyer in Los Angeles and dealt with family law. This novel was first published in 1990, and was published two years later as a paperback with the revised title "Hostile Witness." Wikipedia has a nice article on her. I am a faculty member at a major university (materials and biomedical engineering) and have watched young people especially chewed up by a legal system that provides little rehabilitation (in general) but excellent trapping once in contact with it if one does not have money for a private attorney. It reminds me of another excellent non-fiction book called "Where's the Evidence" about medical care, where New York State spent almost $200,000 on a premature birth to an indigent couple. When the baby was sent home to a tenement, it was soon killed by a rat.Where's the Evidence?: Debates in Modern Medicine Munson has shown the toll that working within such a system takes on those who try to do their best, and to maintain some optimism about outcomes. She eventually quit her job out of frustration, published a few more novels under another name (Mercedes Lambert), and moved to Czechoslovakia to teach English. We have a lot of people trying to do their best in court, in education and in medicine despite some serious structural challenges, and this book very nicely captures that struggle. Two of her more recent novels were just published in a collection with an introduction by more established folks, so perhaps her lack of recognition is being somewhat diminishedDogtown / Soultown. I never wrote a review in this venue before, but felt that one was needed for this book because none yet existed. I hope that you get as much from reading this book as I did, and that we can work together to figure out how to do a better job with the structure for those still engaged. We seem to be in an edgy "romantic" period for the popular arts (witness all the super-hero movies that lack verisimilitude), a bit like the period that existed before the US Civil War. Another good book ("Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture", 1850-1920 by David E. Shi, 1996) describes how the war caused people to pay a bit more attention to the misery around them. The facts seem to be there in readable non-fiction [e.g.,[ASIN:0375506160 Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer]] but sometimes the inner nuance is best caught by a book such as El Nino. My apologies for all the digressions, but this seemed too good a book to let slip gently into that good night, without some comment on context. Cheers