Not long ago, I posted about a book that wasn’t written very well, but was so compelling in its content that all was forgiven.
Unfortunately, I followed it up with one that more or less misses the mark. “Another Day in the Frontal Lobe,” by Katrina Firlik, sounds like an interesting read.
Firlik is a neurosurgeon, and the book is positioned as a “neurosurgeon’s Kitchen Confidential.” But it ain’t.
Kitchen Confidential brings you behind the scenes of something you think of as commonplace, and it surprises and entertains on practically every page.
Frontal Lobe tells you stuff you would have guessed anyway, and a lot of stuff you couldn’t care less about. Really, it should have been an essay. It could have been extremely interesting, covering three or four cases that had compelling storylines.
Instead, it’s a book, with the same three or four cases, filled out with a bunch of stuff about how neurosurgeons joke about brains a lot. Or how at the conferences, they give away knickknacks and go out for steak dinners.
Maybe one problem here is that Firlik wants to make it clear that neurosurgeons aren’t superheroes, but just people. And, I guess, I never thought of them as superheroes. So all the stuff about how they’re just people strikes me as obvious, dull, and not worthy of putting in a book.
The writing is ok, mind you, but not great, and the content is so-so. Some cool stuff about how the brain is like toothpaste (on the first page), and a bunch of stuff that sounds like she’s telling us everything from the not-so-juicy parts of her daily journal. Her thoughts on God, which I don’t care about. Her thoughts on evolution, which I don’t care about. Some dumb had-to-be-there joking around in the locker room.
A little bell rang in my head when she mentions that she has her students read from a book about neurosurgery called Judith’s Pavilion. She apparently really loved that book. The bell reminded me that I have that book on my bookshelf. And that I stopped reading it, because I was bored with it.
Maybe I should give up on neurosurgeons.
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