{"id":189,"date":"2007-07-18T07:48:53","date_gmt":"2007-07-18T12:48:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weeklyrob.dreamhosters.com\/?p=189"},"modified":"2007-07-18T07:48:53","modified_gmt":"2007-07-18T12:48:53","slug":"another-day-in-the-frontal-zzzzzzzzzzz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=189","title":{"rendered":"Another Day in the Frontal-ZZZZZZzzzzz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not long ago, I posted<\/a> about a book that wasn’t written very well, but was so compelling in its content that all was forgiven.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I followed it up with one that more or less misses the mark. “Another Day in the Frontal Lobe,” by Katrina Firlik<\/a>, sounds like an interesting read.<\/p>\n

Firlik is a neurosurgeon, and the book is positioned as a “neurosurgeon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Kitchen Confidential.” But it ain’t.<\/p>\n

Kitchen Confidential<\/a> brings you behind the scenes of something you think of as commonplace, and it surprises and entertains on practically every page.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Maybe I should give up on neurosurgeons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","category-languagelit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}