Michael J. Collins’ Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs: The Making of a Surgeonis a memoir of the surgeon’s journey from breaking old concrete (and other very blue collar jobs) to pre-med and residency. The primary focus is on Collins’ family and personal life with relatively little of his actual medical experiences. For readers like me interested in the nuts and bolts of the acquisition of surgical expertise this tome doesn’t compare to the author’s earlier Hot Lights, Cold Steel (not to mention William Nolen’s 1970 classic The Making of a Surgeon). Even so it’s a delightfully told tale with great vignettes of Irish Catholic life in Chicago.

Skeletons on the Zahara retells the story of shipwreck, enslavement and salvation of the crew of the cargo ship Commerce that sailed from Connecticut in 1815. The original narrative was written by the ship’s captain, James Riley and was a favorite of the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Henry David Thoreau. In addition to the incredible tale of survival, the books is replete with fascinating details about history, nomadic society, biology and more.

I recently finished Ten Hours Until Dawn, by Michael Tougias. Ten Hours… tells the story Captain Frank Quick and the crew of his pilot boat the “Can Do” as their aborted rescue mission turns into a struggle of survival off the coast of Salem, Massachusetts during the great Blizzard of 1978. It’s a harrowing, spellbinding and tragic tale. Tougias does a masterful job of characterizing each member of the crew and documenting their heroic final hours. I realized as I read that I remember this storm. I was just beginning my second semester teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey and I wasn’t able to get to my office that day.

The first book I selected to read on my new Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader was Jeffrey Toobin‘s The Nine, a superb history of the major cases and figures of the Rehnquist Supreme Court from 1992 to 2005. The book confirms the obvious: the systematic evolution of the court from the liberal days of Chief Justice Warren Burger to the most conservative panel in over a century under John Roberts. It is sobering the learn how so few key individuals guided the change beginning with Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. Troubling, too, is how overtly political the appointments have become and how closely the Reagan/Bush appointees follow the party line. Two personalities stand out in particular in this regard. Justice Scalia has what I can only characterize as a weird literalist view of the Constitution while Justice Thomas seems like a deeply troubled, close-minded, disinterested (and probably incompetent) jurist.