New in paperback

It is perhaps no accident that the title of John Gamel’s memoir-in-essays, The Man Who Lived in an Eggcup (Bascom Hill, $14.95), echoes the book it resembles, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” by Oliver Sacks. Like Sacks, Gamel, a retired ophthalmologist in Louisville, Ky., uses medical cases to illuminate the human condition. Gamel’s purpose, though, is not to puzzle out baffling diseases or explain medical advances, but to lay bare the complex emotional terrain of the doctor-patient relationship. In the 17 essays in this collection, many of which have appeared in literary magazines, he offers an array of anecdotes from his medical training. Each one reveals as much about his frailties as it does his patients’. Not every essay is a gem, but many are as dramatic as an episode of “House” and as eloquent and heartrending as any in the growing body of literature produced by doctors.

In “Spinal Beauty,” for example, Gamel tells the story of Cathy, “a girl with a twisted torso, her sternum thrust up like the prow of a ship beneath her flannel gown.” Blighted with a severe form of scoliosis, Cathy is slowly being asphyxiated by her own spine. Gamel is drawn to her: “Her vulnerability, her desperate needs . . . weighed upon my shoulders like the cloak of a king. I sheltered her. I sustained her. This was what I lived for.” It is not revealing too much to say that he eventually realizes the folly of his savior complex. But his epiphany — like many in this collection — is hard-won and gracefully rendered. “Those green eyes held no secrets for me, no craving to be understood,” he writes. “She didn’t want someone to stroke her brow or balm her soul. No, she wanted a surgeon . . . who could fix her body.” 

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Thankfully, such weighty moments are offset by comic ones, as when Gamel, as a young intern who had never changed a diaper or fed a baby, tries to explain infant care to a group of mothers. There are also triumphs: In the title essay, a man with no legs who’s confined to a contraption that resembles an eggcup persuades the hospital to hire him as an announcer on its paging system.

Looking back on his career, Gamel sees his greatest lesson as a simple one: humility. “I watched my patients grow old with grace by facing down their fears,” he writes, “and slowly, decade by decade, they taught me how to do it.”

From our previous reviews:

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (Picador, $16), a novel about the rise and fall of a middle-class Midwestern couple, is a “toxic stew of domestic life” that also wrestles with larger issues afflicting American society: the “moral compromises that take place in boardrooms and bedrooms, administrative offices and country hollows,” wrote Ron Charles. This “brilliant, maddening” book, he added, “is big enough and thoughtful enough to engage and irritate an enormous number of readers.”

Set in “the quietly dysfunctional suburbs of Connecticut,” Alison Espach’s novel The Adults (Scribner, $15) is narrated by a precocious 14-year-old girl, “a fresh, funny observer of adolescent social customs” whose coming-of-age tale is “a jaunty tone poem about the indeterminate years of young adulthood,” according to Lisa Zeidner.

The Grace of Silence (Vintage, $14.95), a memoir by Michele Norris, co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “blends the story of her childhood — and her quest to fill in its gaps — with a wider view of Southern race relations immediately following World War II,” according to Lisa Bonos.

Wray Herbert’s On Second Thought (Broadway, $15), an engaging exploration of the human psyche, uses examples from science and daily life to show “how our minds process information and the implications of our cognitive quirks,” noted Mark Berman.

Charlie Chan (Norton, $16.95), by Yunte Huang, a biography of the fictional Chinese-Hawaiian detective, is “a heady mixture of scholarship, essay and memoir,” according to Michael Dirda.

“No one writes better about nuclear history than Richard Rhodes does,” according to George Perkovich, and in his latest account, The Twilight of the Bombs (Vintage, $17), Rhodes “documents events from the end of the Cold War to 2003.” In Rhodes’s telling, “big personalities clash and cooperate, jokes and epiphanies punctuate the debate, and offbeat details energize the narrative.”

Hazel Rowley’s “enticing” biography of the Roosevelts, Franklin and Eleanor (Picador, $18), “is less about history than about relationships, and it reads like a wonderful novel at times, giving us a vision of what parts of American life were like then,” noted Carolyn See.

Krug reviews paperbacks every month for The Post.