Mary Lee Freeman.

Mary Lee Freeman is a palliative-care nurse practitioner
and former Commonweal intern.

Four years ago in these pages I recommended the works of David James Duncan, The Brothers K, The River Why, and River Teeth (December 5, 1997). Duncan's new and first purely nonfiction work, My Story as Told by Water (Sierra Club, $25, 295 pp.), is a National Book Award nominee. It has a subtitle that is nearly a review unto itself: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark. He's lost some of you already, hasn't he? Granted, Duncan does rant. Granted, he's been known to write the occasional sentence requiring a dozen or more commas--sentences the ends of which, once reached, are capped not by merciful periods but by pleading exclamation points. But Jeremiah ranted, so too Amos, and neither of those boys had even a speck of Duncan's humor. An eloquent nature writer, Duncan uncovers and articulates the many-layered truth of pressing environmental issues, whether they be federal mining policy or Columbia and Snake River dam-breaching, or a host of other concerns.

In April, W.R. Grace & Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to an accumulation of asbestos-related lawsuits. That prompted a rereading of Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action (Vintage/Random House, $13, 502 pp.), winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1995. Those who have not read the story of the mid-1980s suit filed against the W.R. Grace and Beatrice companies on behalf of families of a cluster of leukemic children in Woburn, Massachusetts, can still correct that oversight. (Watching the movie doesn't count.)

Readers of JAMA, a.k.a. the Journal of the American Medical Association, can probably be divided into two camps: those who first read the humanities features--the poem, Molly Southgate's essay about the cover art, and the "A Piece of My Mind" column--and those who head straight to the scientific research articles. I count myself in the former camp, finding the humanities a fitting entree into the world of medical research.

"A Piece of My Mind" essays are usually--but not always--penned by physicians. Health care in the trenches contains an embarrassment of riches for a physician cum storyteller: an endless array of new and unique characters, a good many of them seeking out physicians when the plot of their life stories has undergone a decided twist. Indeed, as Roxanne Young, the editor of this eponymous second collection of essays points out (A Piece of My Mind, AMA Press, $34, 332 pp.), the practice of medicine "is suffused with narrative"--from the initial account by the patient of his or her illness to the translation of that account into a clinical narrative of the disease and the practitioner's attempts to alter its trajectory. Essays which do justice to the raw reality of the practice of medicine without courting melodrama are not so easy to craft. Those in this collection avoid that courtship. Read too many in one sitting, though, and--sated--you'll find yourself thinking that having to wait two weeks between JAMAs is not such a bad fate.

In the days following the tragedies of September 11, I reread the chapter "A Moral Response to Terrorism" in James Tunstead Burtchaell's 1989 collection of essays and book reviews titled The Giving and Taking of Life: Essays Ethical (Notre Dame, $34, 324 pp.). Burtchaell's terrorism essay first appeared in 1986, and fifteen years later retains its power. Beginning with a cogent and nuanced attempt to clarify what terrorism is--and leaving seven accepted definitions in his wake--Burtchaell proceeds to make the case for the indispensability of sophisticated political and historical contextualization. Burtchaell takes the measure of counterterrorism according to the five traditional "just war" requirements, and ends with a discussion of the goal of counterterrorism as being peace rather than capitulation. "A Moral Response to Terrorism" is but one of ten essays and six book reviews in this eloquent and considered collection.

Bracing nonfiction requires tempering. For me, tempering is best achieved by reaching for the poetry of the late Jane Kenyon. I have given copies of Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, $16, 230 pp.) as Christmas gifts to four different people in the last four years. This year I'll make it five in five because of lines in poems like "With the Dog at Sunrise," in which Kenyon contemplates what words of condolence she might send a thirty-one-year-old widow: "I look at the lithe, pink trees more carefully,/remembering Stephen, the photographer./With the hunger of two I take them in."