NONFICTION
The White House Doctor My Patients Were Presidents by Connie Mariano, $25.99
Connie Mariano has seen George H.W. Bush naked. It’s very likely that she’s seen Bill Clinton in the buff, too. Don’t get the wrong idea, though; it was strictly professional.
Mariano, a Filipino-American Navy doctor, spent nine years serving as White House physician — tending to the health of the U.S. commander in chief. Her memoir, “The White House Doctor,” provides a peek into the tedium of treating the president’s every cough, sniffle and golf-course-induced blister. And then some.
“The Secret Service calls it the ‘kill zone,’ ” she writes. “To be in the presence of the president is to stand in the kill zone and to sense the rarefied, exciting, and potentially deadly experience of being in close proximity to an assassin’s most prized prey.”
Luckily, Mariano’s tenure — which encompassed the final year of George H.W. Bush’s term and the entirety of the Clinton administration — was a relatively quiet one. Tense moments, when they arrived, were not explosive in a literal sense. Mariano performed the Heimlich maneuver on a guest at the Bush family’s holiday party, treated Hillary Clinton for a blood clot and accidentally flooded the toilet aboard the king of Spain’s yacht.
As far as juicy White House-insider commentary goes, Mariano’s not much of a gossip. Nonpresidential patients frequently remain anonymous, and if she’s privy to details regarding Clinton’s late-’90s philandering, they are not included here.
Mariano is a self-made woman — the first female White House physician, the first female director of the White House Medical Unit and the first Filipina to become a Navy rear admiral — and “The White House Doctor” is mainly about her accomplishments as a medical professional. In that spirit, Mariano keeps doctor-patient confidentiality intact.
FICTION
Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey, $24.95
In “Perfect Reader,” first-time novelist Maggie Pouncey, daughter of novelist and former Amherst College president Peter Pouncey, makes artful use of her origins to describe a year in the life of 28-year-old Flora Dempsey.
Flora has spent most of her 20s working as an editor at a shelter magazine and avoiding meaningful conversation with her divorced parents.
Her mother, a permanent activist of sorts, wears a lot of black and a chip on her shoulder. Her father is a retired president of a liberal arts college in a small northeastern town. Many years ago he wrote a popular book called “Reader as Understander” that established his reputation. When he dies suddenly, he leaves Flora his large farmhouse, the task of serving as his literary executor, and a sheaf of poems dedicated to a mistress Flora knew nothing about.
She gladly leaves New York, where her life over the past several years will sound grimly familiar to any number of striving young women: “A gradual diminution in photocopying responsibilities, an ever-fluctuating stream of anxiety and anxiety medication, a haze of cigarette hangovers and haircuts she couldn’t afford, afternoons spent in laundromats reading Susan Sontag at the recommendation of some boy with only minimal comprehension, sex without foreplay and urinary-tract infections, air-shaft apartments with bathroom doors painted over so many times they wouldn’t shut.”
After moving into her father’s house, she spends the next several months trying to decide what to do with several of her father’s legacies: his handsome young lawyer (who becomes Flora’s boyfriend), his poems (publish them? burn them?) and his uncomfortably chummy lover.
As the daughter of one of the town’s most prominent citizens, Flora is public property, and returning forces her to grapple with that fact, as well as with a long-ago tragedy that blighted a childhood friendship.
Pouncey’s portrait of a sensitive girl numbed by loss and confused because life didn’t follow the trajectory suggested by her upbringing is intelligent and honest. So is her treatment of the emotional knobbiness of grief. And her take on life in a liberal college town (smug yet unhappy) and in the literary world (snide yet seductive) is deliciously spot-on.
