My mother tells me that I read my way through third grade. Less interested in multiplication facts or the elementary school games of my peers, my nose was often buried in a book–cozied up in the top bunk in the room I shared with my sister, curled up on the living room love seat with a slice of American Singles to snack on, or plopped down outside under a tree. With Peter, Paul, and Mary, Mama Cass and, later, the Beatles often providing the background music, I found a lot of opportunities to snuggle up and venture into other worlds during the cold North Dakota winters and long Minnesota summers of my childhood.
My favorites were stories about people–real people who did interesting things, had adventures and made a difference: the Mayo brothers who founded the famous team-centered Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; Elizabeth Blackwell, who became the first woman doctor in the United States; Helen Keller, who lost both her vision and hearing after an early childhood illness and her tutor, Anne Sullivan, who helped Helen learn to communicate and live a full and functional life; and the title character in Kim: A Gift from Vietnam, about a young girl who was adopted from a Vietnamese orphanage after the war and who struggled to fit in to a new country and a new family.
Barry Marshall, 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, also remembers The Mayo Brothers book from his childhood. He recalls a great “story within a story” and the impact it had on him.
“When people say, is there something that got me into medicine? My grandmother used to have condensed Reader’s Digest novels and biographies. I remember early on reading The Mayo Brothers. There were the two brothers, it was approximately 1910, I think. I think their dad was a surgeon. There was this interesting story of their puppy develop[ing] a bowel obstruction or something and dad was away and the two kids chloroformed the dog and opened him up, did a laparotomy and fixed the puppy. That really captured my imagination. I was always interested in medicine.”
As a child, I learned that stories could spark my imagination and open up new worlds. As an adult, I still love to read stories about pioneers and adventurers who are doing interesting things and making a difference in the world around them. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Danny Meyer
- Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story by Ben Carson, M.D with Cecil Murphey
- Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson
Today while my bookshelves are full with all kinds of fiction and non-fiction titles, I go back to real-life stories like these when I want to be inspired by ordinary people making extraordinary things happen. What stories have sparked your imagination and opened up new worlds to you?
[tags] Peter, Paul and Mary, Mama Cass, the Beatles, Mayo Brothers, Elizabeth Blackwell, Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan, Kim: A Gift from Vietnam; Barry Marshall, Danny Meyer, Ben Carson, M.D., Greg Mortenson [/tags]
