Ticks are more widespread this season than in any year I can remember, and most of us know at least one person who has been diagnosed with Lyme disease. Eliza Hemenway’s “Paris in Oakland” is a first-person account of a mother’s struggle with her child’s Lyme.
Hemenway, who was raised in Northampton and lives in northern California, is a documentary filmmaker and devout Christian. According to the book, she spent years trying to figure out what was wrong with her young daughter, Katherine.
Katherine’s first symptom was foot pain. This was followed by headaches, stomach aches, joint pain and more. Over the eight years it took to obtain a diagnosis, her mother reveals, the child moved from missing school on occasion to having to be schooled at home because she was too weak and sick to go out.
Eventually, Eliza Hemenway was told by a cardiologist that her daughter’s heart problems were a symptom of a nervous-system condition that can be brought on by Lyme disease.
She and Katherine found themselves trapped in an unresponsive health-care system, however.
Their insurance company disputed the idea of Lyme and refused to perform tests for the disease — or even to acknowledge the validity of tests performed at a clinic outside of Hemenway’s health-care network. Eventually, Katherine ended up in a life-threatening state and was hospitalized.
Hemenway’s story isn’t always completely clear. Her narrative jumps around in time, focusing in general on Katherine’s final, excruciating hospital stay. It’s impossible to avoid being moved by this mother’s passion and frustration, however, or to doubt the depth of her religious faith.
“Giants on Record,” co-written by Jim Vieira of Ashfield, is meant to augment the television series, “Search for the Lost Giants,” which aired on the History Channel. The program highlighted the efforts of Vieira and his brother Bill to document the possible existence of prehistoric giants on this continent.
The book features quotations from newspapers, books and other accounts that relate to sightings of people over seven feet tall — or at least traces of those people (bones in particular).
The authors don’t do a lot to help the reader judge which stories are reputable. The book is more interested in trees than forests — that is, in including as many giant sightings as possible rather than telling an overarching story.
Its final chapter manages to explore hypotheses about why and how very tall people might have lived in the Americas long ago — and why and how they might have disappeared.
More overall theory — or even an account of how the authors became interested in chasing giant stories — would have been welcome. Nevertheless, the stories retold in “Giants on Record” will entertain readers with their sheer color and novelty.
Eliza Hemenway will speak about “Paris in Oakland” on Friday, June 10, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Lyme Resource Center in Northampton. “Giants on Record” is available at Boswell’s Books and other bookstores.
Tinky Weisblat is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” Visit her website: TinkyCooks.com