Otto Bookstore

Internet Communications Give Birth to Books:

Two Authors Who Jump-started their Books with Space Age Communication Will Sign at Otto’s

A Review by Betsy Rider

When Dr. Chris Coppola was serving at a trauma center in Iraq, he would relieve the strain of dealing with desperate cases by writing about them in letters home and by answering questions from friends who stayed in touch by blogging.  When he returned from Iraq, he put the letters and the blogs together into a book called Coppola: a Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq.  Then he continued blogging to answer still more questions and share his insight into any number of things, from the many ways people at home can support our military to what he thinks of the current medical insurance “debate.”

When Diane Keeler, an epilepsy patient was trying to understand why she started getting epileptic seizures at age 38 and what she could do about them, she went on the Internet to find other epileptic patients and what they experienced in their search for understanding.  Her book, A Patient Friendly Resource for Epilepsy and Other Seizure Disorders combines her method of coping with those of the many friends she made on MySpace.  Before publishing it she got a medical authority to check it for up-to-date accuracy.

Copolla: a Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq is the up-close and personal story of what a pediatric surgeon experienced during two four-month deployments at a state-of-the-art field hospital 40 miles from Baghdad that lacked nothing but heating and air conditioning and, oh yes, protection from the sand and mud that crept under the tent flaps.  His cases included not only wounded U. S. soldiers (troops, as he calls them) but also wounded Iraqi soldiers and policemen.  Then there were the many civilian casualties including men, women and children.  Two that he described broke my heart—an elderly woman who had been targeted as she came out of the polling place for the first election in anyone’s memory was severely wounded but proudly held up the ink-stained finger that showed she had been fingerprinted before she voted!  The other heart-breaker was a two year old who was critically burned when the insurgents threw an incendiary device into her home because her father was an Iraqi policeman who had arrested insurgents.  And then there was the captured insurgent who spit in the face of a nurse who was trying to help him.  The face of war and its fallout is ever so dramatically revealed in his book.

Both Dr. Coppola and Diane Keeler will be signing their books Friday from 5 to 8.  Ten per cent of the price of Copolla, a Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq will be donated to Doctors without Borders for their work in Haiti (a place where Dr. Coppola has served in the past).