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Balcones Prize Winner in Nonfiction

In 2015, Ben Miller and the poet Anne Pierson Wiese moved from New York City to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to explore their midwestern roots and to focus on their writing careers. Working a day job in a hospital, Miller had a front-row seat to the COVID-19 pandemic as it moved from the coasts to the urban Midwest. Pandemonium Logs casts an unflinching eye on the state of the worker in the US health-care system during a global pandemic, giving voice to the doctors, nurses, support staff, patients, and families caught in the complex swirl of daily dilemmas and crucial choices.

In unsparing yet sympathetic prose, Ben Miller creates an intimate portrait of the impact of COVID on the diverse people of South Dakota. Through a wide range of characters—from understandably confused patients to quietly competent nurses—he explores the human complexities of the crisis: a doctor based in Mumbai who treats critically ill patients in the Dakotas via a tenuous hodgepodge of telehealth apparatus, a Hydra of six workplace trainers who together cannot train one employee to do one job, a vice president of corporate hospitality who lives to rip down safety signs as fast as nurses post them, a ninety-year-old hospital volunteer who pushes wheelchairs containing patients half his age.

In Pandemonium Logs, Miller provides precise and moving observations of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

The remarkable story of the physician whose public health victories changed the world.

Physician to the World by John M. Gibson is a study of the career of William Crawford Gorgas, focusing primarily on the 22 years from the Spanish-American War until his death at the age of 65. The book details the medical community’s gradual acceptance of the mosquito theory as the cause for yellow fever epidemics and follows Gorgas as his initial skepticism gave way to belief while he participated in Walter Reed’s massive cleanup of Havana. From this success Gorgas moved to the Panama Canal Zone and a bureaucratic quagmire as he attempted to apply sanitary principles there to control yellow fever and malaria. As canal construction proceeded, assorted red-tape and critics repeatedly thwarted Gorgas’s efforts. His particular nemesis was the imperious engineer George Goethals, who ruled the construction project with an iron hand. Gorgas’s dogged persistence to make Panama healthy for both Americans and natives eventually succeeded, enabling the project to be completed with minimum loss of life. During World War I Gorgas became U.S. Surgeon General, and finally his reputation equaled his accomplishments. He traveled widely in Europe, South Africa, and South America on behalf of public health improvements and was about to begin another such journey when he died of complications from a stroke in London in 1920.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten signed more death certificates in Chicago—and, by inference, the state of Illinois—than anyone else. As a family physician, he was trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were friends, colleagues, and lovers, shunned by most of the medical community because they were gay and HIV positive. Slotten wasn’t an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as both a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in one of the worst epidemics in modern history.

Plague Years is an unprecedented first-person account of that epidemic, spanning not just the city of Chicago but four continents as well. Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. In telling the story of someone who was as much a potential patient as a doctor, Plague Years sheds light on the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in ways that no previous medical memoir has.