The Friends of the Walker Memorial Book Club meets the second Wednesday of the month at 2 pm.  We will be meeting at the Community Center in the Pine Room.  If you are interested in joining, please send an email to [email protected].  This months selection is “Rough Sleepers” by Tracy Kidder.  You can request a copy of the book from the library.

Book Synopsis:

When Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, the chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? Jim took the job because he felt he couldn’t refuse. But that year turned into his life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they served their thousands of homeless patients. In this book, we travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.”