April Fool's Day - Bryce Courtenay

Title: April Fool's Day Author: Bryce Courtenay Genre: Non-fiction Rating: 8/10 # pages: 449 Date read: November

Summary: Courtenay's son Damon was born in Australia with severe haemophilia. Along with the moving story of an afflicted but strong-spirited boy, Courtenay paints a bitter and angry picture of the Australian medical community at that time, steeped in paternalism and political expediency.

Several times a week Damon would bleed into his joints, and his father would take him to the hospital for infusion of Factor VIII to induce clotting. In other countries families were allowed to stock Factor VIII and infuse at home, minimizing both disruption to the family and permanent damage to joints. This was not permitted in Australia, to the extreme detriment of haemophiliacs and their families.

Worse than this, the screening and fractionation of donated blood in Australia did not at that time meet safety standards known and required in other countries. Damon contracted AIDS from the contaminated Australian blood supply and died of that disease on April Fool's Day in 1991.

Review: A sad book, but really interesting. I'm glad to have read it. I never knew much about the life of a bleeder, and was amazed at how much classic bleeders have to go through to just live some resemblence of an ordinary life.
I was totally appalled at how the Courtenays were treated by a lot the medical 'industry' (for want of better word), and even more so at the fact that people were so callous about AIDS. I wonder if it was only in Australia or if it's representative of how people all over the world viewed it in the early 80s. But that's a topic for a post on its own and doesn't belong in a review.

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A Grave Breach - James Macomber

Title: A Grave Breach Author: James Macomber Genre: Suspense Rating: 7/10 # pages: 348 Date read: November, 2007

Review: What is the gravest breach? Is it a breach of national security? A breach of peace? A breach of contract? Or a breach of confidentiality, of trust?

That is one of the things that James Macomber explores in his third John Cann book and newest novel, A Grave Breach.

John Cann would never have agreed to defend a war criminal in a court of law, especially not after seeing the atrocities he performed during the Balkan war, if it hadn't been for one thing: Arthur Matsen - his boss and a man whom he respects and loves as his own father - asked him to. Forced to find the blurred boundaries between his trust in Matsen and his own impression of his client, Cann travels to Europe and tries to get to the bottom of things and find out why Matsen asked him to take on this case.

Meanwhile, back in the USA Cann's colleague Katherine Price discovers that all is not as it ought to be at the facilities where Cann's ward, Janie is staying. When it is discovered that Janie is subjected to dangerous psychiatric experiments, only a desperate action will protect her.

Giving away any more of the plot would be a shame for other readers of the book. James Macomber managed to keep me at the edge of my seat through the various twists and turns of the book until its final conclusion. Unfortunately by combining two unrelated plotlines, Macomber sometimes neglects one in favour of the other, and not all threads are properly tied up, leaving the reader with unresolved issues and burning questions.

It is an advantage, but not a necessity, to have read the two first John Cann books before reading A Grave Breach. I hadn't, but as all references to earlier books are well explained it allows it to stand on its own without any problems. It is an excellent suspense novel that definitely leaves me wanting to read more of Macomber's work. (Written for Armchair Interviews)

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