Rating: 
Summary: competent faceless
Review: can you say VERY ORDINARY? it's just very anonymous material.
Rating: 
Summary: Delightful Reading
Review: Dear John Murray; Thank you for a wonderful experience. I enjoyed your book and beyond...the spiritual depth of characters and the very humaness of each, made me feel as if I knew them as real friends or neighbors. It is not easy to find books with this depth of meaning and truth. I am so looking forward to your next book. Sincerely, Ellie --
Rating: 
Summary: Thematically Focused and Written in a Lean Style
Review: From the first sentence, these stories have a simple, direct tone that is reminiscent of Hemingway. "On the first morning of the training in Bombay, just minutes before she collapsed, Elizabeth Dinakar stood in front of two hundred people in the conference hall, pointed up at the cholera bacteria magnified on the wall in front of her, and said, 'this is your enemy.'" Every event feels urgent and full of vitality. Though the characters may have feelings that are often ambiguous, the style has a clarity that pulls the reader into the story. Often in a collection of stories, there is little to indicate how or why these particular stories fit together. Such is not the case here. Thematically, the stories in A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies overlap quite a bit. The first story, "The Hill Station," crosses cultural boundaries, expresses an intimate familiarity with medical professions and explores the emotional isolation of a career professional. Variations on these themes are treated throughout the stories in this collection. In exploring these themes, the protagonists are frequently introspective. They think and remember and think some more before taking the one decisive action that is pivotal to their lives and the climax of the story. These intensely analytical characters express their emotions through their obsessions. They are beetle collectors, mountain climbers and third world volunteer doctors. As focused as the themes are between the stories, the settings are diverse. From the top of the Himalayas to the American Midwest, the author captures the essence of these locales and many more besides. Each location has its own distinct personality that is conveyed by the vegetation and the weather, the sounds and smells, even the very feel of the wind and sun. All this adds richness and depth to this fine collection of stories. The stories in this collection capture the poignant solitude that everyone faces in their lives from time to time. This is the bright start for Murray's writing career. Overall, this collection of poignant stories is a treat. They show growth occurring through painful realizations of inadequacy.
Rating:
Summary: Exquisite and very spare
Review: I didn't quite know what to expect when I rec'd this book as a gift - and therefore I was delighted to discover how very much I loved this debut story collection. The stories, though unrelated, share a common thread so that there is a sense of continuity that is often lacking in such collections. Most of the characters are scientific professionals fleeing from some tragic or compromising life event, only to find that you can't run away from what's within you.
Beautiful writing, straightforward but metaphorical and symbolic.
Wow...!
Rating:
Summary: A Passion to Write Well
Review: I've met so many doctors over the years who have incredible talent in other areas. Some manage to balance a full career and still pursue their painting or their love of the cello until they retire to live amazingly long lives, fueled by their passion on which they can now totally focus.
I don't know what Dr. Murray's agenda will be, but I hope he can manage the balance between writing and a medical career. Murray understands the human heart. He has a great understanding of that one large or small situation or life event that hurls a person into choices they might never have made.
Add to this his knowledge of the exotic world and its suffering about which most of us are totally in the dark, his facinating data, probably collected over a lifetime, regarding entymology, and finally his amazing ability with language, and you've got a tremendous reading experience.
I envy anyone who has yet to read this debut of short stories. I grabbed it from the library after reading two Sunday newspaper reviews. I was so struck by his writing that I immediately sought out a signed edition. I can open it to any page and start reading prose that is closer to poetry.
Rating:
Summary: A Passion to Write Well
Review: I've met so many doctors over the years who have incredible talent in other areas. Some manage to balance a full career and still pursue their painting or their love of the cello until they retire to live amazingly long lives, fueled by their passion on which they can now totally focus.
I don't know what Dr. Murray's agenda will be, but I hope he can manage the balance between writing and a medical career. Murray understands the human heart. He has a great understanding of that one large or small situation or life event that hurls a person into choices they might never have made.
Add to this his knowledge of the exotic world and its suffering about which most of us are totally in the dark, his facinating data, probably collected over a lifetime, regarding entymology, and finally his amazing ability with language, and you've got a tremendous reading experience.
I envy anyone who has yet to read this debut of short stories. I grabbed it from the library after reading two Sunday newspaper reviews. I was so struck by his writing that I immediately sought out a signed edition. I can open it to any page and start reading prose that is closer to poetry.
Rating:
Summary: A gorgeous first work of fiction!
Review: It might be possible to read through this book quickly, just as it might be possible to chug down a bottle of vintage wine, but I wouldn't recommend it. Murray's stories - full of subtleties and set on several continents - deserve to be savored. In particular, I loved "The Carpenter Who Looked Like A Boxer," the story of a man who has built a life for himself and his children after being abandoned by his wife. Most impressive is that, while most of the stories deal with themes of loss, abandonment and difficult decisions about life, their impact is one of beauty and hope - and I hope we'll see more from this writer!
Rating:
Summary: More than the sum of its parts
Review: John Murray is an Australian physician with a distinguished career in public health. He has traveled widely and worked in extraordinary, challenging situations that provide him with a wealth of material for these remarkable stories. He is a master of stunning, exquisite detail. To the delight of this reader, he has used his experience and knowledge, not to dazzle us with exotic tales, nor to create clever insider stories, but to reflect on the human condition. On those occasions that he recounts the horrific experience (and there are some) of a well-intentioned and perhaps heroic professional in a foreign land, it becomes a source of reflection on how we perceive ourselves and how we manage our lives, wherever we live. It made me think. Displacement is a theme in many of the stories. In an interview ...when asked why he was so interested in the immigrant experience, Murray responded that it was partly because he, himself, is an immigrant. His experience working with the displaced of the world has obviously also influenced his thinking. He posits that "the century we're living in is the century of displacement." But his vision is larger, I think. This is a century of displacement, not just for refugees, or emigres, but for all of us. Most of us are "on our own" these days, free from traditional constraints of the past. And we can identify our own dilemmas in those of his characters. They struggle with place, cultural inheritance, inclinations, their vision of themselves and who they insist they are. Is that familiar? The stories are layered, moving in time and place across years and continents - there are stories within stories, all of which contribute to the density and realization of the central figure of each. And the delicacy of the writer's hand, the wonderful and specific details that are incorporated in the stories serve, not (just) to awe us with the wealth of his knowledge, but to construct beautiful, translucent containers that illuminate their contents - the characters he has created. These are wonderful stories. The strength of the writing, the poetry, the surprising and often lovely images, the breadth and seriousness and the author's sensitivity make this collection a truly notable first offering. I am looking forward eagerly, to more. Penny Altman ...
Rating:
Summary: Frightening depths balanced by heights of beauty
Review: John Murray, the author of this debut collection of eight short stories, trained as a doctor and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a teaching-writing fellow. He currently lives in Iowa. The title story, "A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies," was selected by Joyce Carol Oates for the Best New American Voices 2002 fiction anthology. Striking the keynote theme and mood of the collection as a whole, a lepidopterist in this story says, "The average life span of an adult monarch butterfly is four weeks. Four weeks to be a momentary burst of color and to reproduce. There is a painful transience to it all. They are nothing but a drop of color in the ocean. A fleeting moment that dazzles and blinds, and then is gone forever. There is something about the transience and the beauty of these insects that gets into your blood. Butterflies are a metaphor for life. Beautiful, fleeting, fragile, incomprehensible." In "The Hill Station," Elizabeth Dinakar, the American-born daughter of Indian parents, travels from Atlanta to the filthy, pestilential slums of Bombay, India, and to the hospital tents in the Jogeshwari slums, where she witnesses the ravaging effects of cholera. In "All the Rivers in the World," Vitek Kerolak, a man who is afraid not so much of the sea itself but of the concept of the sea, travels to Key West, Florida, to reestablish contact with his estranged father. In "White Flour" we meet a woman who does not believe in sparing her children. "Give it to them straight," she says. "Let them understand that life is a cruel mistress, nothing pretty about it." In "Watson and the Shark," a young American trauma surgeon is counseled to develop a philosophy of disaster. Wounded by insurgent rebels in the jungles of central Africa, he bribes his attackers and forsakes those whom he came to save. In "The Carpenter Who Looked Like a Boxer," Danny Dalton didn't like the idea of dark things living in his walls. Abandoned by his wife, solid, reliable, dependable Danny must care for their two children. Stress begins to take its toll, as Danny begins hearing noises in the wall of the house he built as a wedding gift. In "Blue" a mountain climber traverses the ice-blue world of a Himalayan peak. The ghostly memories he has of his deceased father soon turn into a nightmare. In "Acts of Memory, Wisdom of Man," an elderly man recalls the turbulent summer of 1968, the Vietnam protest marches, and the chain of events that shaped his brother's tragic fate. John Murray takes us to exotic places: the jungles of Amazonia, New Guinea, and central Africa; Sri Lanka and the slums of Bombay and Calcutta; Kathmandu and the Himalayan chain.
His stories deal with pride and fear; impotence, infidelity, and miscarriage; plague and disease; refugee camps and displaced people; lost dreams and failed ambitions; murder and suicide; senility and madness; death and devastation. Murrary doesn't believe in sparing his readers. Give it to them straight, he says, let them understand that life is a cruel mistress, nothing pretty about it. His characters doggedly and desperately seek order amidst chaos, discipline to overcome anarchy, the light of logic and reason to counter the darkness of superstition, and the fine precision of the scientific method as a shield against ignorance. But this is not the whole story. Murray skillfully tempers science with art. Writing in a beautiful, poetic prose that brushes against one's cheeks like Angels' breath, he tempers brutal realism with dreamlike romanticism. He counterbalances Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection with musings on the transcendental, inscrutable mystery of life. Such a juxtaposition may at first seem strange, but an artistic symmetry emerges in Murray's stories between the determinism of the outer world and the freedom of the inner world. I prefer to call this literary phenomenon "visionary existentialism." In Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau writes: "When I had mapped the pond, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth." A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies illustrates a similar congruence of art and science. Blending rational intelligence with romantic passion, Murray writes with an astonishing maturity. There are frightening depths here and heights of beauty. Roy E. Perry of Nolensville is an amateur philosopher and Civil War buff. He is an advertising copywriter at a Nashville Publishing House.
Rating:
Summary: A Remarkable Collection of Short Stories
Review: This remarkable collection of short stories is written by a medical doctor-turned-author. Murray offers dazzling insight into the minds and hearts of men and women whom we may have thought too cerebral to have "real" lives --- dedicated physicians and scientists --- all living private lives of great complexity. Murray practiced medicine in far-flung places around the planet before turning to writing. His experiences and acquaintances among peers and patients were surely grist for the mill that turned out the eight short stories in A FEW SHORT NOTES ON TROPICAL BUTTERFLIES. The title story is about an aging surgeon confronting his own physical and mental frailties as he ponders the strange, mad life of his grandfather, a famed collector of rare butterflies. In "The Hill Station," a middle-aged doctor returns to India, the land of her parents, to teach in an epidemiology symposium during a cholera outbreak. Murray shifts the story between her few days in Bombay and reminiscences of a past love. He artfully captures the cadences of language, evoking the smells and mannerisms of India from a clinic in the slums of Bombay to a jostling bus ride through the countryside in a monsoon storm. "The Carpenter Who Looked Like a Boxer" is a chilling tale of a man living alone with his children, trying to put his life back together a year after his wife left. "Blue" is short, poignant and as surreal as the conditions on the Himalayan peak. A man and his comrades are climbing to commemorate the fiftieth birthday of what would have been his father's last climb. "Watson and the Shark" takes place in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a civil war. The setting is a missionary village where doctors struggle to deal with the wounded from the surrounding brutalities. It is the only story that is primarily about doctoring under difficult conditions and bears the ring of truth and quite possibly personal experience. The stories are not all about jungle medicine, but a common thread among the main characters is their dedication to order, organization and their professions. Murray delves into the inner thoughts, hopes and dreams of the men and women who have dedicated their lives and often their souls to their chosen fields. Joyce Carol Oates selected the title story for the Best New Voices 2002 fiction anthology. "Blue" and "The Carpenter Who Looked Like a Boxer" won Murray his teaching/writing fellowship at Iowa Creative Writer's Workshop. And "The Hill Station" won the Prairie Lights Short Fiction Award. --- Reviewed by Roz Shea
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