Bryan Place Neighborhood Association

The BPNA Annual Holiday party is scheduled for December 4th at the clubhouse from 5-8 PM. The main dish only will be catered, but residents are encouraged to bring some of your favorite side dishes and desserts.

This month we will discuss Atul Gwande’s Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.  Dr. Gawande, who frequently writes for New York Magazine, continually focuses his efforts on improving medical results.  This book stresses the importance of checklists in all aspects of life and shows its impact on the medical profession.

Over the past decade, through his writing in The New Yorker magazine and his books Complications and Better, Atul Gawande has made a name for himself as a writer of exquisitely crafted meditations on the problems and challenges of modern medicine. His latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, begins on familiar ground, with his experiences as a surgeon. But before long it becomes clear that he is really interested in a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world–and that is how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities. It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking.

Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don’t know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). Failure in the modern world, he writes, is really about the second of these errors, and he walks us through a series of examples from medicine showing how the routine tasks of surgeons have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable: it’s just too easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality. Gawande then visits with pilots and the people who build skyscrapers and comes back with a solution. Experts need checklists–literally–written guides that walk them through the key steps in any complex procedure. In the last section of the book, Gawande shows how his research team has taken this idea, developed a safe surgery checklist, and applied it around the world, with staggering success.

The danger, in a review as short as this, is that it makes Gawande’s book seem narrow in focus or prosaic in its conclusions. It is neither. Gawande is a gorgeous writer and storyteller, and the aims of this book are ambitious. Gawande thinks that the modern world requires us to revisit what we mean by expertise: that experts need help, and that progress depends on experts having the humility to concede that they need help. –Malcolm Gladwell

The meeting will be held Thursday November 10 at 700 PM.  Contact Gaye Maris for the location or for any additional information on the book club.

The Bryan Place Book Club will meet October 13 to discuss Lisa See’s,  Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.  Publisher’s Weekly says: See’s engrossing novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong, or “old sames”) Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While granting immediacy to Lily’s voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly transmits historical background in graceful prose. Her in-depth research into women’s ceremonies and duties in China’s rural interior brings fascinating revelations about arranged marriages, women’s inferior status in both their natal and married homes, and the Confucian proverbs and myriad superstitions that informed daily life. Beginning with a detailed and heartbreaking description of Lily and her sisters’ foot binding (“Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you have peace”), the story widens to a vivid portrait of family and village life. Most impressive is See’s incorporation of nu shu, a secret written phonetic code among women—here between Lily and Snow Flower—that dates back 1,000 years in the southwestern Hunan provinc.

For the location of this meeting or further information on the book club, please contact: Gaye Maris .

What a wonderful time of the year in Bryan Place.  Yards are being updated after the long hot summer.  October 2011 Yard of the Month goes out to Mark Ingram at 920 Pavilion.  His property has been totally renovated from all the plantings to the color of his house.  A very nice curb appeal on one of the main streets in Bryan Place, this landscape contains various grasses with different colors, strategically planted bushes and flowers along with a new tree that will shade the entrance to this lovely home, and the black mulch just makes the colors pop out of this rock bordered landscape.

Thank you Mark for taking the effort in making our Bryan Place stand out as a desirable neighborhood to live.

The September yard of the month is located at 3601 Bryan Street. Reno Desai has lived in Bryan Place for two years, and created a lovely garden with a beautiful variety of flowering plant and shrubs.

We appreciate the time and effort that neighbors like Reno put into making gardens for the whole neighborhood to enjoy.

Thank you for making Bryan Place such a wonderful neighborhood to live.