Heart in the Right Place

by Carolyn Jourdan

Overview

Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home—to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Jourdan offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs and finds herself following hazmat regulations for cleaning up bodily fluids; maintaining composure when confronted with a splinter the size of a steak knife; and tending to the loquacious Miss Hiawatha, whose daily doctor visits are never billed. Most important, though, she comes to understand what her caring and patient father means to her close-knit community.

With great humor and great tenderness, Heart in the Right Place shows that some of our biggest heroes are the ones living right beside us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565126138
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	08/19/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	514,452
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Carolyn Jourdan, a former U.S. Senate Counsel to the Committee on environment and Public Works and the Committee on Governmental Affairs (now homeland Security and Governmental Affairs), is an award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker. She lives on the family farm in east Knox County, Tennessee

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This is a wonderful book. I would have enjoyed it even if Carolyn wasn't a neighbor of mine in East Tennessee. She is a great writer."

—Dolly Parton, Singer, Songwriter, and Actress

Editorial Reviews

"[A]n absolute delight of a book: warm, funny and written with great heart and understanding."
—Howard Shirley, BookPage

From the Publisher

"[A]n absolute delight of a book: warm, funny and written with great heart and understanding."
—Howard Shirley, BookPage

BookPage

"Jourdan's tone is heartfelt without being preachy and frequently funny without being trite. Readers struggling to reconcile their practices with their beliefs will find Jourdan's memoir to be as much a blueprint for change as it is a satisfying recollection of one person's journey to fulfillment."

—L. Elisabeth Beattie, Louisville Courier Journal

Louisville Courier Journal

"This is a soul-touching memoir filled with memorable Southern characters, plus plenty of country humor, but mostly a memoir about character—the transformative power of selfless acts in forgotten places far from the spotlight."
—John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Heart in the Right Place provided laugh out loud humor to me while on the treadmill (although too much laughing while running can be dangerous ... ) ... I have been recommending this book to friends telling them some of the humorous anecdotes within, but it is the deeper meaning ... that will keep this story in my memory."

—Tina Ristau, Des Moines Register

Des Moines Register

"Sometimes the greater good can best be served one person at a time. With lavish affection, genuine respect, and exuberant humor, Jourdan offers a zestfully compassionate portrait of a poor community rich in the ways of humanity."
—Booklist

Booklist

Former U.S. Senate counsel Jourdan writes of giving up her fast-paced life in Washington to work in her father's family medical practice office in east Tennessee. "For forty years, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week," she writes, "Momma and Daddy ran a homemade, low paid 911 service for a large rural community. There was no such thing as a day off, ever." When her mother had a heart attack, leaving the front desk unmanned, Jourdan returned home to help keep the area's only doctor's office afloat while she recovered. What began as a two-day stay stretched out indefinitely, forcing Jourdan to learn to "calmly register nice people with hard jobs who routinely came in covered in hog or chicken blood." Missing Washington, she wrestles with questions of courage and loyalty, belonging and identity, and living with meaning and purpose. The demands of her new job test her, from the drama of triaging the waiting room and the tedium of negotiating the Medicare coding system to the loss of several favorite patients. In the end, she finds that she is after all her parents' daughter, possessing strength that earned her mother the nickname " Sarge," as well as her father's selfless devotion to this working-poor community. Jourdan's dispatches from the reception desk make for a stirring, beautiful memoir that is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, and ultimately a triumph. (June)

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Publishers Weekly

The medically phobic Jourdan returns from a six-figure job as a superstar D.C. attorney to fill in at her father's rural Tennessee medical practice while her mother, the office manager, recovers from a heart attack. Days turn into months as Jourdan wonders where she belongs. Kate Forbes’s low-key narration captures the author’s subtle humor. For her characterizations of patients like the addled Miss Viola and another who operates on his own hemorrhoids, Forbes uses the twangy accents of the region. By the end, Jourdan has discovered there's more drama in making her way through the maze of Medicare than in Washington politics, more community and compassion at home than she'll ever find in a senator's office. S.W. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2008 - AudioFile