Product Description

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

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43012 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
One day she's hearing congressional testimony and attending black-tie fund-raisers, the next she's filing Medicare forms and mopping up bodily fluids. As the [...] child of a country doctor and his receptionist wife, Jourdan respected her parents' selfless commitment of caring for the disenfranchised people of east Tennessee, but she reveled in her glitzy life as a superstar lawyer in Washington, DC. When her mother suffered a heart attack, however, Jourdan was called home to help out for a "few days" that quickly turned into weeks, then months. Faced with the dilemma of forsaking a high-powered career that could influence matters on a national level for a menial job that directly affected the lives of one small town, Jourdan was surprised to discover that 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 true humanity. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"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 )

"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 )

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

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 )

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 characterthe transformative power of selfless acts in forgotten places far from the spotlight. John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle Post-Intelligencer )

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

Customer Reviews

Charming, inspirational, and unputdownable!!!!

When Senate Counsel Carolyn Jourdan returns to the mountains of eastern Tennessee from Washington, DC after the sudden illness of her mother, she has no idea how long she'll be needed to fill in her role as receptionist for her father, the kindly country doctor. She figures at first it will just be two days. But readers can be glad that it wasn't as in Heart in the Right Place, Jourdan takes the reader on a true journey of the heart to the people of eastern Tennessee and through all the trials and tribulations of a small country one-doctor medical practice. One where he might be paid in even a fox carcass if he charged his patients anything at all.

We meet and learn to love the patients in the practice such as the eccentric Miss Hiawatha and the kindly Mike who doesn't hardly know he is handicapped. And then there are the two friends Obie and Kermit. You never know what kind of predicament they are going to get themselves into next and what kind of injuries it's going to cause. Each time they come through the clinic door it's going to be something totally different. The big question on everyone's mind is, will Carolyn stay in eastern Tennessee where she earned $0 in one year or return to her high-power, six-figure job in Washington, DC?

It was recommended I get this book via Amazon's Customers Also Bought feature after I had purchased another book. I clicked on it and read the description. As a long-time medical office employee it sounded right up my alley. But it would appeal to anyone who enjoys sweet stories with quirky characters such as the Mitford series by Jan Karon or anyone who lives the TV series Northern Exposure or Ballykissangel. But these are very real people here, not those from fiction. I laughed and I cried, I read passages out loud to my husband, and I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning two nights in a row to finish it. I can't recommend this book enough. You will want to buy one for yourself and another as a gift for someone you care about.

Page turner
What a surprise. It looked like a good read, but I couldn't put it down. The first book in a long time that I read in one day. Enjoyable, funny, tear jerker, heart warming all fit this this book.

at last, some real life time
As a new resident of the area written about in the book, I just missed the author when I was buying this book - she writes with a true clarity, insight honed by experience with these wonderful people. I am even more looking forward to the years to come in the Great Smoky Mountains. Her books were sold out after I bought the last one in TN-and she will be available for signing and I hope to catch her. I will recommend this book to my family and friends as a meaninful respite from the fantasy sex and violence that so dominates our culture - it is time to hear about real people who do care and do endure.