I have read a lot of this genre – medical memoirs. According to Google, I have read literally almost all of them. I have noticed a pattern, and a problem, and I’m going to use this review space to make a request. 80% of these books follow a formula: author becomes a doctor, a bunch of funny/strange anecdotes from patient interactions or unusual cases. Some do it better than others, but if you stitched them all together into one huge book you’d probably barely notice the seams. […]
If you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.
This was a tough one, emotionally. One True Thing is the story of a brilliant young woman “with her whole life ahead of her” who is guilted by her controlling and emotionally-arrested father into leaving her life behind to come home and care for her dying mother. And it covers so much ground in a very gentle but sad way: gender roles, parenting, family dynamic, literature and poetry, agency, friendship, romance, and ultimately, euthanasia. At the very beginning of the story, Ellen tells us that […]
There is some strange alchemy associated with gratitude.
This one hit me hard, and I have to admit I’m still processing a lot of it. Drink is part memoir, part investigative journalism, written by Ann Dowsett Johnston, a former editor at “Maclean’s” magazine (Canada’s “Newsweek,” if I may), the story of one woman’s family history and journey of alcoholism, and also an examination of the dangers of (mostly Western) society’s portrayal of the ideal woman and her relationship with alcohol, with is generally supposed to be empowering, equality-driven and rewarding, but has been […]
Another problematic medical memoir.
This is the second problematic medical memoir I’ve read in as many weeks. Dr. Austin is an ER doctor, and his book is probably 70% standard stuff for these kinds of books – patient anecdotes and ruminations on the meaning of things. I’ve read…a lot of those books. The other 30% focuses on the impact of shift work and burnout on his family life. The 70% I loved. It was reasonably well-written, and you’d have to go out of your way to make the […]
90% great, 10% WHAT?!
Bedside Manners is a series of essays/vignettes about the encounters between doctors and patients, mostly. All but a couple are clearly intended to be true and from the perspective of Dr. Watts, who is a gastroenterologist. (The couple that seem to be about some other doctor are weird.) His writing is prosey and nice, and stories fly by, and the subject matter is surprisingly interesting. (Not that I’m surprised that the 6,049,284th medical memoir I’ve read was interesting. But he’s a gastroenterologist.) Are you hearing […]
Going Home
Last summer, as part of my job as a health educator, I visited a woman at her home who had recently given birth. Newborn tests showed that the baby may have had a serious hemoglobin disorder. The woman spoke no English, and in fact her native language was spoken by such a small population that it had taken a lot of work to find an interpreter, who I had on speaker phone. At one point I asked the interpreter to define hemoglobin, explain that her […]