Book Review: Cancerland: A Medical Memoir by David Scadden, M.D.
David Scadden, M.D. titled his book Cancerland: A Medical Memoir. Truthfully, it’s more of a scientific history book. There’s very little in it that constitutes memoir, in the sense of personal experiences. He does tell a bit of his mother’s cancer story, and some...Graphic Novel Review: Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 by M.K. Czerwiec
Taking Turns is a memoir in graphic novel format from MK Czerwiec. She was one of the nurses caring for HIV / AIDS patients at Chicago’s Illinois Masonic Medical Center in the 1980s and 1990s. I found this book on Hoopla after reading The Great Believers. Rebecca...Book Review: Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour spends much of her book, Sick: A Memoir, talking about relationships. Sometimes it’s her parents or girlfriends. But more often it’s the men in her life. I’ve seen reviewers bemoan this. But here’s what I think. A single young woman, battling...Book Review: The Demon Under the Microscope by Thomas Hager
Thomas Hager writes a compelling medical and scientific history in The Demon Under the Microscope. Subtitled From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug, its scope is incredibly wide. This book is the perfect...Book Review: Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain by Abby Norman
Abby Norman tells her often harrowing story with grace in Ask Me About My Uterus. She’s had to make her way through life in pain, and mostly alone. I’m in awe of her courage and fortitude! Norman spent her childhood with an absent father, and a functionally absent...Book Review: Backbone: Living with Chronic Pain Without Turning into One by Karen Duffy
Karen Duffy’s second book, Backbone: Living with Chronic Pain Without Turning into One, is meant to be a funny and motivational read. Duffy has certainly lived through more days of illness and pain than not. And she has some celebrity cred which adds a bit to the...Book Review: The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris
If you’ve ever used the bright blue or green mouthwash with the antiseptic taste, then you have benefitted from the expertise of Joseph Lister. More importantly, if you’ve had surgery in a spotlessly clean operating room with a surgeon gowned and gloved up, you owe...Book Review: Standing Strong: An Unlikely Sisterhood and the Court Case that Made History by Diane Reeve with Jenna Glatzer
Standing Strong is the perfect title for Diane Reeve’s moving memoir about acquiring HIV/AIDS from a long term partner who willfully transmitted the virus to many people. Reeve is still standing despite the devastation of finding out her significant other was cheating...Book Review: The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs
Nina Riggs wrote The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying as she was being treated for stage four breast cancer, the kind that’s become only treatable, not curable. During the same time, Nina was saying goodbye to her mother, who had the same disease and...Book Review: The Ghost in My Brain: How a Concussion Stole My Life and How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Helped Me Get It Back by Clark Elliott, PhD
Dr. Clark Elliott’s medical memoir, The Ghost in My Brain, is one of the best I’ve read. Elliott, who is a PhD teaching Artificial Intelligence in Chicago, describes the effects of a concussion like nothing else I’ve seen. To discuss the resulting...Book Review: Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay’s memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is exquisitely emotionally raw. If my closest friend poured her deepest, darkest secrets out to me, it couldn’t begin to be this vulnerable. It hurt my heart to read chapter after chapter of Gay’s...Book Review: The Education of a Coroner: Lessons in Investigating Death by John Bateson
Reading John Bateson’s book, The Education of a Coroner: Lessons in Investigating Death, is like reading a very grim tabloid. No gossipy or gory detail is spared, which sometimes felt overwhelming to me. But I like CSI-type shows and this was like binge watching...Book Review: When the Air Hits Your Brain by Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., MD
In When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery, Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., MD tells of his life as a neurosurgeon. Starting with the “grunt work” required of a med student who accidentally starts his clinical experience in neurosurgery, and ending...Book Review: The Family Gene by Joselin Linder
The Family Gene by Joselin Linder is everything I wish for in a medically-oriented memoir. Linder blends the science of genetics deftly with her own family’s story. It was so compelling that I flew through the book in just a day or so. When Joselin is just...Book Review: The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives by Theresa Brown
I read The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients Lives by Theresa Brown, RN as an audiobook. I love listening to memoirs, since it feels like I’m having a long, albeit one-sided, conversation with a new friend. This is a peek into one oncology...Currently reading
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I will definitely recommend Kick Pain in the Kitchen to my patients: Those who are looking to avoid pharmaceutical treatment and those who want to combine western medicine with alternative therapies.
Jane A. Swartz
ARNP, MSN, Rheumatology Nurse Practitioner
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