by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 20, 2022 | LEARN: Medical Memoir, RESIST: Social Justice
Thomas Fisher wears many hats in his new book, The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER. He’s a writer, physician, and commentator. All in all, he blends the various roles well and creates a compelling narrative. But I found it more...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 12, 2022 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Fiona Murphy focuses her lyrical memoir, The Shape of Sound, on her experience with hearing and deafness. We follow her memories of childhood up until the present. So, we learn about her ongoing denial of being deaf in one ear. She analyzes how and why she hid her...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Dec 7, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Cancer touched the life of Rebecca Whitehead Munn at an early age. Together with a wide circle of cancer patients and family members, she created All of Us Warriors: Cancer Stories of Survival and Loss. As often happens with cancer and other illnesses, this group of...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Oct 12, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Nicole Bell tells her story of a thriving marriage unexpectedly disrupted in What Lurks in the Woods: Struggle and Hope in the Midst of Chronic Illness. Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down. Bell and her husband have two young kids. She lands a dream job, they...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 28, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Leigh Cowart explores why people consent to experience pain in their upcoming book, Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. They take the science of pain and correlate it with a variety of intentional experiences from ballet class to eating wildly...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 19, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Renée Nicholson writes about two different parts of her life in Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness. Initially, she’s the young dancer making sense of competition, instructor corrections, and visions of the future. As the essays progress, Nicholson...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 15, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Ayelet Waldman is a privileged mom of four teenagers, married to a fellow writer, and living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She also lives with a variety of mental health diagnoses, some of which she questions. A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 7, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Michele Harper, M.D. opens her heart in a memoir about her experiences in medicine, The Beauty in Breaking. But this book is more than that. It’s part meditation on finding herself amid divorce, moving to a new city, and finding peace in yoga and stillness. She’s also...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jan 23, 2021 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Ruth Coker Burks writes about her experiences caring for HIV/AIDS patients in All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South. She wasn’t a nurse or other health care provider. She was just a young woman with a big heart and buckets...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 5, 2020 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Casey Schwartz writes a memoir and social history mash up in Attention, A Love Story. She’s a thirty-something woman who started using Adderal, a drug to treat ADHD, in college. But she took it without being diagnosed. It’s just one of those things college kids do,...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jan 6, 2020 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
If I’m going to read about death, let it be a book by Caitlin Doughty. And in this book, Doughty travels the world, investigating various death-related practices. She makes the topic fun, which obviously sounds different from how we typically perceive death. What I...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Nov 29, 2019 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Over-Diagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health is a physician researchers’ perspective on the state of medical practice in the United States. It was published in 2011, so some of the information is dated. But the fundamental questions raised by H....
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Nov 4, 2019 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Dr. Brendan Reilly creates a gripping memoir, One Doctor, by balancing several elements. As a hospitalist, a doctor working strictly with patients admitted to hospital, he details individual cases. At the same time, he reflects on how the cases affect him beyond the...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 17, 2019 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
In No Apparent Distress, Rachel Pearson writes a riveting account of her time in medical school. She’s especially focused on her work at a student-run charity medical clinic in Galveston, TX. Given everything happening these days along the Texas border, it’s even more...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 3, 2019 | LEARN: Chronic Illness, LEARN: Medical Memoir
Louise Aronson subtitles Elderhood with the following: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life. I submit that she focuses primarily on the second of these topics, rather than the other two. And that makes sense because she has many years of...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 4, 2019 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Kyle Bryant is a man on a mission. He’s living with a rare disease called Friedreich’s Ataxia (FA). Diagnosed at age 17, it causes him to be extremely unsteady on his feet. FA isn’t just about mobility. It causes vision and hearing loss, as well as shortening the...
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