Chronic Illness
Cole Kazdin — What’s Eating Us (Book Review)
Cole Kazdin combines memoir and narrative nonfiction in her upcoming book, What’s Eating Us: Women, Food, and The Epidemic of Body Anxiety. It’s an excellent reflection of life with an eating disorder. But it’s also much more. For example, Kazdin investigates aspects...
Larry Kramer — The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me (Review)
Larry Kramer created seminal works of gay rights and AIDS epidemic history in his deeply personal plays, The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me. Both plays revolve around Ned Weeks, a gay man living and working in New York City in the 1980s. They are heartbreaking and...
Meghan O’Rourke — The Invisible Kingdom (Book Review)
First, Meghan O’Rourke bares her soul about chronic illness in her 2022 book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness. And second, she analyzes how US medical care fails patients with difficult to diagnose chronic illnesses. This is two parts...
Jennifer Wright — Get Well Soon (Book Review)
Jennifer Wright balances aspects of medicine, science, and social history in her 2017 book, Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. Perhaps I connected most strongly to the human and social elements because of experiencing the COVID-19...
MeiLan Han, MD — Breathing Lessons (Book Review)
Dr. MeiLan Han transfers years of knowledge as a lung doctor, or pulmonologist, to the printed word in her upcoming book Breathing Lessons: A Doctor’s Guide to Lung Health. With this book, she offers explanations of many lung-related conditions including asthma,...
James Nestor — Breath (Book Review)
James Nestor combines scientific exploration and his own experiences in Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. The two aspects keep the book from being entirely memoir or entirely an academic treatise. At its heart, Nestor asks why breath matters. We breathe...
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