Tea with Winnicott by Brett Kahr with illustrations by Alison Bechdel. Published by Karnac, 2016. Reviewed by Dr Neil Vickers. Brett Kahr’s Tea with Winnicott is the first volume to appear in Karnac’s new ‘Interviews With Icons’ series, in which contemporary psychoanalysts conduct imaginary interviews with major figures from the psychoanalytic pantheon. […]
Category: Book Reviews
Book Review: The Way We Die Now
Seamus O’Mahony, The Way We Die Now. Head of Zeus, 2016. Reviewed by Richard Smith Perhaps the first and most important thing to say about this book is that it’s a joy to read. I started it on a flight from Dhaka to Mexico City when I was exhausted, but quickly […]
Wellcome Book Prize Winner 2016 – ‘It’s All In Your Head’ reviewed
Suzanne O’Sullivan, It’s All In Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness. London: Vintage, 2016; first publ in hardback 2015 by Chatto & Windus Reviewed by Professor Edward Shorter The very subtitle of the book makes one nervous: “stories of imaginary illness.” If there is one phrase that psychosomatic patients – who have symptoms […]
Book review: Social Class in the 21st Century
Mike Savage, Social Class in the 21st Century, Pelican, 2015 Reviewed by Jacob King, Medical Student. You may have heard about the Great British Class Survey, you may have even completed the Great British Class survey (GBCS) or tried their online Class Calculator. In 2015 Mike Savage and colleagues summarised the findings of […]
The Reading Room: The Violet Hour – Great Writers at the End
Katie Roiphe. The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. Virago, 2016 Reviewed by Professor Robert C Abrams, Professor of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York A central premise of Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour is that the awareness of approaching death is a milestone we all will face at some time […]
The Reading Room: Reading for Health
Erika Wright. Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2016) Reviewed by Dr Jane Darcy, Department of English, University College London Erika Wright begins Reading for Health with a timely reminder for Victorianists, quoting Ruskin’s argument about the dangerous temptation of the ‘phenomenon of the sick-room’ for […]
The Reading Room: Salka Valka
Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness: she needs to be alone Reviewed by David S. Baldwin, Professor of Psychiatry Clinical and Experimental Sciences Academic Unit Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton, United Kingdom Email: dsb1@soton.ac.uk Born in Reykjavík in April 1902, Halldór Guðjónsson (he changed his name to Halldór Kiljan Laxness in 1923) […]
The Reading Room: The Other Side of Silence
The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir of Depression by Linda Gask. Vie Books, 2015 Reviewed by Dr Lilian Hickey There is a shocking, but humane and tender poetry in George Eliot’s lines in Middlemarch which refer to the deafening ‘roar’ of life that might lie ‘on the other side of silence’ in our […]
The Reading Room: When Breath Becomes Air
Hope, Oncology and Death Seamus O’Mahony When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. London: The Bodely Head, 2016. Paul Kalanithi was nearing the end of his neurosurgical training at Stanford when aged thirty-six, he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. He had never smoked. He was referred to an oncologist specializing in […]
The Reading Room: ‘Making Medical Knowledge’
Making Medical Knowledge By Miriam Solomon Oxford University Press, 2015 Reviewed by Dr Jonathan Fuller, University of Toronto We should forgive anyone unfamiliar with recent trends in ‘scientific medicine’ for thinking that within scientific medicine there are now multiple medicines to choose from: evidence-based medicine (EBM), translational medicine, narrative medicine, personalized medicine, […]