Book Review by A. David Lewis Shimizu, A. (2015). Cells at Work!, Volume 1. New York: Kodansha. 978-1-63236-356-5 Shimizu, A. (2016). Cells at Work!, Volume 2. New York: Kodansha. 978-1-63236-357-2 Shimizu, A. (2017). Cells at Work!, Volume 3. New York: Kodansha. 978-1-63236-390-9 Shimizu, A. (2017). Cells at Work!, Volume 4. New York: Kodansha. 978-1-63236-391-6 Shimizu, A. (2017). Cells at Work!, Volume 5. New York: Kodansha. […]
Category: Book Reviews
Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Elinor Cleghorn. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2021. ISBN 9781474616850 Anne Green joined a grand house in an Oxfordshire village as a scullery maid during the 1640s. She was raped by the owner’s nephew in 1650 and became pregnant. Four months later, Anne went into labour. Her son was stillborn and […]
Notes on Material Cultures of Psychiatry
Book Review by George Tudorie Material Cultures of Psychiatry, edited by Monika Ankele and Benoît Majerus, transcript, 2020, 416pp. Meditative excavations of lost worlds are not the exclusive territory of phantasy, of imagining in disguise one’s own world buried, waiting for a speaker for the dead. Sometimes the sediment one contemplates is real enough, and […]
Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer
Book Review by Dr Isabella Watts Published by One World and Virago This book is the beautiful memoir the artist Riva Lehrer, detailing her experiences of life, love, and her engagement with disability culture. Born in 1958 Lehrer is diagnosed with spina bifida- a condition of the spinal cord which many infants at that time […]
We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation
Book Review by Isabella Watts Eric Garcia, We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. Mariner Books, 2021. 304 pages. The well-respected political journalist Eric Garcia has written for publications including The Washington Post, The Week, and The New Republic for many years. He is now the senior Washington Correspondent for The Independent. This is his […]
Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity
Book Review by Swati Joshi Spencer, Danielle. Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pages: 369. ISBN 978-0-19-751076-6. Danielle Spencer’s Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity (2021) is the strong jet stream that shudders the “biopathological” (8) gaze compelling us to “locate the pathology—in ourselves” (xi). Her research […]
The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Beth Blum. Columbia University Press. 2020. ISBN 9780231194921. During my teenage years, I was an avid reader of Stieg Larsson’s scandi noir trilogy Millennium, best known for its first title, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005). I loved the main character, Lisbeth Salander, and a few might be […]
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
Book Review By Matthew Harris Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the anatomy of injustice. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. ISBN: 9780374602512, 496 Pages. The central plea in Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s Inflamed is to have the reader acknowledge that colonial capitalism, which separates society from nature, subverts the holism required […]
Encountering Pain: Hearing, Seeing, Speaking
Book Review by Jennifer Bracken Scott Edited by Deborah Padfield and Joanna M. Zakrzewska ISBN: 9781787352636 UCL Press, 2021 Full text of book is available online at https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10120621/1/Encountering-Pain.pdf Pain is an important indicator that something is wrong in the body. But pain is also invisible and immeasurable to anyone besides the patient; while an […]
Sanatorium
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Abi Palmer. Penned in the Margins, 2020. 9781908058713 Teresa of Avila, the Saint Teresa immortalised by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s electrifying marble sculpture, was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and mystic. She became a local celebrity for her raptures, which, according to those who witnessed her ecstatic spiritual experiences, regularly involved […]