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 […]
Category: Book Reviews
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 […]
Diagnosis: Truth and Tales
Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Jutel, Annemarie Goldstein. Diagnosis: Truth and Tales. University of Toronto Press, 2019. In a short verse from his posthumous collection Falling Ill (2016), American poet C. K. Williams offered a richly ambiguous representation of his experience receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. The poem, “Diagnosis,” begins with a coherent reflection on […]
Lithium: A Doctor, A Drug, and a Breakthrough
Book review by Laura Grace Simpkins Walter A. Brown. Liveright. 2020. ISBN 9781631497902 I was prescribed lithium carbonate—two 400mg tablets to be gulped down with a large glug of water before bed—nearly four years ago. For a while I knew only several vague details about my medication: it was ‘natural’, it could easily be ‘toxic’, […]
Lumen
Book review by Laura Grace Simpkins Tiffany Atkinson. Bloodaxe Books, 2021. ISBN 978-1-78037-530-4. Morphine, ‘magnolias of paperwork’, and hammocks: these are a few of the things touched on by Tiffany Atkinson in her fourth collection of poems, Lumen. The publication is divided into two parts: a sequence followed by standalones—including many that star Otto, Atkinson’s […]
So Much More Than a Headache: Understanding Migraine through Literature
Book Review by Laura Grace Simpkins Kathleen J. O’Shea. The Kent State University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-60635-403-2 Can language ever fully represent pain? Much writing about illness returns us to that question, including two books published this year: Pain: The Science of the Feeling Brain and Ouch!: Why Pain Hurts, and Why It Doesn’t Have […]
Civilian Lunatic Asylums During the First World War: A Study of Austerity on London’s Fringe
Book Review by Peter Tyrer Claire Hilton. Palgrave MacMillan, 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-54870-4 The moral status of a country can be determined by its treatment of the mentally ill. On this count Norway and Sweden do well, Russia and the US do badly, and the United Kingdom is in between. But was it always thus? This […]