Johnathan M. Metzl. 2019. Dying of Whiteness: How the politics of racial resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. Basic Books.352 pp. ISBN-13: 9781541644960 by Izzy Watts This book is a deep dive into how racial resentments fuel political patterns, authored by a man who is both a sociologist and psychiatrist. Through interviews and data analysis, Metzl […]
Category: Book Reviews
Book Review: Winston Churchill’s Illnesses
Allister Vale and John Scadding (2020). Winston Churchill’s Illnesses 1886 -1965. Frontline Books, 2020 pp 522. ISBN 978 1 52678 949 5 Book review by Adrian Crisp A 16 year old boy shuffled past the coffin in Westminster Hall and stood in the crowds outside St Paul’s Cathedral at his funeral. Fixed in my auditory […]
Performance, Medicine and the Human
Book Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Mermikides, Alex. Performance, Medicine and the Human. Methuen Drama, 2020. ISBN: 9781350022157. In 2005, US Senator Sam Brownback sponsored a bill seeking to outlaw the creation of “human chimeras,” arguing that the mere existence of “chimeras”—embryos that incorporate cellular material borrowed from either a non-human or another human source—“raises […]
Get On With You!
Review by Robert C. Abrams, M.D. Field Light, Owen Lewis At the heart of Owen Lewis’ latest collection of poems, Field Light, is the story of a middle-aged man at a multi-focal impasse—emotional, temporal, marital, professional. That man is Lewis himself, who finds himself unable to move beyond a crucial juncture in his life. The […]
Making Bodies Kosher: The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England
Book Review by Angela Davis Ben Kasstan. Making Bodies Kosher: The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England. Berghahn Books, 2019. 286 pages. ISBN: 9781789202281. In Making Bodies Kosher, Ben Kasstan, a social and medical anthropologist, explores how Haredi (strictly religiously observant) Jews navigate the complexities of engaging with biomedical maternity and infant health […]
Easing Pain on the Western Front
Book Review by Dr. Richard M. Prior Paul Stepansky. Easing Pain on the Western Front. McFarland & Company 2020 (paperback version), 232 pages. ISBN 978-1-4766-9001-9. Paul Stepansky’s Easing Pain on the Western Front provides a very new and unique insight into the experience of U.S. Army nurses providing direct care on the battlefields of the Western […]
On What It Feels Like to Be A Problem
Book Review by Anna Stenning James McGrath, The Naming of Adult Autism: Culture, Science, Identity. Rowman and Littlefield International 2019 [paperback version], 272 pages. ISBN 9781783480418 In an article for the Poetry Society, Joanna Limburg explained that her collection The Autistic Alice[1] approached the issue of what it meant to write as an autistic subject […]
Medicus: The Power of Knowledge—A Novel Approach to Medical History
Exhibition Review by Prof Desmond O’Neill, MD, FRCPI The closing of an innovative exhibition of medical history in the ancient German city of Speyer may seem to be a small loss in the context of the many enormous tragic losses of life and livelihood of Covid-19. However, medical history has insights to offer on how […]
Bandage, Sort and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering
Book Review by Christopher Bosley Josh Seim. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering. University of California Press, 2020. 272 pages. ISBN: 9780520300231 This book offers a stunning analysis of the Emergency Medical System (EMS), its frontline workers, and its patients. Seim concentrates on the ambulance as an […]
Review of Long Cases in General Medicine: A 1983 Aid to the MRCP Exam
Review by Jolyon Bending Roy Pounder. Long Cases in General Medicine (second edition). Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications. 1983. I like old medical text books. They give a sense of the wishes of the author, and inform us of what was instilled in its readers. The ones that come most readily to mind are the grand […]