On Madness and the Demand for Recognition: A philosophical inquiry into identity and mental health activism by Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed (Oxford University Press, 2019), and how ‘soft and pure’ disciplines must take the lead to enrich our repertoire in how we think about ourselves and others today Book Review and Provocation by Kai Syng Tan […]
Category: Book Reviews
Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory
Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara (Editors), Forward by Stacy Alaimo, 2017, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 667 pages, £58. Reviewed by Dr. Sue Smith Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory is a groundbreaking project dedicated to bringing […]
The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science and the Great War
Stefanous Geroulanos and Todd Meyers (writers). The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science and the Great War (2018), University of Chicago Press, 432 pp, £26.50. by Linda Roland Danil In this book, Geroulanos and Meyers mainly explore the emergence of a new approach towards corporeal integration in physiology during and after […]
Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction [book review]
Anne Whitehead, Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) 224 pages, £75.00 ISBN 9780748686186 (Paperback forthcoming in May 2019). by Marie Allitt. In order to unravel the concept of empathy, Anne Whitehead engages with many of the increasingly relevant and problematic topics in both medicine and medical humanities today, […]
Lissa: A Story About Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution
Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye (writers), Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer (art), Marc Parenteau (lettering), Lissa: A Story About Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution (2017), University of Toronto Press, 302 pp, £12.99. Reviewed by Dr Glyn Morgan Lissa is the first book in a new series from University of Toronto Press with the punningly pleasant […]
Book Review: Cicely Saunders: A Life and Legacy
David Clark, Cicely Saunders: A Life and Legacy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 335pp., £25.99 hardcover, ISBN: 9780190637934 Reviewed by Joe Wood, University of Glasgow This biography, almost 20 years in gestation, provides an encyclopaedic account of the life of Cicely Saunders, often described as the founder of the modern hospice movement. The book […]
Book Review: The Reading Cure
The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite by Laura Freeman, London: W&N, 2018. Reviewed by Sarah Ahmed, King’s College London Almost ten years after being diagnosed with anorexia, after a decade of eating because she had to, not because she wanted to, Freeman found herself reading Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. His […]
Book Review: Phenomenology of Illness
Phenomenology of Illness by Havi Carel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016 Reviewed by James Rakoczi Havi Carel’s Phenomenology of Illness is a rich and tightly-structured book with two principle aims. First, ‘to provide a comprehensive and coherent phenomenology of illness’ (38). Second, to travel in the ‘opposite direction’ and give an account of ‘what illness […]
In Shock
Rana Awdish, In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope (2018), New York: Bantam Press, 272 pp, £14.99. Reviewed by Róisín King, Trinity College Dublin Aptly stated by Ed Pellegrino, ‘medicine is the most humane of the sciences, the most scientific of the humanities’. This implies an essential balance […]
Diary of a Bipolar Explorer
Lucy Newlyn, Diary of a Bipolar Explorer (2018), Oxford: Signal Books, 232pp, £9.99. Reviewed by Neil Vickers Lucy Newlyn was until recently Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on English Romantic poetry. She has published two collections of poetry: Ginnel (2005) and Earth’s Almanac (2015). […]