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 […]
Tag: book review
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]