How do you tell a story about a real-life, embodied individual who inspired a stereotype, without reducing her life to fit into the same trope you are trying to upend? How do you uncover the exception that proved the rule without reifying the label you acknowledge is pernicious? I’m not sure, and Josh Levin sure… Read more →
Tag: Book review
Complicating the Canon of the First World War: A Review of Ellen La Motte’s Backwash of War, edited by Cynthia Wachtell
Think back on any syllabi of the First World War and the literature represented in it. For me, those titles included Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Frederick Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, or poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Laurence Binyon. Indeed,… Read more →
From Hospital to Home: Wendy Kline’s Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth
Wendy Kline has delivered a new addition to the history of childbirth in America. In her engaging and well-researched book, Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth, Kline presents a new and necessary chapter in the story of the medicalization of childbirth in the United States: the history of the home birth movement. Kline has a… Read more →
What Does Gender Have to Do with the Desert?
Overheard in Grand Junction, Colorado on February 4, 2019 after Amy Irvine’s reading from her book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness. Amy Irvine’s Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness is a monologue written as if Irvine spoke directly to the deceased writer Edward Abbey at his gravesite. For those who… Read more →
Historian Witches and Scientist Vampires: Can We Be Deborah Harkness When We Grow Up?
Historian-witches, vampire-scientists, and a world where you can get a tenure-track job at an Ivy and fancy fellowships at Oxford just because you work hard and have great hair? You guessed it: we’re talking A Discovery of Witches. Please excuse our numerous exclamation points! A Discovery of Witches is the first book in Deb Harkness’s… Read more →
Understanding Trauma in the Civil War South: A Conversation with Diane Miller Sommerville
As I’ve written about for Nursing Clio previously, there’s been much debate in recent years about so-called ‘dark’ Civil War history. In that debate, Diane Miller Sommerville has been a vocal advocate for increased attention to the physical and psychological trauma wrought by the war. Her new book, An Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering… Read more →
“Acknowledgments in Essay Form:” Briallen Hopper’s Hard to Love
I agreed to review Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions a week before my long-time boyfriend broke up with me out of the blue one otherwise completely normal Wednesday afternoon. Needless to say, my copy of Briallen Hopper’s heartfelt and nourishing essays arrived at exactly the right time. Her collected musings — examining love, life,… Read more →
Seeking Health and Doing Harm: Gender Bias, Medical Sexism, and Women’s Encounters with Modern Medicine
A 2011 survey completed by faculty at forty-four medical schools in the United States and Canada indicated that 70% of institutions did not have “a formal sex- and gender-specific integrated medical curriculum,” failing to provide adequate instruction on specific health topics for which sex- and gender-based evidence exists.1 This striking statistic, coupled with a personal… Read more →
The Favorite Sister
There are few things I enjoy more in my fiction than a good, unreliable narrator. As someone who loves the art of storytelling, I find the way an unreliable narrator can construct a façade, building a truth out of a false assumption, a misremembered interaction, or an outright deception — and I find the tumble,… Read more →
I’m Not Crazy!: Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain
I was diagnosed with endometriosis when I had my first laparoscopy at 14. I’m very lucky. I got my period when I was 12, and from the start I was in such pain that I regularly missed school. Thankfully, my mother also had endometriosis and knew (although hoped she was not right) that I probably… Read more →