Face: A Memoir By Marcia Meier Saddle Road Press Many of us have traumatic events that divide our lives in two: the life we had before that defining moment and the life that came afterward. In Marcia Meier’s case, those two segments are of heartbreakingly
Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life By Suzanne Koven W. W. Norton & Company, 320 pages Sometimes you pick up a book that seems to be written not just for you—a young female physician—but for you in this very moment
In this brilliantly written, thoroughly researched, movingly raw book, Washington gives us a front row seat to everything that is wrong with this aspect of our health care system.
How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences by Sue William Silverman 198 pp, ISBN 9781496214096, University of Nebraska Press, 2020 As doctors, we see death. We predict it. We diagnose it. We hold death’s hand and comfort those left behind in its wake. For
Such are the questions plaguing Suzanne Farrell Smith in her haunting, deeply felt and gorgeously rendered new memoir The Memory Sessions. Smith’s father dies when she is just six years old, killed by a drunk driver on his way home from work. Outside of a few fleeting details—the doorbell chime, the police officer’s voice, a Knight Rider episode interrupted—her memory is wiped clean, not only of that pivotal night, but any childhood memories before or since, up to the age of about twelve or thirteen.
The Buddha Sat Right Here: A Family Odyssey through India and Nepal By Dena Moes 263 pp, ISN978-63152-561-2, She Writes Press , 2019 Some weeks ago, I participated in my family’s traditional Passover Seder. The ritual meal and accompanying service re-creates the story of the
The Shame of Losing by Sarah Cannon 264 pp, ISBN 978-1-59709-624-9, Red Hen Press, 2018 When my son was seventeen, he suffered a traumatic brain injury at the hands of a drunk driver in a crash that killed his girlfriend. A detective showed up at
Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius By Leonard Shlain 256 pages, Lyons Press, 2015 Image from Lyons Press Several months ago, my best friend gave me Leonardo’s Brain as a college graduation gift. Little did he know, this book had been on my list
Image from Penguin Random House God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine By Victoria Sweet 416 pp. Riverhead Books. When Victoria Sweet decides to become a physician (the first in her family) she thinks she is going
Image from Little, Brown and Company Book Review by Jeffrey Millstein, MD You Can Stop Humming Now: A Doctor’s Stories of Life, Death and in Between By Daniela Lamas Release date: March 26, 2018 Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Pages: 256 You Can Stop Humming
In Shock by Rana Awdish 265 pages, St. Martin’s Press, 2017 I read Dr. Rana Awdish’s book, In Shock, from cover to cover on a six-hour flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco. I started it expecting to read for just an hour or two and
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks 237 pp, ISNB 9780385352567, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017 Like many of my generation, I spent my childhood outdoors. I scooped up tadpoles from the pond next door, watching them sprout limbs and turn terrestrial. I trapped