For only a moment I was concerned that Carolyn Roy-Bornstein’s new book, A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing for Healthcare Professionals, was going to ask too much of me and my colleagues. A retired pediatrician and writer-in-residence for a family medicine residency program, Roy-Bornstein has created a reflective writing workbook built around the definition of…
Category: Book Reviews
Book Review: Narrative Medicine: Trauma & Ethics by Anders Juhl Rasmussen and Morten Sodenmann
The co-editors of Narrative Medicine: Trauma and Ethics, Anders Juhl Rasmussen and Morten Sodenmann, open their introduction with their goal for this text to “reposition narrative medicine with trauma studies and ethics in a global context” (xv). The book contains 20 chapters from scholars of medicine/healthcare, narrative medicine, trauma-informed care, ethics, literature/writing, philosophy, anthropology, arts…
Chronic Illness, Power Dynamics, and Bears in Rachel Weaver’s Dizzy
Many have noted the power of illness and disability narratives to serve as a window into the lives of patients, enabling patients to better understand their own stories and healthcare providers to improve their empathy and understanding of illness experiences (Garden 1). Dizzy, a memoir by Rachel Weaver, interlaces her journey with chronic illness with…
Digestion, Discipline, and Resistance: A Book Review of Jean Walton’s “Dissident Gut”
In moments of political pressure—colonial rule, incarceration, and border regimes—the body does not remain neutral. It reacts; it withholds, expels, and emphatically revolts. In Dissident Gut, Jean Walton takes this bodily dissent as her object of study, arguing that digestion itself is inherently a political process. As she understands it, metabolic disturbance is not only…
Eli Clare’s Notes to Disability Studies: On the Access Practices of “Unfurl”
Eli Clare’s new book, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (2025), presents a challenge to disability studies. The most impactful challenges to this field over the past few decades have critiqued its narrow focus on whiteness, the West, and physical disability, with more recent work attempting to understand disability through intersectional and global frameworks as well…
Book Review: Cancer and Caregiving in Heart the Lover by Lily King
In Heart the Lover, Lily King does the unimaginable: she crafts the perfect coming-of-age college love story, and then unravels and complicates it with a temporal jump into the future, a reunion sobered by time and cancer. Always a genius when it comes to capturing physical experiences on the page, King conjures cancer’s daily horrors…
Book Review: Liminal Spaces and the Moral Imagination in “Our Long Marvelous Dying” by Anna DeForest
Anna DeForest’s first novel, A History of Present Illness (2022), follows an unnamed medical student through tension-filled classroom and clinical years among more privileged classmates in New York City. DeForest’s follow-up novel seems a segue from the first. Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024) also features an unnamed narrator–one further along in their medical career– seeking…
Pandemic Death Discourse: A Book Review
Pandemic Death Discourse critically engages the notion of “death as the greatest equalizer,” revealing how mortality, far from being neutral, exposes the deeply social, gendered, racial, geopolitical, and economic contours of life and death during the initial onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the heart of this collection lies a call to recognize and communicate…
Maggie Nelson’s Oral Examinations: On “Pathemata, Or, the Story of My Mouth”
After years of living with jaw pain, Maggie Nelson began to write about it. In her new lyric memoir, she describes her practice of cataloging the ebbs and flows of her pain as well as the process of accumulating information from various specialists. “I allow the / tapestry to widen,” Nelson writes as she adds…
Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet
“I think of language as being tremendously potent. It causes deep feelings in us, so much so that its effects would seem nearly chemical, medical.” In his interview with journalist Adam Boretz for The Millions, author Ben Marcus explained the genesis of his 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet with the words above. Imagining language as…