In his new book Drugs: The Story of Pharmacology (Yale University Press, 2026), Rod Flower, Emeritus Professor of Biochemical Pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London, offers a grand-sweeping account of how humans have come to know and use medicines as we do in the present day. Throughout the book’s twenty-two chapters, Flower guides the…
Tag: book review
“What Kind of Mother” by Judy Sandler: the beautiful, incomplete puzzle of life
“Addiction issues, mental illness, attempts at recovery, progress, setbacks: a mother tries to make sense of her son’s troubled life journey in light of her own history. Without sentimentality and from an unvarnished self-oriented perspective, Judy Sandler allows herself to explore how her son’s type II bipolar disorder has affected not only his life, but hers as well.”
Book Review: A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City by Thomas F. Rzeznik
In A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (New York University Press, 2026), Professor Thomas F. Rzeznik offers a comprehensive look into the daily operations of the long-standing, titular hospital. Through this process, Rzeznik celebrates some of the more influential women among the ranks of the Sisters…
Book Review: Everything Is Water by Chelsea Krieg
What does it mean to care for someone? This is a question we consider when looking at literature through the lens of health humanities and one of the questions implicit in the poetry collection, Everything Is Water by Chelsea Krieg. Throughout these poems, the idea of “care” appears in different contexts: care of the sick,…
Book Review: Fear and Motherhood in The Heart Folds Early by Jill Christman
When an 18-week ultrasound revealed that her son had only developed half of his heart, Jill Christman did not know what to do. In her 2026 memoir, The Heart Folds Early, Christman unspools her ultimate decision to terminate the pregnancy, shedding light on the various heart-wrenching reasons a mother might choose not to carry a…
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…
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…
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…
“If Nothing” by Matthew Nienow – An Alphabetical Review
An Alphabetical Review of “If Nothing” by poet Matthew Nienow (Alice James Books, 2025)