A gripping chronicle that will be especially useful for expectant or aspirational mothers.
The story of the transformative Doula Project.
Mahoney and Mitchell explain how they were inspired as activists to broaden the reproductive rights movement to make sure that women seeking abortions “have continuous, nonjudgmental physical, emotional, and educational support just like people giving birth.” During the summers of 2007 and 2008, they “set out to translate the reproductive justice framework into a more direct-care-oriented approach.” They took the term “doula,” derived from the Greek name for female slave and in the past only used to describe birth attendants, and adapted it to include “abortion doulas.” The authors aimed to include not only women who suffered miscarriages, underwent deliberate abortions, or decided to become single mothers, but also “transgender and gender nonconforming people,” and they helped to bridge the gap between birth and abortion activists. As they note, those who sought their help were mainly “women of color, immigrants, and young people.” While the main focus of the book is the women they served and the causes they supported, the authors also discuss the problem of caregiver burnout in this emotionally charged field. During the past decade, doulas have been credited with helping to create a more broad-minded acceptance of their craft, and just as significantly, they have gained acceptance by the medical profession, something that was sorely lacking in previous decades. For women without support from family or friends, their presence during medical procedures can be crucial. Doulas represent their clients’ wishes when they are unable to do so—e.g., helping to make a decision about induced labor or C-section. This eye-opening book also includes a glossary that defines common terms such as “epidural” as well as less-familiar ones like “dilation and curettage” or “manual vacuum aspiration.” Throughout, the authors’ stories are vivid, absorbing, and informative.
A gripping chronicle that will be especially useful for expectant or aspirational mothers.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55861-941-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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