An intriguing memoir that provides an eye-opening perspective on institutionalized medicine.
In her debut memoir, a psychiatrist learns important lessons about physical and mental well-being while dealing with her own illness.
At one point in Carmichael’s engrossing book, she stresses the importance of “finding the right story—that is, understanding the connection between physical symptoms and responses to stress and anxiety,” and this balanced, holistic approach informs the work as a whole. Her own medical odyssey began when she was 30 years old and pregnant with her first child. She noticed a strange tingling in her legs but simply marked it down to her pregnancy. She did the same thing two years later, during her second pregnancy, when she experienced numbness. (“Strange how you can be so wise and fool yourself at the same time,” she writes.) Other symptoms came and went, and she ignored them, until 10 years after the initial symptoms, when it became obvious that something was seriously wrong. After she received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, she began to notice a split between facts and emotions that she explores throughout this book: “While the neurologist looked so pleased at making the diagnosis,” she writes, “he did not seem to notice or care that I was emotionally devastated.” This disconnect prompted Carmichael to explore the psychological aspects of chronic pain and disease, starting with her own. “In retrospect, I can see that I was depressed, but I did not know that then,” she writes. “I could not sleep through the night and had difficulty concentrating, but all I knew was that I felt numb inside.” Using a combination of historical overviews and individual case studies, she effectively illuminates the value of understanding the emotional elements of a patient’s battle with chronic pain. Overall, she effectively points out the personal, almost spiritual, aspects of chronic care, while also stressing the need for more empathy on the part of doctors.
An intriguing memoir that provides an eye-opening perspective on institutionalized medicine.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479230402
Page Count: 242
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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