A well-written and empowering work about the challenges facing female patients.
A debut health book explores how and why women often receive inadequate medical care.
In this work, Salenger examines the individual and structural problems that often lead women to get insufficient health care, incorrect diagnoses, or unnecessary prescriptions. In separate chapters, the author identifies six broad reasons for improper treatment and looks at each in detail, both summarizing existing research and sharing stories from her own interviews with female patients. The book includes behavioral aspects (women tend to make their own care a low priority), structural problems (female patients’ symptoms are often dismissed or misunderstood), and economic forces (women are the primary targets of prescription drug advertising). Each chapter concludes with specific strategies that may help women advocate for themselves, express themselves in language familiar to medical professionals, and receive appropriate treatment. The work also addresses the unique challenges of women’s health (most patients with autoimmune diseases, which are difficult to diagnose, are women) and the subjective nature of medicine itself (doctors often draw different conclusions from the same data). Salenger has done an excellent job of compiling information on women’s health and how medicine is practiced. Each problem (for instance, diagnoses that differ based on a patient’s gender) is presented with citations that make it clear it is a systemic issue that goes beyond individual doctor-patient interactions—a genuine and widespread difficulty rather than a matter of miscommunication or hypochondria. The book is well written and easy for nonspecialists to follow, and Salenger’s tips for readers are useful suggestions that can realistically be implemented on an individual level. The volume’s one major shortcoming is its omission of trans women and nonbinary patients, as all the references appear to involve cisgender women. That aside, the work provides an excellent discussion of a widespread problem that has both individual and structural causes and remedies. The book tells a story that can be infuriating at times, but presents it in a nonpolemical way, demonstrating the scope of the issue while making it clear that a solution is possible.
A well-written and empowering work about the challenges facing female patients.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-401-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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