Category: Books

With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “Patient: the True Story of a Rare Illness,” by DJ and alt-rock musician Ben Watt, one half of the duo Everything But The Girl.

About the Book: A memoir of Ben Watt's hospital days after being diagnosed with the rare auto-immune disease Churg-Strauss syndrome – just before his world tour. Told in sparse, poetic prose with candor and a lack of self-pity, this novella-length work expertly captures the gulf between the healthy and unwell.

Reasons to Read: If you like stories of novel medical situations, if you savor great observational details (of his experience and ICU neighbors: a gallery that wouldn't be out of place in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) or understated tales of romantic devotion, or if you simply seek insight into the detachment, uncertainty, and unexpected clarity that can come from illness.

Bonus reason: if you're nostalgic for the 90s (and casual mentions of floppy disks).

Reasons to Avoid: If you hope for information about Ben's music – or how his illness inspired or impacted Everything But The Girl's breakthrough albums – you'll find almost no information about it. Similarly, if you want a medical-mystery à la House, be warned the mystery is backseated to the patient-experience, which could prove disappointing.

Further Listening/Reading: 

As soundtrack to the memoir, check out Everything But the Girl's most successful albums, which released in the years following his diagnosis:

• Amplified Heart
• Walking Wounded

Or read the memoirs of Watt's bandmate and partner, Tracey Thorn:

• Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star
• Naked at the Albert Hall: the Inside Story of Singing

Perhaps you’ve perused the humanities collection and noticed a small shelf with bound journals. A curiosity - especially since the library no longer retains physical journals. If you picked up one of these volumes, you’d be looking at the Bellevue Literary Review: a highly respected, prize winning literary journal (Duotrope, an online compendium of literary magazines, lists their acceptance rate at 1.51%). More importantly, you’d be looking at one of the premiere literary journals founded in the medical field, specifically in the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, making it rather unusual (most university-related journals are centered in literature or creative writing departments). 

During April’s poetry month, we discussed possible publication venues for the literary among us, including Bellevue. April might be over, but the art of writing is year long. Despite its potentially intimidating stature, as a health sciences student (who writes), you’re exactly situated to submit. 

On Bellevue’s submissions page, they define the kind of writing they’re looking for: 

Bellevue Literary Review seeks high-caliber, unpublished work, broadly and creatively related to our themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body. We encourage you to read BLR before you submit.

(Bellevue Literary Review, 2024)

Note that last sentence. Almost every literary magazine will encourage you to read before submitting, but many higher-end magazines do not publish online (or only publish small excerpts). Himmelfarb’s copies of Bellevue provide a nice chance to peruse without having to subscribe, which helps clarify what the publisher actually wants. For example, Bellevue values “character-driven fiction with original voices and strong settings” (Bellevue Literary Review, 2024), but publishers can interpret something like “strong settings” many different ways. Reading, therefore, truly does increase your odds of acceptance. 

That being said, the journal isn’t just for writers. It also provides a nice reading break for the non-writers at Himmelfarb. 

In this digital world, we have endless options to eject us from our current moment or task, but many of these provide more stimulation than reset. Fiction lets us get out of our own heads for a bit, while expanding our imaginative and empathetic capacities, if we let it. And refreshingly, short stories are finish-able within a single sitting, unlike many of the books in the Humanities collection. 

So if you have a moment, check out Bellevue Literary Review or ask the folks at the circulation desk for help finding them!

References:

Bellevue Literary Review. (2024). Submissions. https://blreview.org/submit/.

With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions,” by NPR science-journalist Richard Harris. 

About the Book: 

Applying his decades of journalistic experience to the “reproducibility crisis” - a term coined to describe the difficulty in replicating large amounts of published science - Richard Harris interviews many key figures attempting to improve the standards of science. Chapter by chapter, he analyzes factors of the crisis such as human error (reporting only what works, not doing double blind experiments, refusal to comply with fact checkers), sample sizes determined by budget, experiments that use only one cell line, test animal problems, a culture that incentives publication speed over accuracy, debunked facts circulating like ghost ships, and more. 

Part compendium of errors, part call to action, “Rigor Mortis” is an eye-opening account of the last couple decades of scientific rigor. 

Reasons to Read: 

If you’re looking for a balanced, outsider’s take on the subject, Harris does an excellent job presenting arguments and counter-arguments. For example, he discusses both Brian Nosek’s Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, which attempted to replicate 50 published attention-gathering papers, and the criticism of the project from Robert Weinberg, one of the lead scientists of the chosen studies (Harris, 2017, pg. 159). 

Despite the aggressive (and somewhat hyperbolic) title, Harris writes with a sense of concern that never feels disparaging. If you’re looking for a broader look at the issue, the extensive interview range presents a fuller picture than many of the articles out there. 

Reasons to Avoid: 

If you’re already familiar with the issue, “Rigor Mortis” could prove depressing. 

Although science self-corrects, and although Harris presents improvements across the board (and emphasizes how many of them would be cost effective), the road ahead seems long, and the weight of culture change seems daunting. 

Further Reading: 

• The C. Glenn Begley pieces about the Reproducibility crisis mentioned in chapter one: “Raise standards for preclinical cancer research” and his followup, “Six Red Flags for Suspect Work.” 
• Nigel Hawkes’ BMJ article: “Most Laboratory Cancer Studies Cannot Be Replicated, Study Shows.” 
• John P. A. Loannidis’ Plos Medicine article: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”

References: 
Harris, Richard. (2017). Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions. Basic Books.

With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion. 

About the Book: “The Year of Magical Thinking” is a memoir of the grief experienced by Joan Didion, novelist and journalist, after the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Written the year after his death, Didion turns her journalistic eye to her own raw thought processes, resulting in a masterful study of grief and a testament to a successful marriage. 

Reasons to Read: Since Didion wrote “The Year of Magical Thinking  so close to her husband’s death, the work maintains an immediacy; reading it almost captures the evolution of her thoughts as they developed. Raw but measured, it provides a sharp picture of grief that could very well help those who are grieving. 

Reasons to Avoid: If you’re triggered by flaunting of luxury, be prepared for copious references to exotic travel, hotel living, ruby crystal glasses, and phrases like [speaking of the late 60s], “a mood where no one thought twice about flying 700 miles for dinner" (Didion, 2005, p. 49). 

Further Reading: 

• Play It as It Lays - Didion’s classic 1970 novel, which depicts 1960s Hollywood and an emerging nihilism (available at Himmelfarb through Ebook Central Complete). 
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Didion’s 1968 collection of non-fiction, often regarded as the best example of her new-journalism  (available through consortium loan).

References:

Didion, J. (2005). The Year of Magical Thinking. Vintage International.

With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity” by Sir Michael Marmot. 

About the Book: Based on the Whitehall Studies (ten year mortality studies into the British Civil Service), “The Status Syndrome” is the culmination of Sir Michael Marmot’s decades long research. In it, he concludes that autonomy and the ability to participate in society are key factors of health. Relentlessly, he investigates the usual suspects of poor health - smoking, processed foods, etc - and demonstrates how they don’t fully account for health disparities. A blend of medical research and public health recommendation, “The Status Syndrome” demonstrates a keen intersection of analysis and application. 

Reasons to Read: Beyond being highly accessible, Michael Marmot brings a unique perspective as the original leader of the Whitehall studies. And since the studies themselves focus solely on the middle class, the book avoids the obvious (ex: of course dire poverty leads to poor health outcomes). 

It’s a book that goes beyond left and right wing politics, and, in fact, might challenge either value-set. It can be read selfishly - i.e. what are the ingredients for a healthy/quality life, and how do I position myself? Or, it can be read selflessly - i.e. how can we organize society so others can have a healthy/quality life? 

Reasons to Avoid: The book takes a commonsense idea - higher status correlates tightly with better health outcomes - and takes the magnifying glass to its nuances. But if you prefer easily graspable ideas without looking into the examples, then “higher status correlates tightly with better health outcomes” might be enough for you. 

If you’re a policy-junky, you can skim the Acheson report online (fully titled the “Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health Report”), from which Marmot derives his government recommendations. 

(Not) Fun Facts: 

• In an eye-opening example, Marmot features our very own D.C. as an example of status gradient. “The status syndrome can be illustrated by a short ride on the Washington, D.C., subway. Travel from the southeast of downtown Washington to Montgomery County, Maryland. For each mile traveled, life expectancy rises about a year and a half. There is a twenty-year gap between poor blacks at one end of the journey and rich whites at the other” (Marmot, p. 2).

References

Marmot, Michael. (2005). The Status Syndrome. Times Books.