Tag: Humanities Highlights

With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” by Mary Roach. 

About the Book: The book that launched Mary Roach's science-writing career, "Stiff" investigates the contribution of human cadavers to science [with studies ranging from humane to grisly to wacky; from crash safety to the physics of crucifixion], as well as human burial practices [including alternatives to burial or cremation]. Written with humor and respect – and without sacrificing the ethical questions – Roach follows her journalistic interest while guiding readers along the various labs, morgues, and fields of rotting corpses in the industry.

Reasons to Read: If you like books that make you say "dang" a lot (or your preferred utterance), if you want to take a steady (but never overly macabre) look at death (and maybe get a party fact about Victorian medicine along the way), or if you want to understand the reality of cadaver testing for you or your loved one.

Reasons to Avoid: If you like your books to be focused [Roach encompasses the history of anatomy, organ donation, crash and ballistics testing, embalming techniques, funeral practices, and more.], or if you'd rather dial down the wisecracks in books about death.

Further Reading: 

• The Knife Man [available at Himmelfarb]
• The Butchering Art : Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine [available at Himmelfarb]
• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife [available through the Consortium Loan Service]
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex [available through the Consortium Loan Service]

With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “An Anthropologist on Mars,” by Oliver Sacks. 

About the Book: "An Anthropologist on Mars" explores seven fascinating cases of mental conditions, depicting outliers who not only had a rare experience but the talent or background to make sense of it. Drawing from his direct contact with these patients, Sacks enriches the facts of these accounts with history and a strong narrative sense. These limit cases help us not only understand others with these conditions but human cognition itself.

Reasons to Read: If you like listicles but want something more robust and literary; "Anthropologist" is a set of seven attention-grabbing, memorable cases; except, unlike the average listicle (which features recycled content and minimal research), the stories in "Anthropologist" come from first-hand accounts and benefit from Sacks bountiful knowledge and narrative capabilities. Recommended if you enjoy thinking about creativity and the relationship between limitations and strengths.

Reasons to Avoid: While eloquent and readable, the book is aimed at general readers (and therefore contains broad overviews of neurological conditions that might be redundant to researchers); moreover, Sacks interacts with patients in a "gonzo journalism" kind of way, embedding himself in their lives outside of a clinical setting. This gonzo psychiatry makes excellent reading but may be of less clinical use.

Further Reading: 

• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain [available at the Himmelfarb Library]
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat [available through the Consortium Loan Service]
• A Collection of Moments: A Study of Involuntary Memories [available through the Consortium Loan Service]
• Scattered Shadows: a Memoir of Blindness and Vision [available online through E-Book Central Complete]

With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “Everyman,” by Philip Roth. 

About the Book: Winner of the Pen/Faulkner award in 2007, Philip Roth’s slim novel portrays a man’s life in miniature that begins with the main character’s funeral. Eschewing conventional narrative structure, Roth weaves in and out of memories, forming a tapestry of regret and loss as the main character pursues a long-forestalled art career amidst health failure. Everyman is a novel that collapses personal history with medical history, investigating the way disease and aging shape us. 

Reasons to Read: if you’re looking for scathing insights into complex emotions around aging and the disappointments of aging, brisk novels that offer an easy entry point into an acclaimed author’s oeuvre, or novels built around poetic (and surprisingly, often funny) moments rather than plot. 

Reasons to Avoid: if you don’t like novels that lack chapter breaks, stories about serial philanderers who can’t stop philandering (even in the retirement home), or if you prefer developed characters rather than generalizations. 

Further Reading: 

• American Pastoral [available through the Consortium Loan Service]
• Goodbye, Columbus [available through the Consortium Loan Service]
• Portnoy’s Complaint [available through the Consortium Loan Service]

With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Healthcare,” by T.R. Reid.

About the Book: A unique and grounded book on comparative policy: author T.R. Reid takes his ailing shoulder to healthcare systems around the world, creating a highly personal/practical look at different healthcare options [a healthcare Big Mac Index of sorts], all while informing the reader about the systems themselves. Morally-minded but never overwrought, “The Healing of America” lays out practical steps for improving America’s healthcare system that appeal both to a love of efficiency and a concern for human flourishing. 

Reasons to Read: If you want to educate yourself about policy but would rather read about anything else, “The Healing of America” is exceptionally readable and filled with concrete examples. If you’re looking for a hopeful take on the subject, Reid provides simple and tested adjustments to improve healthcare and delivers them with the pluckiness of someone who believes victory is possible. 

Reasons to Avoid: If you want to avoid jealousy over almost anyone’s healthcare system but our own. If you’re less interested in Otto Von Bismarck and just want to read about policy, you might begrudge the frequent history lessons. And if you would rather have the most succinct reading, the book (like many of its kind) becomes repetitive at points.

Further Reading: 

• An American Sickness: how Healthcare Became Big Business, and How You Can Take it Back
• America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

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.

With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing an inspirational book for the New Year: “Mountains Beyond Mountains: the Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer,” by Tracy Kidder.

About the Book: Part biography, part origin story of Partners in Health, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” tells the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man who dedicated his life to battling disease and serving the poor with out-of-the-box-thinking, a justice-fueled irreverence for the status quo, and a willingness to redefine the impossible. Journalist Tracy Kidder follows Farmer’s service in Haiti and Peru with wonder and intimidation, entertaining periodic skepticism about Farmer’s practicality (walking 7 hours to visit a single patient, for example) while ultimately marveling at the work accomplished. 

Reasons to Read: As an inspiration for anyone studying medicine or public health, Farmer shows that apathy can be overcome, policy change can happen, millions can be saved – and anything’s possible.  

Reasons to Avoid: Farmer’s example seems (at times) impossibly high, even unreplicatable, and his vision of charity impossibly uncompromising. It’s important to remember that charity does not require genius and that any progress helps.

Fun Facts: 

• The Arcade Fire song, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is named after the novel (CBC Music). 

Further Reading: 

• Bending the Arc - a 2017 documentary about Partners in Health
• How Paul Farmer helped save the lives of millions of people by John Green
• Infections and Inequalities: the Modern Plagues, by Paul Farmer
• Partner to the Poor: a Paul Farmer Reader

References: 

10 things you didn't know about Arcade Fire's The Suburbs (Jul 31, 2020). CBC Music. https://www.cbc.ca/music/10-things-you-didn-t-know-about-arcade-fire-s-the-suburbs-1.5669278.

Cover Photo by Reynaldo Mirault on Unsplash