Books by/about Physicians and Patients
Books by/about Physicians and Patients
The following selected list of books published between 1994 and 1999 in which death-and-dying is a major theme is taken from an annual bibliography on physicians and patients in literature that our visiting literature and medicine scholar, Joseph Cady, Ph.D., prepared for his medical school classes during those years.
1994
Lionel Abrahams, The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan: A Novel in 17 Stories (Academy Chicago, 1993). Autobiographical novel about the attempts by a man with cerebral palsy to live life to the fullest. Originally published in South Africa in 1977.
Vassily Aksyonov, Generations of Winter (trans. John Glad and Christopher Morris; Random House, 1994). Novel tracing the fortunes of the family of a renowned Moscow surgeon from the 1920s through World War II. The author, a physician by training and a prominent Soviet literary dissident, was forced to emigrate in 1980. Now a literary exile in the US, he teaches at George Mason University in Virginia.
Roderick Anscombe, The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula (Hyperion, 1994). Revisionist novel by a psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard Medical School, in which Dracula is a late nineteenth-century Hungarian physician.
Thomas Avena, ed., Life Sentences: Writers, Artists & AIDS (Mercury House, 1994). Poems and memoirs by, or interviews with, 15 writers and visual and performing artists, most of whom were HIV+ at the time and some of whom have since died.
Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door (Dutton, 1994). Novel of the British home front during World War I, a fictionalized account that occasionally involves actual historical figures. One major strand of the plot features the work of the British psychiatrist/anthropologist William Rivers with shell-shocked English soldiers.
Louis Begley, As Max Saw It (Knopf, 1994). AIDS figures at the climax of this novel by a well-known contemporary American lawyer-writer, which traces several decades in the relationship of three men, two a gay couple, the third an emotionally- and sexually-repressed lawyer.
Peter H. Berczeller, Doctors and Patients: What We Feel About You (Macmillan, 1994). A retiring internist on the faculty of NYU Medical School recounts a series of anecdotes from his practice illustrating the strong emotional dimensions of medical work.
Susan Bergman, Anonymity: The Secret Life of an American Family (Farrar, Straus, 1994). Fragmentary and sometimes angry memoir by poet who only learned that her father was gay and had HIV after his death from AIDS in 1983.
Doris Betts, Souls Raised from the Dead (Knopf, 1994). Novel focusing on a 13-year-old girl's death from kidney disease and its effect on her working-class Southern family and community.
Irene Borger, ed., Witness (AIDS Project Los Angeles, 1994). Prose pieces by members of the AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers' Workshop, which was founded by the editor, a Los Angeles writer, in 1990.
Peter Cameron, The Weekend (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994). Elegiac novel in which the surviving friends and lover of a man with AIDS gather for a country weekend to mark the first anniversary of his death.
Rafael Campo, The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World (Arte Publico Press, 1994). Poems by a young internist about his experiences as a gay Latino in a heterosexual Anglo world. Winner of the National Poetry Series 1993 open competition.
Ethan Canin, The Palace Thief (Random House, 1994). New collection of stories by an acclaimed young American physician-writer, author of an earlier story collection, Emperor of the Air (1988), and novel, Blue River (1991).
Peter Cashorali, "The Cemetery," Clifford Chase, "Leaving the Beach," Jameson Currier, "Fearless," David Rackoff, "Sagrada Familia"--in Men on Men 5: Best New Gay Fiction, ed. David Bergman (Plume/Penguin, 1994). More stories about AIDS by some contemporary gay male writers, in new collection of contemporary gay short fiction based on the successful 1986-88-90-92 anthologies of the same title.
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry: Inside A Deaf World (Houghton Mifflin, 1994). The story of the students and staff at the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City, by the hearing daughter of the superintendent.
Gretel Ehrlich, A Match to the Heart (Pantheon, 1994). In this collection of stories, essays, and meditations on several topics, a poet and nature writer describes her experience being struck by lightning and her rescue from injury by an extraordinary physician.
Gayle Feldman, You Don't Have to Be Your Mother (Norton, 1994). The journalist-author, whose mother died of breast cancer at 47, was diagnosed with the disease at the age of 40 while eight months pregnant with her first child. Now in remission, she tells the story of her treatment and of finally coming to terms with the loss of her mother.
Mary Fisher, Sleep With the Angels: A Mother Challenges AIDS (Moyer Bell, 1994). Collection of speeches and photographs by the HIV+ artist from a wealthy Republican background who was infected by her ex-husband (who later died of AIDS) and who first spoke publicly about her diagnosis in a speech to the 1992 Republican national convention.
Janice Galloway, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (Dalkey Archive, 1994). Novel by a Scottish author, first published there in 1989, which uses deliberately fractured form to mimic the experience of a woman's mental breakdown.
Daniel Gawthrop, Affirmation: The AIDS Odyssey of Dr. Peter (New Star Books, 1994). Biography of Peter Jepson-Young, a Vancouver physician with AIDS who became a national Canadian spokesperson for AIDS by hosting a weekly "AIDS Diary" on Canadian television from 1990 to 1992 and who died in November of that year. Basis for the award-winning documentary, "The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter."
F. Gonzalez-Crussi, The Day of the Dead and Other Mortal Reflections (Harcourt Brace, 1993). A collection of essays about death and its attendant rituals by a pathologist on the faculty of Northwestern Medical School, the author of several similar earlier collections--e.g., Notes of an Anatomist (1986), The Five Senses (1989).
Jim Grimsley, Winter Birds (Algonquin Books, 1994). Hemophilia, alcoholism, and spouse and child abuse are issues in this wrenching novel about a working-class Southern family.
Donald Hall, Life Work (Beacon, 1993). In the second half of this book, the author, a prize-winning American poet, reflects on his experience of colon and liver cancer.
E. Lynn Harris, Just As I Am (Doubleday, 1994). This sequel to the author's popular 1991 Invisible Life continues the tale of the sexually conflicted black gay lawyer Raymond, augmented by the story of his former lover Nicole. Both find true love in the end, but, in a subplot, Raymond's best gay male friend dies of AIDS. Rare portrait of AIDS in the middle-class African-American community.
John Hersey, Key West Tales (Knopf, 1994). The central novella in this short-story collection by the well-known American novelist and journalist documents the decline and death from AIDS of a young English professor.
David Hilfiker, Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor's Journey with the Poor (Hill & Wang, 1994). Account by a family physician who lives and works among the poor in the inner city of Washington, DC. The author previously wrote the acclaimed Healing the Wounds: A Physician Looks at his Work (1985).
Therese Jones, ed., Sharing the Delirium: Second Generation AIDS Plays and Performances (Heinemann, 1994). Collection of gay AIDS plays and performance pieces that have succeeded the "first generation" of AIDS drama by writers like William M. Hoffman and Larry Kramer, all produced in 1992-93 and most from the West Coast. Authors are Doug Holsclaw, Michael Kearns, James Carroll Pickett, Ted Sod, Wendell Jones and David Stanley, Victor Bumbalo, and Tim Miller.
Harry Kondoleon, Diary of a Lost Boy (Knopf, 1994). Autobiographical novel in which an HIV+ gay man distracts himself with the foibles of his heterosexual friends. Author, a well-known gay playwright, died of AIDS in March 1994.
Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika (Theatre Communications Group, 1994). Text of the second part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play about AIDS, which opened in the fall of 1993 to the same rave reviews as Millennium Approaches: Part One.
Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer (Beacon, 1994). A new collection of essays by an American feminist writer, who has recounted her experiences of multiple sclerosis and clinical depression in several similar earlier books--e.g., Plaintext (1986), Remembering the Bone House (1990), Carnal Acts (1991), Ordinary Time (1993).
Russell Martin, Out of Silence: A Journey into Language (Henry Holt, 1994). The author chronicles the slow and painful acquisition of language by his nephew, who had become autistic at 18 months after suffering brain damage from a reaction to a common vaccination.
Hannah Merker, Listening (HarperCollins, 1994). Extended meditation by a writer-editor about her gradual deafness as a result of a skiing accident.
Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (Harcourt Brace, 1994). Stirring collection of essays by the well-known gay American AIDS writer (e.g., Love Alone and Borrowed Time, both 1988), who now has full-blown AIDS. (The author died of AIDS in February 1995.)
Paul Monette, West of Yesterday, East of Summer: New and Selected Poems (1973-1993) (St. Martin's 1994). Selections from the author's three earlier books of poems, including seven from his 1988 AIDS sequence, Love Alone, plus eleven new poems, all but one of which concern AIDS.
Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter (Knopf, 1994). In this best-selling book, a professor of surgery and the history of medicine at Yale Medical School works to demythologize death by frankly and graphically describing the multiple ways human life ends. Winner of the 1994 National Book Award for nonfiction.
Avodah Offit, Virtual Love (Simon & Schuster, 1994). Epistolary novel, by a psychiatrist and sex therapist, consisting of the e-mail between two psychiatrists (a male treating a female prostitute for a sexual dysfunction and a female whom he consults about the case by computer), as well as of the unsent letters the female psychiatrist amasses to her male colleague.
Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing (Atheneum, 1994). A distinguished contemporary American novelist recounts his experience of a spinal tumor that left him paraplegic.
Paul Rudnick, Jeffrey (NAL/Plume, 1994). Text of the successful 1993 Off-Broadway play, which chronicles, chiefly comically, the adventures of a frightened New York gay man in the age of AIDS.
Joanna Scott, Various Antidotes (Henry Holt, 1994). Each of the inventive stories in this collection, covering incidents from the seventeenth century to the present, involves some aspect of scientific or medical life.
Richard Selzer, Raising the Dead (Whittle/Viking, 1994). The well-known surgeon-writer recounts two surgical case histories: the experience of the 19th-century English novelist Fanny Burney, who underwent, without anesthesia, the third mastectomy on record for breast cancer, in 1811; and his own near-death experience in 1991, when he became suddenly and officially "dead" for ten minutes during an episode of what was later revealed to be Legionnaire's disease.
Ronald O. Valdiserri, Gardening in Clay: Reflections on AIDS (Cornell, 1994). Collection of short essays about AIDS by a physician who lost his twin brother to AIDS in 1992 and who is now Deputy Director of the Division of STD/HIV Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and its People in the Age of AIDS (Simon & Schuster, 1994). An infectious diseases specialist, born in Africa of Indian parents, becomes the de facto AIDS doctor in the small inner-American city of Johnson City, Tennessee, in the late 1980s. The first personal book by a physician about working with AIDS.
Peter Wells, Dangerous Desires (Viking, 1994). Three interrelated stories in this first collection by a New Zealand writer concern AIDS.
Donna Williams, Somebody, Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism (Times Books/Random House, 1994). A continuation of the Australian author's Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic (1993), in which she describes her struggle to function in the world as her own self rather than through the false selves she had constructed through dissociation during her autism.
Susan Ford Wiltshire, Seasons of Grief and Grace: A Sister's Story of AIDS (Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1994). The author, a classics professor at Vanderbilt, describes the AIDS illness and death of her gay brother, a former Reagan Administration official from Texas.
Michael Winerip, 9 Highland Road (Pantheon, 1994). Account by a New York Times reporter of life in a group home for mental patients in suburban Long Island, based on his two-year experience as a participant-observer there in 1991-92.
Terry Wolverton, ed., Blood Whispers, Vol. 2: L.A. Writers on AIDS (Silverton Books, 1994). Second collection of writings from a workshop of people with HIV/AIDS and their caregivers at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Services Center, edited by the Center's artist-in-residence.
1995
John Berger, To the Wedding (Pantheon, 1995). The marriage of a young HIV+ Frenchwoman is at the center of this episodic novel by a well-known British writer and painter who has lived in France for many years.
Irene Borger, ed., Witness, second edition (AIDS Project Los Angeles, 1995). More prose and poetry by members of the AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers' Workshop, which was founded by the editor, a Los Angeles writer, in 1990.
Tim Brookes, Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness (Times Books/Random House, 1994). The author, a commentator for National Public Radio who had a near-fatal asthma attack, explores asthma in himself and others, at the same time investigating the disease's environmental causes and socioeconomic contexts.
Rebecca Brown, The Gifts of the Body (HarperCollins, 1994). Sparely-written and moving vignettes about a home health care aide's work with a variety of people with AIDS.
Edie Clark, The Place He Made (Villard, 1995). The author, a writer and editor, describes the death of her second husband from cancer at the age of 39.
Robert Coles, The Mind's Fate: A Psychiatrist Looks at His Profession--Thirty Years of Writings (Little, Brown, 1995). A collection of essays by the well-known psychiatrist and medical humanist at Harvard.
Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man (Viking, 1995). Episodic novel about Toronto earlier in the century by a well-known Canadian novelist, focusing on the friendship between three school friends and narrated by one of them, a physician who achieves an unusual success in diagnosis by practicing an unorthodox psychosomatic medicine.
Edith Kunhardt Davis, I'll Love You Forever, Anyway (Donald I. Fine, 1995). The author, a children's book author and illustrator, deals with her grief and guilt after the death of her son from a bacterial heart infection at the age of 27.
David B. Feinberg, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (Viking, 1994). Essays about AIDS activism and living with AIDS by the author of Eighty-Sixed (1989) and Spontaneous Combustion (1991). Author died in November 1994.
Mary Fisher, I'll Not Go Quietly: Mary Fisher Speaks Out (Scribner, 1995). Second collection of speeches and photographs by the HIV+ artist from a wealthy Republican background who was infected by her ex-husband (who later died of AIDS) and who first spoke publicly about her diagnosis in a speech to the 1992 Republican national convention.
Sandra M. Gilbert, Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (Norton, 1995). The author, a well-known feminist literary scholar, describes her husband's sudden death in the recovery room after routine cancer surgery and the hospital's attempt to cover up the cause. The "wrongful death" suit she brings, which was eventually settled out of court, is further complicated by her lawyer's superficial investigation of the case.
Gail Godwin, The Good Husband (Ballantine, 1994). Novel tracing the death from ovarian cancer of a distinguished woman academic. As much of a domestic and academic focus as a medical one.
Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (Houghton Mifflin, 1994). A young poet, diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma at the age of 9, describes her experiences during the long course of treatment to reconstruct her face, covering 18 years and 30 operations.
Marilyn Hacker, Winter Numbers (Norton, 1994). This most recent collection by an award-winning American poet contains a section of poems, "Cancer Winter," about her experience of breast cancer.
Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden, Or, The Twilight Letters of Gustav Uyterhoeven (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). Novel exploring the spiritual and intellectual life of a fictitious nineteenth-century Dutch physician, turning on a set of letters he writes to friends and family while practicing abroad.
Douglas Hobbie, Being Brett: Chronicle of a Daughter's Death (Henry Holt, 1995). A novelist chronicles the four years between his daughter's diagnosis with Hodgkin's disease and her death at age 27.
John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence (Hyperion, 1995). The author, a radio and television journalist who was left paraplegic from an automobile accident at the age of 19, writes a spirited report to "the ambulatory world" from "the parallel universe" of the disabled.
Marie Howe and Michael Klein, eds., In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea Books, 1995). Twenty-eight personal essays by a wide spectrum of writers, from people with AIDS to surviving caregivers to physicians.
Michael Ignatieff, Scar Tissue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994). Novel, by a Canadian historian living in England, about a philosophy professor who agonizingly confronts his mother's descent into Alzheimer's disease. Among the secondary characters are the narrator's brother, a physician, and a patient of his who has ALS.
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Knopf, 1995). A clinical psychologist who is a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the co-author of the standard medical text on manic depression describes her own experience of the illness and her stabilization with lithium and psychotherapy. New York Times bestseller.
Thom Jones, Cold Snap (Little, Brown, 1995). Second book of searing and macabre stories by the author of the widely-praised The Pugilist at Rest (1993). As in that earlier collection, several characters here suffer from some serious disease. Author is himself diabetic and a recovering alcoholic.
Michael A. LaCombe, ed., On Being a Doctor (American College of Physicians, 1994). A collection of the columns of the same name published as a regular feature in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Carl Judson Launius, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (University of Arkansas Press, 1995). An Arkansas poet who became quadriplegic after a high-school football injury describes, in an unself-pitying and sometimes even funny way, his later experiences in rehabilitation, college, graduate school, and teaching.
Greg Louganis, with Eric Marcus, Breaking the Surface (Random House, 1995). The Olympic gold medal diver tells the story of his life and career, including his public disclosure of his homosexuality in 1994 and his diagnosis with AIDS in 1995.
Claire McCarthy, Learning How the Heart Beats: The Making of a Pediatrician (Viking, 1995). A collection of autobiographical sketches by a young pediatrician. Melvin Konner calls it "the best book about becoming a pediatrician."
Ellen Burstein MacFarlane with Patricia Burstein, Legwork: An Inspiring Journey Through a Chronic Illness (Scribner, 1994). A former television reporter who was struck with multiple sclerosis in her mid-40s describes her exploitation by a charlatan physician and her coming to terms with her disease.
Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Therapist's Reckoning With Her Own Depression (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995). A psychologist's account, in journal form, of her descent into clinical depression and of her recovery with the help of controversial electroshock therapy.
Susan Onthank Mates, The Good Doctor (University of Iowa Press, 1994). About half the stories in this prize-winning first collection by a practicing physician and former concert violinist concern doctors and medicine, with a special focus on woman doctors.
Blake Morrison, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (Picador, 1995). A British poet's memoir of his father, a Yorkshire doctor, who died of stomach cancer in 1991. Both the author's parents were physicians.
Lance Morrow, Heart: A Memoir (Warner, 1995). While recovering from his second bypass surgery at the age of 53 (his first was at 36), the author, a writer for Time, explores his family past in an attempt to understand his heart disease.
Walt Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS (Duke University Press, 1995). A gay clinical psychologist uses case histories from his own practice to explore the overlooked stresses faced by gay men who are HIV-, including depression, anxiety, reclusiveness, and sexual dysfunction.
Robert Pensack, M.D., and Dwight Williams, Raising Lazarus (Putnam's, 1994). With a novelist as collaborator, a physician writes of his experience of congenital Idiopathic Hypertrophic Subaortic Stenosis (his mother died of the condition, and his brother and teen-age nephew also have it) and of his successful, though traumatic, heart transplant.
John Preston, Winter's Light: Reflections of a Yankee Queer (University Press of New England, 1995). In this collection by a gay journalist from Maine who died of AIDS in 1994, several essays concern the AIDS epidemic.
Reynolds Price, The Promise of Rest (Scribner, 1995). In this novel by a well-known Southern writer, a bisexual poet and teacher at Duke brings his gay son home from New York to die of AIDS.
Anna Quindlen, One True Thing (Random House, 1994). Cancer, euthanasia, and psychiatry are topics in this novel about a young career woman who returns home to care for her dying mother.
Richard Reynolds, M.D., and John Stone, M.D., eds., with the assistance of Lois LaCivita Nixon, Ph.D., M.P.H. and Delese Wear, Ph.D., On Doctoring (Simon & Schuster, 1995). A new, revised, and expanded edition of the anthology of stories poems, and essays first published in 1991. Emphasis on modern materials.
Natalie Robins, The Girl Who Died Twice: The Libby Zion Case and the Hidden Hazards of Hospitals (Delacorte, 1995). Recounts the tragic case of the college student Libby Zion, who presented in a New York City hospital emergency department with flu-like symptoms and who died shortly thereafter when given the wrong medication. Led to the reform of New York State law governing residents' working hours and culminated in a long trial.
Annie G. Rogers, A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy (Viking, 1995). The author, a professor of human development and psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a psychologist in private practice, describes a breakdown she experienced while a graduate student, when her work with a child patient reawakened her own memories of childhood sexual and physical abuse.
Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (Knopf, 1995). The latest collection of "clinical tales" about his patients by the well-known neurologist-author of Awakenings, A Leg to Stand On, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Benjamin Alire Saenz, Carry Me Like Water (Hyperion, 1995). Epic novel about a contemporary Chicano family, in which an AIDS nurse and a gay couple coping with AIDS are important figures.
Wilfred Sheed, In Love With Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery (Simon& Schuster, 1995). A novelist and journalist describes, in a paradoxical witty way, his experiences of adolescent polio, of addiction to alcohol and tranquilizers and subsequent addiction depression, and, finally, of cancer of the tongue.
Charlotte Watson Sherman, Touch (HarperCollins, 1995). A 35-year old heterosexual black woman artist in Seattle discovers she is HIV+. The first novel to focus extensively on an African-American woman with AIDS.
Rickie Solinger, The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law (Free Press, 1994). The life and times of Ruth Barnett (1895-1969), a non-physician abortionist who ran a practice in Portland, Oregon, for 50 years, until legal pressure and prosecution in 1968 forced her to retire. Contains information about abortion in general in America during those years, as well as about physician-abortionists who also thrived during that period.
Andrew Solomon, A Stone Boat (Faber & Faber, 1994). Novel documenting the rapprochement between a young gay concert pianist and his terminally ill mother, who initially blamed the onset of her cancer on the stress involved in having a homosexual son and whose family ultimately helps her to commit suicide.
Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Reckoning With Depression (G. P.Putnam's, 1995). The author, a reporter for the Washington Post, describes her history of depression, which began in adolescence, which included several suicide attempts and hospitalizations, and which eventually stabilized through a combination of psychotherapy, antidepressants, and behavioral change.
Yvonne S. Thornton as told to Jo Coudert, The Ditchdigger's Daughters: A Black Family's Astonishing Success Story (Birch Lane Press, 1995). The author, the director of the perinatal diagnostic center at Morristown (NJ) Memorial Hospital and an associate physician at Rockefeller University Hospital in New York, relates the success stories of herself and her five sisters, children of a laborer and a cleaning woman.
Daniel Vilmure, Toby's Lie (Simon & Schuster, 1995). AIDS among adolescents and the clergy is one concern in this intense, tragicomic novel about a gay teenager's coming-of-age during his senior year at a Jesuit high school in the South.
Sharon Oard Warner, ed., The Way We Write Now: Short Stories from the AIDS Crisis (Citadel Press, 1995). Sixteen short stories about AIDS by diverse authors, originally published from 1986 to 1994.
Joan Weimer, Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak (Random House, 1994). The author, a middle-aged literature professor, finds her entire identity challenged by her experience of a detached vertebra, for which she underwent successful spinal surgery and a later regimen of physical therapy.
Paul West, A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery (Viking, 1995). A well-known American novelist who experienced a mild stroke in 1984 describes the episode and the active role he took in his own recovery.
Tim Willocks, Green River Rising (William Morrow, 1994). Novel by a British psychiatrist about a prison uprising in Texas, in which one of the major characters is a female forensic psychiatrist.
Abigail Zuger, Strong Shadows: Scenes from an Inner City AIDS Clinic (Freeman, 1995). An internist and infectious diseases specialist reports on AIDS among the urban poor through portraits of nine of her patients in an outpatient HIV clinic in New York. Only the second personal book by a physician about working with AIDS.
1996
Vassily Aksyonov, The Winter's Hero (Random House, 1996). Sequel to the author's 1994 Generations of Winter. A panoramic novel documenting the further adventures of the family of a Moscow surgeon, Dr. Boris Gradov, from World War II to the death of Stalin in 1953 and concentrating on Gradov's grandson Boris, who becomes a medical student. The author, a physician by training and a prominent Soviet literary dissident, was forced to emigrate in 1980 and is now a literary exile in the US.
Marcia Angell, M.D., Science on Trial (Norton, 1996). The editor of The New England Journal of Medicine argues that there is no scientific foundation to the negative claims about silicone breast implants and castigates people's tendency to believe sensationalistic media accounts instead of careful scientific studies.
Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (Dutton, 1995). The final novel in this British writer's World War I trilogy (see her 1991 Regeneration and 1994 The Eye in the Door), where one of the main characters is again the British psychiatrist/anthropologist William Rivers, who did pioneering work with shell-shocked English soldiers.
Kathryn Black, In the Shadow of Polio: A Personal and Social History (Addison-Wesley, 1996). The author, whose mother died of polio in 1956 at the age of 31, gives a detailed history of the polio years in the United States and recounts the disease's devastating effect on her family.
Irene Borger, ed., From a Burning House: The AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers Workshop Collection (Washington Square Press Books, 1996). Anthology of writings by members of the AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers Workshop, which was founded by the editor, a Los Angeles writer, in 1990. Contains information about starting similar workshops elsewhere.
Christine Brennan, Inside Edge: A Revealing Journey Into the Secret World of Figure Skating (Scribner, 1996). Notable for its attention to the under-reported topic of AIDS in figure skating, which, the author contends, has lost more athletes to the disease than any other sport in the country.
Elinor Burkett, The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of AIDS (Houghton Mifflin, 1995). Concentrating chiefly on the politics and economics of AIDS, a journalist who covered the epidemic for The Miami Herald picks up where Randy Shilts's 1987 And the Band Played On left off and castigates almost everyone involved in the national fight against AIDS for "greed and utter stupidity" and for a "failure to treat AIDS as a disease, pure and simple."
Janice A. Burns, Sarah's Song: A True Story of Love and Courage (Warner Books, 1995). Seven-year journal of a young middle-class Catholic heterosexual woman with AIDS, starting with her bisexual husband's diagnosis and then her own (both were in their early 20s), and tracing their development into AIDS activists and her husband's painful decline and death. The title refers to the name she gave to her "unconceived and unaborted child."
John A. Byrne, Informed Consent: A Story of Personal Tragedy and Corporate Betrayal Inside the Silicone Breast Implant Crisis (McGraw Hill, 1995). A reporter for Business Week investigates the silicone breast implant crisis through the experience of Colleen Swanson, who successfully sued the manufacturer, Dow Corning, for deceptive business practices and who ironically happened to be married to the chief of the corporation's ethics oversight program.
Rafael Campo, What the Body Told (Duke University Press, 1996). Second book of poems by a young internist, who won a national poetry prize for The Other Man Was Me in 1994. Topics include his medical work and his experiences as a gay Latino in a heterosexual Anglo world.
Bernard Cooper, Truth Serum: Memoirs (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). Several essays in this autobiographical collection by a Los Angeles-based gay writer concern AIDS. (The author's 1993 autobiographical novel, A Year of Rhymes, chronicles an older brother's decline and death from leukemia.)
Mark Cosman, In the Wake of Death: Surviving the Loss of a Child (Moyer Bell, 1996). The diary of the author, a business executive, in the year after his 17-year-old daughter was shot to death.
Tom Crider, Give Sorrow Words: A Father's Passage Through Grief (Algonquin Books, 1996). The diary of a journalist whose daughter died in an apartment fire at the age of 21.
Nicholas Delbanco, In the Name of Mercy (Warner Books, 1995). Thriller about the mounting number of suspicious deaths occurring at a Michigan hospital and at an affiliated hospice run by a young physician who had earlier assisted his cancer-ridden wife to commit suicide.
Mark Doty, Atlantis (HarperPerennial, 1995). Several poems in this latest book by a prize-winning American poet concern his lover's suffering and death from AIDS.
Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 1996). The same author's prose memoir, journal, meditation, and elegy about his lover's sickness and death from AIDS and his own anguish and guilt at surviving.
Mary Fisher, My Name Is Mary: A Memoir (Scribner, 1996). Autobiography of the HIV+ artist from a wealthy Republican background who was infected by her ex-husband (who later died of AIDS) and who first spoke publicly about her diagnosis in a speech to the 1992 Republican national convention.
Shelley Geballe, Janice Gruendel, and Warren Andiman, eds., Forgotten Children of the AIDS Epidemic (Yale University Press, 1995). The first full-length look at the issues facing children whose parents and siblings are dying of AIDS.
F. Gonzalez-Crussi, Suspended Animation: Six Essays on the Preservation of Bodily Parts (Harcourt Brace, 1995). A professor of pathology at Northwestern and author of earlier works like Notes of an Anatomist (1986) and The Day of the Dead (1993) produces another collection of paradoxically somber and witty essays about pathology, this time about the art of embalming and related matters.
Noah Gordon, Matters of Choice (Dutton, 1996). Popularly-written novel about a woman doctor in rural Massachusetts who faces some of the thorniest issues in modern medicine (e.g., abortion, health insurance).
Richard Gordon, ed., The Literary Companion to Medicine (St. Martin's, 1996). An anthology of literary selections about doctors, medicine, and illness. Especially useful for including lesser-known as well as famous authors and for its ample selection of pre-contemporary materials. But has some glaring omissions (e.g., no Chekhov or William Carlos Williams) and lacks historical and thematic organization.
Rachel Hadas, The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths (Faber & Faber, 1995). Collection of essays by an American poet centering on her mother's death from cancer and the loss of one of her closest friends to AIDS. (The same author's 1991 Unending Dialogue is a selection of poems by members of a writing workshop she led at New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis from 1989 to 1991.)
Evan Handler, Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (Little, Brown, 1996). A young actor tells the story of his diagnosis and treatment for leukemia at age 24. Based on his one-man play about the experience.
Richard A. Isay, M.D., Becoming Gay: The Journey to Self-Acceptance (Pantheon, 1996). The author, an openly gay psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a graduate of the U of R medical school, continues the discussion he started in his 1989 Being Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development, telling the story of his own development from a closeted student, husband, and young practitioner to an activist gay psychiatrist and using cases from his own practice as examples of the benefits of, as well as the special issues within, gay-positive psychotherapy.
Fenton Johnson, Geography of the Heart: A Memoir (Scribner, 1996). A novelist recounts his and his lover's relationship and his lover's death from AIDS. (The same author's 1993 Scissors, Paper, Rock centers on a young gay man with AIDS who returns to his working-class Kentucky family to die.)
R. S. Jones, Walking On Air (Houghton Mifflin, 1995). Novel graphically tracing the AIDS illness and death of a successful New York stockbroker as he is cared for by two friends, another gay man and a heterosexual woman.
David A. Karp, Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meanings of Illness (Oxford University Press, 1996). A sociologist who has himself long suffered from depression reports on his own struggle and on his extensive interviews with fifty people with the condition, focusing on how they construe their experience of the illness. Also useful for providing the perspective of family members, the book is critical of all one-dimensional approaches to depression, including a purely biomedical one.
Robert Klitzman, M.D., In a House of Dreams and Glass: Becoming a Psychiatrist (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Through a series of clinical anecdotes and personal sketches, the author tells the story of his three-year psychiatric residency at a large urban hospital. (The author's 1990 A Year-Long Night reports on his internship year.)
Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story (Dial Press, 1996). Account by a Boston newspaper editor and columnist of her twenty years as what she calls a "high-functioning alcoholic" until she crashed and joined AA. New York Times bestseller.
Michael Korda, Man to Man: Surviving Prostate Cancer (Random House, 1996). The author, the editor-in-chief of the publishing house Simon & Schuster as well as a popular novelist, gives a detailed and frank account of his treatment for prostate cancer and exhorts other men with the disease to abandon what has typically been their private and silent approach to the diagnosis.
Rika Lesser, All We Need of Hell (University of North Texas Press, 1995). Stark and blunt collection by a poet and prize-winning translator about her history of suicide attempts, psychotic episodes, and severe depression.
Spencie Love, One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). A historian recounts the career and accidental death of Dr. Charles R. Drew (1904-50), a pioneering black surgeon and researcher on blood plasma (he was the first black surgical resident at Columbia Presbyterian in the 1930s and also the medical director of the first American Red Cross blood bank). A political progressive as well as a scientist (he protested the Red Cross's practice of segregating black blood from white blood and the AMA's policy of excluding black doctors), Drew was killed in a car accident in North Carolina, and an erroneous myth developed around his death that he was denied treatment by white doctors at a private hospital (a common practice in the South at the time).
William J. Mann, "Tricks of the Trade," Achim Novak, "Graham Greene Is Dead," Richard C. Zimler, "The Most Obvious Place"--in Men on Men 6: Best New Gay Fiction, ed. David Bergman (Plume/Penguin, 1996). More stories about AIDS by some contemporary gay male writers, in new collection of contemporary gay short fiction based on the successful 1986-88-90-92-94 anthologies of the same title.
Cleopatra Mathis, Guardian (Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). Several poems in this collection by an American poet concern her pregnancy and her husband's simultaneous treatment for a brain tumor.
Mark Matousek, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story (Riverhead Books, 1996). An HIV+ former editor at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine tells the story of growing up in a dysfunctional family, of being a teenage male prostitute and drug abuser, of the loss of many friends to AIDS, and of becoming a disciple of the young Indian mystic Mother Meera.
George McGovern, Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle With Alcoholism (Villard, 1996). Memoir by the former Senator and Presidential candidate about the alcoholism of one of his daughters, who finally died of the disease (she froze to death in the snow while drunk) after many years seesawing between sobriety and drinking.
Kate Phillips, White Rabbit (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). A first-time, 28-year old, novelist accomplishes the impressive feat of imagining the final day in the life of an ailing 88-year old woman.
Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning With Life (Schocken, 1995). A set of complex essays by a British philosophy professor centering on her experience of advanced ovarian cancer and a close friend's death from AIDS. (The author died in 1995.)
Mary Canago Rowland, M.D., and edited by F. A. Loomis, As Long As Life: The Memoirs of a Frontier Woman Doctor (Fawcett Crest, 1996). The edited memoirs of the author (1873-1966), one of the earliest woman physicians in the United States, who was married to another physician and who practiced chiefly on the Nebraska and Kansas frontiers. (First published in 1994 in a small press edition.)
Sarah Schulman, Rat Bohemia (Dutton, 1995). The central character in this episodic novel by a lesbian writer is a lesbian rat exterminator in New York's East Village who, in wanting "to be a witness to my own time," chronicles conditions for gay men and lesbians in the urban 90s and the AIDS deaths of many of her friends.
Susan Richards Shreve, The Visiting Physician (Doubleday, 1996). A young woman doctor who takes a visiting position as the only physician in an Ohio town is the main character in this novel tracing the tensions and secrets underlying the placid surface of small-town life.
Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness (Random House, 1996). Through a series of composite portraits, a clinical psychologist who had herself been treated for mental illness as a teenager chronicles her early years working with seriously disturbed patients in Boston.
Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery (Norton, 1996). Vivid and sometimes amusing chronicle by a neurosurgeon of his years in training, in which he tries to demystify the specialty and decries the occupational hazard of becoming a "surgical psychopath" whose "humanity is placed under general anesthesia."
Tom Waddell and Dick Schaap, Gay Olympian: The Life and Death of Dr. Tom Waddell (Knopf, 1996). Memoir (written with the aid of a sports reporter) of a pioneering gay physician who was an Olympic decathlete in 1968, founded the Gay Games in 1982, and died of AIDS in 1987.
Marion Winik, First Comes Love (Pantheon, 1996). Widely-hailed memoir about the author's unconventional marriage to an HIV+ gay man with whom she had two children, who eventually developed AIDS, and whom she helped to commit suicide.
Irving D. Yalom, Lying on the Couch (BasicBooks, 1996). Novel tracing the lives and work of three California psychiatrists in the age of managed care and "the twilight of the shrinks," by a professor of psychiatry at Stanford who has also written several textbooks in the field (e.g., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980, Inpatient Group Psychotherapy, 1983) as well as the best-selling Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989).
A. B. Yehoshua, Open Heart (Doubleday, 1996). A long novel by one of Israel's pre-eminent writers, focusing on a surgeon who is completing his residency when the action begins and whose life and future career are decisively changed by a visit to India.
1997
Diane Ackerman, A Slender Thread (Random House, 1996). A poet and well-known essayist (A Natural History of the Senses) describes her experience as a hot-line counselor at a suicide-prevention and crisis center in a college town in upstate New York.
Alice Adams, Medicine Men (Knopf, 1997). A well-known American novelist traces the experience of a 40-ish San Francisco woman as she is treated for a malignant sinus polyp and mostly mistreated by a variety of male physicians, including her doctor boyfriend.
Miguel Algarin, Love Is Hard Work: Memorias de Loisaida (Scribner, 1997). In this book of poems by the founder of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe on New York's Loisaida (aka Lower East Side), the author depicts his own HIV infection and the loss of friends and lovers to AIDS.
Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Knopf, 1997). Moving reflections by former French magazine editor who in 1995, at the age of 44, suffered a rare kind of brain stem stroke resulting in "locked-in syndrome," where the only bodily ability left to him was left-eye movement. He dictated the book to an assistant by blinking at letters of the alphabet and died suddenly two days after its French publication.
Susan Baur, The Intimate Hour: Love and Sex in Psychotherapy (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). A clinical psychologist takes a middle ground in the debate about eroticism between therapist and patient, arguing that love and sexual attraction are natural, therapeutic parts of the psychotherapy relationship and can be usefully acknowledged in treatment but never acted out.
Daniel Baxter, The Least of These My Brethren: A Doctor's Story of Hope and Miracles on an Inner-City AIDS Ward (Harmony Books, 1997). A physician's account of his three-and-a-half years on the staff of the Spellman Center for HIV-Related Diseases of St. Clare's Hospital in midtown Manhattan, which chiefly serves patients who are already multiply-troubled (e.g., crack addicts, IV-drug users, prostitutes, prisoners and former prisoners).
John Berger, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (Vintage, 1997). Paperback reissue of highly-praised 1967 book documenting and reflecting on the work of English country doctor John Sassall, whom the author, a prize-winning British novelist and critic, followed on his rounds; accompanied by photographs by Jean Mohr.
Suzanne E. Berger, Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). A poet writes of her "exile" from normal life as a result of obscure ligament injury, judged not surgically reparable, that left her in chronic pain and lying flat for six years before regaining very limited motion.
Michael Bérubé, Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child (Pantheon, 1996). The author, a professor of literature at the University of Illinois, combines philosophical and sociopolitical discussions about disability with the story of his second son, Jamie, who was born with Down's syndrome and other developmental problems.
Chris Bohjalion, Midwives (Harmony Books, 1996). Novel, narrated by an obstetrician/gynecologist, about her mother, a former hippie turned lay midwife, who is tried for murder after performing an emergency Caesarean on a mother who she believed had died of a stroke during a home birth.
Jimmy Breslin, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me: A Memoir (Little, Brown, 1996). The veteran New York journalist describes his risky surgery for, and recovery from, a brain aneurysm that was discovered by chance in late 1994.
Rosemary Breslin, Not Exactly What I Had in Mind: An Incurable Love Story (Villard Books, 1997). The daughter of Jimmy Breslin, also a New York journalist, mixes an account of the onset of a mysterious chronic illness with the story of her engagement and marriage.
Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (Henry Holt, 1996). A controversial New York novelist, who announced his AIDS diagnosis in a New Yorker essay and claimed that the disease was totally unexpected, writes about dying from the syndrome, in a mixture of essays, journal entries, and brief notations.
David Brudnoy, Life Is Not a Rehearsal: A Memoir (Doubleday, 1997). Conflicted memoir by Boston's best-known conservative talk show host, who was "outed" as a gay man by his diagnosis with AIDS in 1994.
Daniel Burston, The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing (Harvard Univ. Press, 1996). Biography of the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose theories about the existential and interpersonal roots of madness, detailed in works like The Divided Self (1959) and Sanity, Madness, and the Family (1964), exerted enormous influence on psychotherapy and on intellectual thinking in the 1960s and 70s.
Helen Broinowski Caldicott, A Desperate Passion: An Autobiography (Norton, 1996). Story of the Australian pediatrician who was the first president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and who became a world-renowned anti-nuclear activist through her involvement with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
Rafael Campo, The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (Norton, 1997). Autobiographical volume in which a young physician-poet explores concerns similar to those in his earlier books of poems (The Other Man Was Me--1994 and What the Body Told--1996), writing about the connections he sees between poetry and healing, about his work with AIDS patients, and about his experiences as a gay Hispanic in a heterosexual Anglo world.
Rita Ciresi, Blue Italian (Ecco Press, 1996). The illness and death of a 31-year-old husband from prostate cancer is the focus of this sometimes comic novel about the marriage of a cranky Italian-American working-class Catholic social worker and the law-student son of prosperous Long Island Jews .
Lucille Clifton, The Terrible Stories (BOA Editions, 1996). One of the subjects in this most recent collection by a well-known African-American poet is her diagnosis of breast cancer and subsequent mastectomy.
Kathyln Conway, Ordinary Life: A Memoir of Illness (Freeman, 1997). An unusually unsparing account by a psychotherapist, wife, and mother about her diagnosis of breast cancer and lymphoma in her 40s after having survived Hodgkin's disease in her 20s. Amid the combined stress of her cancer treatments and her family and professional responsibilities, she concludes that the experience of cancer is "without redeeming value, . . . a misery to be endured."
Karin Cook, What Girls Learn (Pantheon, 1997). A mother's struggle with breast cancer is one of the major subjects in this coming-of-age novel about two adolescent sisters.
Alfred Corn, Part of His Story (Mid-List Press, 1997). This commemorative first novel by a well-known gay American poet traces a New York playwright's year in London after his lover's death from AIDS.
Linda Katherine Cutting, Memory Slips: A Memoir of Music and Healing (Harper/Collins, 1997). A concert pianist writes of her recovery from incest by her father, the suicides of two siblings, and hospitalization for a breakdown.
Eric Darton, Free City (Norton, 1997). In this novel set in a 17th-century northern European port, the dawn of the Enlightenment is seen through the eyes of a surgeon and mechanical engineer.
Susan Bluestein Davis and Hilary de Vries, After Midnight: The Life and Death of Brad Davis (Pocket Books, 1997). Biography (co-authored by his widow) of the American actor who died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 41, focusing on the secrecy with which he shrouded his diagnosis in Hollywood and on his death by assisted suicide.
George E. Delury, But What If She Wants to Die? (Birch Lane/Carol, 1997). Memoir of a man who served four months in jail for attempted manslaughter after agreeing to assist his wife to die (she had suffered from multiple sclerosis for 22 years) and then suffocating her with a plastic bag when he feared the lethal mixture of drugs she had taken was not working fast enough to prevent discovery by her home health aide. He wrote the book, he declares, "above all to vindicate my wife's decision to die and to contribute to a rational discussion of the issues."
Elaine DePrince, Cry Bloody Murder: A Tale of Tainted Blood (Random House, 1997). Rare and impassioned book about hemophiliac AIDS, by the adoptive mother of three hemophiliac sons who contracted HIV from contaminated Factor VIII. Two of the boys died, at 11 and 15; the third, at 16, is struggling with a falling T-cell count.
Tim Dlugos, Powerless: Selected Poems, 1973-1990 (Serpent's Tail, 1996). In this selection from the work of a young gay American poet who died of AIDS in 1990, the final section focuses on his life after diagnosis.
John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little (Norton, 1997). In this novel mixing humor and pathos, an aspiring writer leaves his wife to live with his psychotherapist girlfriend, who shortly after is diagnosed with ovarian cancer and whose life is further encumbered by a multiply dysfunctional family.
Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Univ. of California Press, 1996). A sociologist traces two crucial episodes in the history of AIDS in America: the "credibility struggles" among competing factions about the causation of AIDS and the discovery of the virus; and how AIDS activists spurred an unprecedented democratization of science by actually influencing the Government (e.g., the FDA) to change its way of doing AIDS- treatment research.
Lucinda Ebersole, Death in Equality (St. Martin's, 1997). Meditative novel narrated by a struggling New York writer in her mid-40s who returns to her Alabama hometown to die of lung cancer.
Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, The Death of Innocents (Bantam, 1997). Basing their work in part on two recent revisionist articles in Pediatrics and in part on the evidence uncovered in some recent notorious infanticide cases, two science journalists argue that misguided medical theory and misleading earlier scientific articles have led physicians to misclassify a significant number of infanticide or child abuse cases as SIDS or near-miss SIDS.
Marc Flitter, Judith's Room: The Haunting Memories of a Neurosurgeon (Steerforth Press, 1997). Collection of clinical tales by a neurosurgeon, set in a imaginary hospital wing that he dubs Judith's Pavilion, where he has "admitted, confined, and confessed my failures" and where he imaginatively gathers "all the patients who might otherwise haunt me, refuse to be buried or rationalized or forgotten."
Abby Frucht, Life Before Death (Scribner, 1997). Novel about a 40-year old woman's death from cancer, unusual for its occasionally comic and fantastical tone.
Jacqueline Gorman, The Seeing Glass (Riverhead, 1997). A dual memoir of the author's autistic brother, who had died ten years before, and of her own experience of losing her sight to a rare optic disorder (which turned out to be temporary).
Eli Gottlieb, The Boy Who Went Away (St. Martin's, 1997). Narrated by the younger of two adolescent sons, this coming-of-age novel centers around a family's conflicts over treatment for the older boy's autism.
Jaap Goudsmit, Viral Sex: The Nature of AIDS (Oxford University Press, 1997). A leading AIDS researcher, a professor of virology at the University of Amsterdam, traces the history of HIV and argues that the proliferation of different viral strains threatens "epidemics of immense proportions."
Jane Zita Grover, North Enough: AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts (Graywolf, 1997). Collection of seven essays by a San Francisco AIDS activist who, burned out after five years of working with patients, moves to the Minnesota north woods, only to find, not the pristine landscape she imagined, but ravaged, clear-cut forest.
Amy Hoffman, Hospital Time (Duke University Press, 1997). The author's unprettified memoir of helping to care for her friend Mike Reigle, a cantankerous Boston gay activist, as he dies from AIDS.
Michelle Huneven, Round Rock (Knopf, 1997). Novel focusing on two recovering alcoholics--one the director of a detox retreat/"farm" who has been sober for years, the other a newly-arrived graduate student--and their attraction to the same woman.
Marty Jezer, Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words (Basic Books, 1997). A middle-aged professional author who came of age before the emergence of disability activism and who has the most severe kind of stuttering problem (he is disfluent 80% of the time) writes a memoir of his earlier life and treatments and a handbook to contemporary stuttering research.
Mahlon Johnson, M.D., with the assistance of Joseph Olshan, Working on A Miracle (Bantam, 1997). A neuropathologist at Vanderbilt Medical School becomes his own patient when a scalpel slip during an autopsy on an AIDS patient gives him HIV, and, as result of an aggressive experimental regime he devised for himself, there is no longer any detectable virus in his blood.
Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the 20th Century (Rutgers University press, 1997). A science journalist traces the profound changes wrought in both medicine and culture by Roentgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895.
Henry Kisor, Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet (Basic Books, 1997). Author of a 1990 memoir about his deafness (What's That Pig Outdoors?) and also the book editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, Kisor earned a private pilot's license in midlife and here recounts his adventures hop scotching across the country in a small plane, in a journey modeled after one made by another deaf pilot, Cal Rodgers, in 1911.
Harold L. Klawans, Why Michael Couldn't Hit and Other Tales of the Neurology of Sports (Freeman, 1996). A neurologist and pharmacologist at Rush Medical College in Chicago, the author of earlier books about illnesses of the great (e.g., the 1990 Newton's Madness), writes here of famous athletes' neurological disorders.
Michael Klein and Richard McCann, editors, Things Shaped in Passing: More "Poets for Life." Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea Books, 1997). A continuation of Michael Klein's 1989 anthology on the same subject, Poets for Life.
John Lantos, Do We Still Need Doctors? (Routledge, 1997). While answering in the affirmative, a physician and ethicist at the University of Chicago uses incidents from both his personal and clinical experience to argue for a different kind of doctor, more socially-aware and involved.
Bernard Lown, The Lost Art of Healing (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). While acknowledging the obvious benefits of technological progress in medicine, an emeritus professor of cardiology at Harvard laments the depersonalization it has led to in the physician-patient relationship and seeks to restore the "care" in "health care."
David Loxterkamp, A Measure of My Days: The Journal of a Country Doctor (University Press of New England, 1997). The journal of a year in the author's life as a family practitioner in the small town of Belfast, Maine.
Patrick McGrath, Asylum (Random House, 1997). Narrated by a consulting psychiatrist at a maximum security hospital for the mentally ill, this novel documents the harrowing events that ensue when the wife of another psychiatrist at the hospital pursues an affair with one of the patients, an artist who murdered and decapitated his wife. Based in part on England's Broadmoor Hospital, where the author's father once served as medical superintendent.
Christina Middlebrook, Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying (Basic Books, 1996). Anti-romantic memoir by a Jungian analyst who at age 49 was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and told she had only a 50 percent chance of surviving more than two years
Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain (Harcourt Brace, 1997). Novel about an eighteenth-century English surgeon whose "genius for the knife" seems directly linked to his inability to feel both physical and emotional pain, to his lack of "that quality of attention towards another's suffering which marks out the true healer."
Thomas Moran, The Man in the Box (Riverhead Books, 1997). Historical novel of ambiguous tone set during World War II, in which a Jewish physician who had eluded the Nazis is hidden by a Catholic family in a village in the Austrian Tyrol.
Jay Neugeboren, Imagining Robert. My Brother, Madness and Survival: A Memoir (Morrow, 1997). A novelist and teacher writes of the chronic mental illness of his brother (who at age 50 has been hospitalized 50 times) and of his struggles coping with the responsibility for his brother's care while also dealing with two troubled teenaged sons he has raised alone for the past decade.
Craig Nova, The Universal Donor (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). In this semi-thriller, an emergency-room physician's lover, a zoologist who is the wife of his best friend from medical school, has been bitten by one of her lab cobras, and he must persuade a psychopath with a rare blood type whom he once turned in to the police to be a donor for her.
Sherwin B. Nuland, The Wisdom of the Body (Knopf, 1997). The surgeon and historian of medicine who wrote the much-noticed How We Die now sets out to explicate physiology and disease for the general reader, in a mixture of biological information, philosophical disquisition, patient testimony, and autobiographical commentary.
Kenzaburo Oe, A Quiet Life (Grove, 1996). The Nobel-Prize winning novelist, who had already written about his mentally retarded son in A Personal Matter (1969), tells more of his story through the fictional journal of his daughter, who is left to care for the boy in Japan for a year while the novelist and his wife are abroad.
Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe Sex Education Went Wrong (Duke University press, 1996). A collection of essays from the 1980s by a "postmodernist" AIDS critic, continuing her arguments from her Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (1985) and Inventing AIDS (1990) that society needs to be blunter and more all-encompassing in AIDS education.
Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Legacy of Male Depression (Scribner, 1997). Using cases from his own practice, a therapist who specializes in male depression discusses the special cultural factors that make men susceptible to depression and that then exacerbate the situation by blocking them from getting help for it.
Jonathan Rosen, Eve's Apple (Random House, 1997). Highly praised first novel in which a young teacher obsessively tries to understand his girlfriend's anorexia and the earlier suicide of his older sister.
Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (Dutton, 1997). Borrowing a concept from environmentalism, an activist gay journalist argues that the fast-lane "sexual ecology" of urban American gay male culture has been instrumental in the vast spread of AIDS among gay men. Controversial in opposing the earlier tendency of AIDS commentators not to criticize "promiscuous" gay male behavior, out of fear of blaming the victim and of cooperating with right-wing homophobes.
Patrick Samway, Walker Percy: A Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). A new biography of the prize-winning American novelist, a Catholic moralist who graduated from medical school but never practiced medicine and who included physicians among his protagonists.
Will Self, Great Apes (Grove Press, 1997). Swiftean satire of psychiatry and medical politics by controversial English novelist, in which chimpanzees rather than humans are the most advanced species and in which an "elder stateschimp of the psychiatric fraternity" takes on as a patient a celebrated artist suffering from the delusion that he is human.
Samuel Shem, Mount Misery (Fawcett Columbine, 1997). In this sequel to his well-known The House of God, the author (the pseudonym of the psychiatrist and playwright Stephen Bergman) delivers a broad send-up of the psychiatric community in which the earlier novel's protagonist, Dr. Roy Basch, starts his residency at a posh (and multiply dysfunctional) New England psychiatric hospital.
Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh, Making Miracles Happen (Little, Brown, 1997). The authors, life partners, describe Mr. Smith's successful efforts to tackle the medical system and find helpful treatment after being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor eleven years ago and told he had three months to live. The book, which also recounts the similar struggles of several other patients, won over the skeptical New York Times science reporter, who called it "a medical miracle story that not only is gripping . . . but also somehow steers clear of most of the pitfalls."
Karen Stabiner, To Dance with the Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer (Delacorte, 1997). The author documents the state of breast cancer research and treatment in the US through the lens of the work of the famous specialist Dr. Susan Love, whom she shadowed for nine months at the new UCLA Breast Center (from which Dr. Love eventually resigned).
Claire Sylvia, with William Novak, A Change of Heart: A Memoir (Little, Brown, 1997). Spiritualistic account by a dancer and choreographer who had a heart-lung transplant and who after the surgery began to experience personality changes resembling the attitudes, habits, and tastes of her donor, an eighteen-year-old man who had died in a motorcycle accident.
Julia Tavalaro and Richard Tayson, Look Up for Yes (Kodansha, 1997). Memoir of Ms. Tavalaro's arduous recovery from two massive strokes (and a subsequent seven-month coma) suffered at age 33.
Colm Toibin, The Story of the Night (Henry Holt, 1997). AIDS dominates the last third of this novel about a gay Argentinean man of English origin who had lived a closeted and politically myopic life under the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s.
E. Fuller Torrey, Out of the Shadows: Confronting America's Mental Illness Crisis (Wiley, 1996). A psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia, who worked for several years in a public psychiatric hospital in Washington and at a clinic for the mentally-ill homeless, criticizes the "deinstitutionalization" movement of the 1970s, arguing that it has resulted in poor care of the chronically mentally ill as well as in increased violence by them in the general society.
Susan C. Vaughan, The Talking Cure: The Science Behind Psychotherapy (Putnam's, 1997). Taking her evidence from recent research in artificial intelligence and neurobiology, a psychiatrist argues that there is a biochemical basis for the value of psychotherapy, which "produces long-lasting changes in the neurons that make up your mind."
Irene Vilar, A Message from God in the Atomic Age: A Memoir (Pantheon, 1996). A young Puerto Rican writer, hospitalized after a suicide attempt, combines notes from the psychiatric ward with a searching memoir of her mother's suicide and of her larger family history.
Ben Watt, Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness (Grove, 1997). The author, a member of the English pop group Everything but the Girl, tells the story of the mysterious onset of, and his protracted treatment for, what turned out to be Churg-Strauss syndrome, a rare lung disorder with occasional skin and intestinal involvement.
Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony (Knopf, 1997). The deaths of friends and lovers from AIDS dominate this last in a trilogy of autobiographical novels by a well-known American gay writer.
John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). In a deliberately fragmentary and elusive narrative, a well-known African-American novelist tells the story of the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic, chiefly through the eyes of an epileptic young black preacher.
Scott Zwiren, God Head (Dalkey Archive, 1996). Autobiographical novel, often written in appropriately muddled form, about severe manic-depressive illness, in which a college freshman suffers serious injury in a suicide attempt.
1998-1999
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson (Doubleday, 1997). Transcriptions of weekly taped meetings between the author, a successful sports journalist who feels his life has become false and shallow, and his former college mentor and sociology professor, who is dying of ALS and who passes on his wisdom in the art of living to him; New York Times bestseller.
Federico Andahazi, The Anatomist (Doubleday, 1998). In this light-hearted historical adventure that became a bestseller in his native Argentina, the author, a psychiatrist, tells the story of an imaginary sixteenth-century Venetian anatomist who "discovers" the clitoris and of the various sexual and professional upheavals that follow.
John-Manuel Andriote, Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America (University of Chicago Press, 1999). Basing his work on more than two hundred interviews, the author, a Washington journalist, offers the first book-length "inside look" at the effects of AIDS on American gay people and on the gay civil rights movement.
Charles Atkins, The Portrait (St. Martin's, 1998). Thriller by a Yale psychiatrist, in which a successful New York painter with bipolar disorder is menaced by a mysterious stalker.
Rosemary Bailey, Scarlet Ribbons: A Priest with AIDS (Serpent's Tail, 1997). A British journalist recounts the story of her brother, the late Rev. Simon Bailey, a priest of the Church of England who served a Yorkshire mining village and was the only English priest with AIDS to stay in his parish after disclosure of his diagnosis.
Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie (Carroll & Graf, 1998). This novel set in the nineteenth century centers around a physician and amateur photographer, George Hardy, and his adventures as an army medical officer in the Crimean War, and is narrated by a diverse range of characters who surround and serve him.
Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag (University of California Press, 1998). Bardach, who went on to become a pioneering surgeon specializing in cleft lip and palate correction and is now a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa Medical School, describes his imprisonment as a young Pole in a Soviet labor camp and the role that his fortuitous work as a medical assistant there played in his recovery from despair and decision to study medicine.
John Bayley, Elegy for Iris (St. Martin's, 1998). A critic, novelist, and retired Oxford professor describes caring for his wife, the distinguished philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, to whom he has been married for 40 years and who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the mid 1990s. (Murdoch died in February 1999, shortly after the book's American publication.)
Martha Beck, Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic (Times Books/Random House, 1999). Spiritualistic memoir by a career counselor and magazine columnist about her and her husband's decision to carry their second child to term after they learned he had Down's syndrome.
Louis Begley, Mistler's Exit (Knopf, 1998). In a deliberately antiromantic and anticathartic narrative, the author traces the last weeks in Venice of an American advertising executive with terminal cancer.
David Bergman, Heroic Measures (Ohio State University Press, 1998). Several poems in this collection by a well-known gay American poet and critic concern people with AIDS.
Léon Bing, A Wrongful Death: One Child's Fatal Encounter With Public Health and Private Greed (Villard, 1997). The author, a healthcare journalist, documents the six-month downward spiral of a bright athletic San Diego girl through the "psychosis mills" of for-profit psychiatric hospitals, ending in her suicide at the age of 13.
Chris Bohjalian, The Law of Similars (Harmony Books, 1998). The author of Midwives (1997) follows up that novel with another that focuses on a female practitioner in legal and ethical trouble, this time a homeopath facing a charge of malpractice.
Melitta Breznik, Night Duty (Steerforth Press, 1999). In this novel by a psychiatrist now practicing in Zurich (which was first published in German in 1995), a young physician reexamines her own life and that of her troubled family in post World-War-II Germany as she performs an autopsy.
Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Holy Hunger: A Memoir of Desire (Knopf, 1999 8?). Rare memoir about addiction to overeating, from which the author recovered through participation in Overeaters Anonymous.
Ethan Canin, For Kings and Planets (Random House, 1998). This second novel by a well-known young American physician-writer focuses on the friendship between two very different young men in college and after. After first hoping to attend medical school, the protagonist becomes a dentist and thrives in a small New England town.
Albert Howard Carter III, First Cut: A Season in the Human Anatomy Lab (Picador, 1997). A medical humanist describes a semester's observation of new medical students at Emory University as they dissect cadavers.
Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems (Knopf, 1998). The well-known American short story writer turned increasingly to poetry in his last years, as he was dying from lung cancer, and this collection ends with that body of poems about his illness and approaching death.
Joan Cassell, The Woman in the Surgeon's Body (Harvard University Press, 1998). An anthropologist reports on her three-year-long observation of thirty-five woman surgeons in five North American cities
Ross Chambers, Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author (University of Michigan Press, 1998). Academic study focusing on three diaries by artists who died of AIDS, two of them video diaries by the French writer Hervé Guibert and the American film-makers Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman and one a more conventional diary by Eric Michaels.
Susan Cheever, Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker (Simon & Schuster, 1999). The author, the daughter of the distinguished American novelist John Cheever and herself the author of several novels and a memoir, describes her family's persistent drinking problems and her own recovery from alcoholism through A. A.
Anton Chekhov, Chekhov: The Comic Stories, trans. Harvey Pitcher (Ivan R. Dee, 1999). 40 comic stories, most of them short sketches that the great turn-of-the-century fiction writer and dramatist wrote for popular magazines while he was an impoverished medical student (though few concern medicine).
Anton Chekhov, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-eight New Stories, trans. Peter Constantine (Seven Stories Press, 1998). Previously uncollected early stories from the same period and genre as the preceding (more of these deal with physicians and medicine—e.g., "Village Doctors," "Intrigues," "In the Pharmacy").
Chu Tien-Wen, Notes of a Desolate Man (Columbia University Press, 1999). The narrator and protagonist of this novel by a well-known Taiwanese woman writer is an HIV- Taiwanese gay man whose best childhood friend has died of AIDS and who reflects on the transforming effect AIDS has had on Taiwanese gay culture.
Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1999). The author, who teaches political science and African-American studies at Yale, presents the first book-length study of the American black community's response to AIDS, including such controversial topics as the role black homophobia played in delaying attention to the disease.
C. Bard Cole, "Anniversary," Greg Johnson, "The Death of Jackie Kennedy," Felice Picano, "The Geology of Southern California at Black's Beach," Emanuel Xavier, "Christ-Like"—in Men on Men 7: Best New Gay Fiction, ed. David Bergman (Plume/Penguin, 1998). More stories about AIDS by some contemporary gay male writers, in new collection of contemporary gay short fiction based on the successful 1986-88-90-92-94-96 anthologies of the same title.
Frances K. Conley, Walking Out on the Boys (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998). The author, the first woman to be granted tenure in neurosurgery at an US medical school and now the acting director of the Palo Alto Veterans Health Care System, describes her 1991 resignation from the Stanford Medical School faculty to protest a work environment pervaded with sexist attitudes and sexual harassment of women.
Joe Connelly, Bringing Out the Dead (Knopf, 1998). Novel graphically recounting the experiences of an EMS medic in New York's Hell's Kitchen over a two-day period, based on the author's own work as a medic there for ten years.
Francine Cournos, City of One: A Memoir (Norton, 1999). The author, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia, discusses her struggles as an orphaned adolescent in foster care and their connection to her later decision to study medicine and psychiatry.
Michael Cunningham, The Hours (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998). A writer with AIDS is a secondary character in this novel paralleling the lives of three different women from the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1990s; one is the well-known British novelist Virginia Woolf. Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Jameson Currier, Where the Rainbow Ends (Overlook Press, 1998). AIDS enters midway through this novel about a group of New York gay and lesbian friends from the late 1970s to the present. By the author of Dancing on the Moon: Short Stories about AIDS (1993).
Richard Davis, Yours, D3 (Alliance House, 1999). Autobiographical novel by a retired neurosurgeon at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital about the hardening of a young man during WWII combat.
Robert Dessaix, Night Letters (St. Martin's, 1997). The narrator of this novel is an Australian traveler recently diagnosed with an incurable disease that seems to be AIDS, and over twenty nights, from his Venetian hotel room, he writes a series of letters home to a friend that intertwine reflections on his mortality with accounts of his real and imagined journeys.
Andre Dubus, Meditations from a Movable Chair (Knopf, 1998). Essays from a well-known American short story writer, who has been confined to a wheelchair since 1986, when he was hit by a car and lost one leg completely and the use of the other. (The author died of a heart attack in March 1999.)
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). Gripping and poignant narrative, by the recently-named editor of The American Scholar, about the cultural clash between the animist, non-rationalist family of a severely epileptic immigrant Laotian girl and her diligent, science-based, American physicians.
Steve Fiffer, Three Quarters, Two Dimes, and a Nickel: A Memoir of Becoming Whole (Free Press, 1999). With wry humor, the author describes his recovery of limited mobility after a teen-age wrestling accident that at first seemed to have left him quadriplegic.
Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland (Knopf, 1998). The willfully oblivious hero of this novel is a young Scottish physician who is posted by the British Ministry of Health to a clinic in a remote Ugandan village and who comes under the spell of the dictator Idi Amin.
Patricia Foster and Mary Swander, eds., The Healing Circle: Authors Writing of Recovery (Penguin, 1998). Selection of essays by writers who have experienced chronic or catastrophic illness.
Laurie Fox, My Sister from the Black Lagoon: A Novel of My Life (Simon & Schuster, 1998). In this semiautobiographical novel, the narrator describes how her family's life and her own development were indelibly marked by the unending troubles of her mentally ill older sister.
Marilyn French, A Season in Hell: A Memoir (Knopf, 1998). The well-known author of The Women's Room describes a five-year series of health catastrophes, beginning with a diagnosis of esophageal cancer, the treatment for which led to a six-week coma, followed in turn by life-threatening kidney infections, pneumonia, painful compression fractures, and a permanently disabling heart attack.
Susan Griffin, What Her Body Thought: A Journey Into the Shadows (Harper San Francisco, 1999). A well-known writer on feminism and the environment describes her diagnosis with chronic fatigue immune dysfunction ten years ago, before the syndrome was officially recognized by the medical community, and discusses her illness in the context of diverse cultural, political, historical, and spiritual concerns.
Jerome Groopman, M.D., The Measure of Our Days: New Beginnings at Life's End (Viking Penguin, 1997). Inspired by his father's unnecessary early death and his own experience as a casualty of failed orthopedic surgery, the author, a pioneer in cancer and AIDS care and an immunology professor at Harvard Medical School, offers portraits of eight patients as they face mortal illness.
Allan Gurganus, Plays Well with Others (Knopf, 1997). The author of the widely acclaimed Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All tells the story of three young artists who come to New York to succeed (a gay male writer, a heterosexual female painter, and a bisexual male composer) and who come face-to-face with the burgeoning AIDS crisis.
David Guterson, East of the Mountains (Harcourt Brace, 1999). In this second novel by the author of the best-selling Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), a retired heart surgeon with terminal colon cancer decides to commit suicide and sets off on a hunting trip to shoot himself, only to have a series of unexpected encounters along the way.
Donald Hall, Without (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). The author, a well-known American poet who has written of his own bouts with colon and liver cancer (in Life Work, 1993), presents a cycle of poems about the suffering and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, from leukemia in 1995 and about his own bereavement.
Lowell Handler, Twitch and Shout: A Tourette's Tale (Dutton, 1998). The author, a freelance photographer with Tourette's, had settled on isolation as a solution to the embarrassment of his condition, until he joins Oliver Sacks, the neurologist-author, on a 1988 tour to study others with the disorder and to produce a photojournalistic essay for Life magazine.
Brooks Hansen, Perlman's Ordeal (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). The author, who imagined the adventures of a nineteenth-century Dutch physician in his 1995 novel The Chess Garden, here invents a turn-of-the-century, pre-Freudian, physician-"hypnotherapist" in London who comes into conflict with a spiritualist friend about the treatment of an hysteric adolescent patient.
Louise Harmon, Fragments on the Death Watch (Beacon, 1998). Fragmentary work by a lawyer whose father died a slow and painful death, mixing personal reflection, imaginary dialogues, and technical legal proposals.
Robin Hathaway, The Doctor Digs a Grave (St. Martin's, 1998). The protagonist of this new series is a Philadelphia cardiologist with a second career as a detective.
Lorian Hemingway, Walk On Water: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 1998). A granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway tells the story of her recovery from her family's disease of alcoholism, in which her reformed-alcoholic great-uncle and a doctor friend of his were crucial figures.
Miroslav Holub, Shedding Life: Disease, Politics, and Other Human Conditions (Milkweed Editions, 1997). Collection of occasionally witty, occasionally truculent essays on science and politics by a Czech poet who is also a physician.
Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (Harper Flamingo, 1997). Stark and disjointed memoir by a 23-year-old anorexic and bulimic, who once weighed a near-fatal 52 pounds and who still struggles with her illness.
Marie Howe, What the Living Do (Norton, 1998). Several poems in this moving collection by an American poet concern her brother's sickness and death from AIDS
Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (Knopf, 1999). The author, a clinical psychologist on the psychiatry faculty at Johns Hopkins who wrote vividly of her manic-depression in the best-selling An Unquiet Mind (1995), follows up that book with a study of the origins, treatment, and effects of the suicidal mind, again drawing on her own experience (she attempted suicide at the age of 28, before her own illness was
Rodger Kamenetz, Terra Infirma: A Memoir of My Mother's Life in Mine (Schocken, 1999). The author's meditation on his mother's death from cancer, in which she refused to speak to her husband and children in the last stages.
Beth Kephart, A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage (Norton, 1998). A mother's memoir of her son's struggle to overcome pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, a catchall condition that might best be described as a milder form of autism. National Book Award finalist.
Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). The well-known West Indian-born novelist recounts her brother's death from AIDS in Antigua, mixed with a meditation on her escape from and continuing entanglement with her original family and culture.
Georgina Kleege, Sight Unseen (Yale University Press, 1999). Essays on the personal, social, and cultural aspects of blindness, by a novelist, essayist, and translator who has been legally blind since the age of eleven.
Robert Klitzman, Being Positive: The Lives of Men and Women with HIV (Ivan R. Dee, 1997). A psychiatrist who has written two books about his internship and residency (the 1990 A Year-Long Night and the 1995 In a House of Dreams and Glass) tells the stories of a range of HIV+ New Yorkers he met in his practice.
Jim Knipfel, Slackjaw (Tarcher/Putnam, 1999). Wry memoir by New York journalist about coping with a double health crisis—a form of epilepsy that induces depression and seizures of rage, and the onset in his early 20s of retinitis pigmentosa, which in a few years left him blind.
Leonard Kriegel, Flying Solo: Reimagining Manhood, Courage, and Loss (Beacon, 1998). The author, a novelist and City College of New York English professor, lost the use of his legs when he contracted polio at age 11, during the summer 1944 epidemic, and several essays in this collection concern what he bluntly calls his experience as a "cripple."
Stephen Kuusisto, Planet of the Blind (Dial Press, 1998). The author, a professional writer who lost most of his sight as an infant when an overly oxygenated incubator permanently damaged his retinas, tells the story of his decades-long attempt to deny his blindness (which included years of careening around his neighborhood on a bicycle) and his embarking on a new life at 39 with the aide of a seeing-eye dog.
Jane Lazarre, Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery (Duke University Press, 1998). The author intertwines the story of her treatment for breast cancer with narratives of earlier losses and griefs—e.g., her mother's death from breast cancer when the author was a child, the death of a beloved therapist from the same disease, her brother-in-law's death from AIDS, traumatic disappointments in her work life.
Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Guilty by Reason of Insanity: A Psychiatrist Explores the Mind of Killers (Fawcett/Ballantine, 1998). The author, on the clinical staff at Bellevue Hospital and a faculty member at NYU School of Medicine and the Yale Child Study Center, reports on her interviews with infamous killers on death row and on her findings that all were brain-damaged and had been sexually abused as children.
John L'Heureux, Having Everything (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999). Satirical novel about a chaired professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School whose "perfect" life has an underside that includes activities like housebreaking.
Robert Lipsyte, In the Country of Illness: Comfort and Advice for the Journey (Knopf, 1998). A New York Times columnist offers a guidebook to the land that he calls "Malady" through descriptions of his two experiences of testicular cancer and of his ex-wife's death from breast cancer.
Jacki Lyden, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Highly-praised memoir by a correspondent for National Public Radio about her fierce love for, and dismay at, her manic-depressive mother.
Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking (Norton, 1997). A Michigan undertaker who is also a widely-published poet offers a set of witty and affectionate essays about his trade, his town, his family, and death and dying.
Myra MacPherson, She Came to Live Out Loud: An Inspiring Family Journey Through Illness, Loss, and Grief (Scribner, 1999). The author follows Anna Johannessen, a 44-year old woman with breast cancer, during the last year of her life, as she works to remain active in her treatment and to prepare her husband and children for a future without her.
Anne McCracken and Mary Semel, A Broken Heart Still Beats: After Your Child Dies (Hazelden, 1998). An anthology of literature about losing a child.
Robert McCrum, My Year Off: Recovering Life After a Stroke (Norton, 1998). Through a series of diary entries, interspersed with those of his wife, a well-known British editor and writer recounts his arduous year-long recovery from a mysterious cerebral hemorrhage (no obvious cause was ever found) that he suffered at the age of 42.
Hilary Mantel, The Giant, O'Brien (Holt, 1998). The antihero of this historical novel is John Hunter, a famed anatomist based on an actual eighteenth-century British physician, who connives to secure the remains of an Irish giant who becomes mortally ill after coming to London to exhibit himself.
Charles L. Mee, A Nearly Normal Life (Little, Brown, 1998). Blunt memoir by a novelist and playwright about his life as a polio patient, after having been stricken by the virus at age 14, during the early 1950s polio epidemic.
Daniel Menaker, The Treatment (Knopf, 1998). The life of Jake Singer, a 32-year-old private school teacher in Manhattan, paradoxically improves despite the "scourge" of his treatment with his acerbic psychoanalyst, Dr. Ernesto Morales, whom he describes as "an insane, bodybuilding, black-bearded Cuban Catholic Freudian."
Susan Minot, Evening (Knopf, 1998). As she is dying of cancer, a thrice-married 65-year-old mother of four looks back on her life's disappointments and losses (an unfulfilled first romance, the death of a son).
A. G. Mojtabai, Soon: Tales from Hospice (Zoland Books, 1998). Moving collection of stories about hospice patients and their caregivers, based on the author's own experience as a hospice volunteer.
Thomas Moran, The World I Made for Her (Riverhead, 1998). In this novel about an art expert confined to a hospital bed by the deadly side effects of a toxic case of chicken pox, the silenced narrator (he is on life-support with a ventilation tube in his throat) fantasizes about creating a perfect world for one of his nurses; based on the author's five-month hospitalization with the disease.
Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening (Crown, 1998). Several health issues (heart attack, stroke, cancer, the general trials of old age) figure in this moving novel about an aging and ailing New York novelist and literary intellectual.
David Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (University of California Press, 1998). The author argues from postmodernist literary theory for a "biocultural" rather than "biomedical" model of illness.
Ben Neihart, Burning Girl (Morrow, 1999). Combination love story and thriller about a poor premed student at Johns Hopkins entangled in the criminal problems of his wealthy new boyfriend and in the dilemma of his boyfriend's pregnant sister, with whom he had had a brief fling
Sanjay Nigam, The Snake Charmer (William Morrow, 1998). The author, an Indian-born physician and researcher who now lives in Boston, describes the trials that befall an illiterate New Delhi snake charmer who in a fit of rage one day bites his snake in two and kills it.
Stewart O'Nan, A Prayer for the Dying (Henry Holt, 1999). Novel depicting the effects of a diphtheria epidemic on a small Wisconsin town in the late 1860s.
Claudia L. Osborn, Over My Head: A Doctor's Own Story of Head Injury from the Inside Looking Out (Andrews McMeel, 1998). The author suffered traumatic head injury when she was struck by a car while bike riding, and she describes her recovery and return to practice through her participation in the Head Trauma Program at NYU Medical Center's Rusk Institute.
Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant (Harcourt Brace, 1997). A gay magician who ran a rug stores in Los Angeles under a false name and identity dies of AIDS, and two sets of characters help each other deal with their grief—the title character, a heterosexual employee who had married him just before his death, and his true family of origin in Nebraska.
Teddy Pendergrass and Patricia Romanowski, Truly Blessed (Putnam, 1998). The soul-music star Teddy Pendergrass describes his recovery from a 1982 automobile accident that left him a quadriplegic at the age of 32.
Anna Quindlen, Black and Blue (Random House, 1998). The author of the 1994 One True Thing, about a mother dying of cancer, writes now about domestic violence, in a novel focusing on a battered wife and her flight with her ten-year-old son from her abusive husband.
Diane Rehm, Finding My Voice (Knopf, 1999). The final third of this autobiography by a well-known National Public Radio talk-show host recounts her experience of, and ultimately successful treatment for, spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological disorder that creates a strangled hoarseness and tremors in the voice.
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead, 1997). Paperback reprint of 1996 New York Times bestseller in which the author, a former pediatrician and now the medical director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, relates inspirational stories from her own life and from her practice counseling people with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.
Frederick Reuss, Horace Afoot (MacMurray & Beck, 1997). A man with terminal cancer is a major character in this novel about a man who changes his name, breaks with his past, and moves to a small Midwestern town called Oblivion, where he lives as a semi-eccentric.
Guenter B. Risse, Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals (Oxford University Press, 1999). A historian traces the evolution of the hospital, drawing on the experiences of patients, doctors, and others in hospitals from different periods and places.
David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Indiana University Press, 1998). A theater historian examines the various ways gay men have used "performance" to intervene in the AIDS crisis—from public ceremonies like candlelight vigils to full-scale Broadway productions like Angels in America—as well as the various ways the American theater has been affected by AIDS.
Lisa Roney, Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on Life with Diabetes (Henry Holt, 1999). Rare memoir about the experience of diabetes, by a woman diagnosed with the disease in childhood.
Nancy L. Roth and Katie Hogan, eds., Gendered Epidemic: Representations of Women in the Age of AIDS (Routledge, 1998). Collection of critical essays about women and AIDS, focusing on cultural, political, and prevention issues.
Ellen Lerner Rothman, M.D., White Coat: Becoming a Doctor at Harvard Medical School (Morrow, 1999). The author, now a Pediatrics resident in Boston, provides a rare portrait of a woman physician's progress through medical school and initiation into medical culture.
Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Icy Sparks (Viking, 1998). Novel tracing the development of the orphaned title character, who is battling Tourette's syndrome in 1950s Kentucky, from ages 10 to 15.
Jose Saramago, Blindness (Harcourt Brace, 1998). In this symbolic novel, the author, a Portuguese who won the Nobel Prize for Literature shortly after this translation's appearance, describes a sudden and inexplicable plague of blindness in an unnamed city, focusing on the family of an opthamologist.
Helen Schulman, The Revisionist (Crown, 1998). The central character in this wry but poignant novel is a 40-year-old neurologist and son of a Holocaust survivor, who, when he is thrown out of the house by his wife, embarks on a project to confront a well-known Holocaust denier.
Morrie Schwartz, Morrie: In His Own Words (Walker, 1999). Reflections by the Morrie of Tuesdays with Morrie (see above) as he dealt with his terminal illness and approaching death (originally published in 1996 as Letting Go).
Peter A. Selwyn, M.D., Surviving the Fall: The Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor (Yale University Press, 1998). The author, now the Associate Director of the AIDS program and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Yale Medical School, describes his ten years treating AIDS patients as an intern, resident, and clinician at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and discusses the effect of that experience on his ability to face his buried feelings about the sudden death (and apparent suicide) of his father when he was an infant.
Richard Selzer, The Doctor Stories (Picador, 1998). The well-known American surgeon-writer offers a selection from his three decades of short fiction, echoing the famed 1984 Robert Coles collection of William Carlos Williams stories in his title.
Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary (Random House, 1998). The author, a clinical psychologist who works with schizophrenics and depressives and who described that experience in her earlier Welcome to My Country (1996), narrates her own recovery via Prozac from a previously intractable depression that had debilitated her since her teens, while at the same time acknowledging some consequent losses (e.g., her sex drive, her belief in God).
Paul Solotaroff, Group: Six People in Search of a Life (Riverhead Books, 1999). A New York journalist who had had a successful experience with group psychotherapy is granted unlimited access by members of a new therapy group whose work is limited to a ten-month period and tells the story of the patients' lives and encounters under the aegis of a charismatic psychiatrist.
Howard M. Spiro, Mary G. McCrea Curnen, and Lee Palmer Wandel, eds., Facing Death: Where Culture, Religion, and Medicine Meet (Yale University Press, 1998). Paperback reprint of the editors' prizewinning 1996 collection, where physicians, nurses, ethicists, and academics write about medical, cultural, and religious responses to death.
James B. Stewart, Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder (Simon & Schuster, 1999). A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist tackles several taboo subjects in medical culture as he chronicles the life and career of Dr. Michael Swango, who continued to be protected by medical colleagues as evidence mounted of his complicity in the deaths of several of his patients.
Aryeh Lev Stollman, The Far Euphrates (Riverhead, 1997). In this coming-of-age novel by a New York neuroradiologist, the son of a German-refugee rabbi grows up in post-WWII Ontario amidst survivors of medical torture in the Nazi concentration camps.
Sarah Payne Stuart, My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell (HarperCollins, 1998). Robert Lowell, the prize-winning poet who suffered a series of debilitating breakdowns during his career, was the author's first cousin once removed, and she discusses his illness within her family context, in which half a dozen members were afflicted and hospitalized.
Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival (Knopf, 1998). The well-known gay journalist and former editor of The New Republic, who is now HIV+, mixes autobiography, religious memoir, and political analysis in arguing that drug advances have transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable disease.
Alfred I. Tauber, Confessions of a Medicine Man: An Essay in Popular Philosophy (MIT Press, 1999). A physician who is also trained as a philosopher analyzes the current state of medical care and of the doctor-patient relationship, interweaving personal anecdotes, historical narrative, and philosophical concepts.
Liz Tilberis with Aimee Lee Ball, No Time to Die (Little, Brown, 1998). The author, the British editor-in-chief of American Harper's Bazaar, describes her diagnosis of and radical treatment for stage-three ovarian cancer and her work as a cancer-care activist (Ms. Tilberis died in May 1999).
Aydin Tözeren, A New Life: Being a Gay Man in the Era of HIV (University Press of America, 1997). Portraits of the experience of AIDS among a range of gay men. their families, and loved ones, by a professor of Biomedical Engineering.
Abraham Verghese, The Tennis Partner: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Loss (HarperCollins, 1998). The author of the widely-acclaimed My Own Country (1994) continues the professional and personal story he began there, while at the same time dealing with the taboo subject of physician substance abuse as he memorializes an addicted younger colleague and friend who ultimately committed suicide.
Diana Wagman, Skin Deep (University Press of Mississippi, 1997). Novel in which a former topless waitress enters into a peculiar relationship with a young plastic surgeon, who pays here to shroud herself completely in blue and talk to him about beauty three nights a week.
Daniel Wallace, Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998). As his dying father hides behind the facade of jokes that had long been the hallmark of his personality, the hero of this novel invents a series of mythic tales about him in an attempt to get closer to him.
Gayle Warner with David Kreger, Dancing at the Edge of Life: A Memoir (Hyperion, 1998). The journal of a poet and environmental activist who was diagnosed with aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 30 and died 13 months later.
Marilyn Webb, The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life (Bantam, 1997). The former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today investigates the variety of new ways in which Americans are approaching mortal illness and death, with reports based on an eclectic range of sources, from dying persons' stories to the Medline database to court briefs to the human potential movement.
Barry Werth, Damages: One Family's Legal Struggles in the World of Medicine (Simon & Schuster, 1998). A reporter chronicles the tangled court case brought by the parents of a child born severely retarded and the "damages" that its seven-year lawsuit wrought to all sides.
Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish (Knopf, 1998). The author, the literary editor of The New Republic, presents his journal of the traditional year of mourning for his father, mixed with reflections on the larger Jewish religious traditions and cultural history of which it is a part.
John Morgan Wilson, Revision of Justice (Doubleday, 1997). AIDS figures centrally in this mystery featuring a gay Los Angeles investigative reporter.
Sidney J. Winawer with Nick Taylor, Healing Lessons (Little, Brown, 1998). The author, a senior gastroenteroligist at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, describes the changes in himself, his family, and his understanding of his profession as his wife battles terminal stomach cancer.
Peter Wyden, Conquering Schizophrenia: A Father, His Son, and a Medical Breakthrough (Knopf, 1998). The author, a writer and editor, writes of the schizophrenia of his son Jeff (his other son is Ron Wyden, US Senator from Oregon) and of his improvement via new psychopharmacological agents after a 25-year struggle with other treatments.
R. D. Zimmerman, Hostage (Delacorte, 1997). In this novel in a popular series featuring a gay television reporter and his policeman lover, three diverse people with AIDS take a right-wing spokesperson hostage and threaten to kill him. under control).
Thom Jones, Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (Little, Brown, 1999). A third collection by the author of The Pugilist at Rest (1993) and Cold Snap (1995). As in those earlier books, some of these discomfiting and macabre stories contain characters who are physicians and people with serious illness.
Geneviève Jurgensen, The Disappearance (Norton, 1999). The two young daughters of the author, a French writer, were killed in a car crash in 1980, and for ten years she found it impossible to put her suffering and grief into words, until the composition of this book, which consists of letters written over a two-year period to a sympathetic friend.
Books by/about physicians and patients written by Utah authors
Abigail Judd Bishop, All My Dreams Came True (Published by family of Abigail Judd Bishop, 1998). " This is a book composed by Abigail Louise Judd Bishop, our sister and friend who died of a brain tumor on December 22, 1996. As her siblings we feel that this is her final legacy - her gift - and that it should be shared in its purest form." Abigail was a resident of Utah.
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Vintage, 1991). "In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same spring, Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and with it the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950's. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that seems certain to become a classic in the literatures of women, nature and grieving.
