Summary:

This self-portrait includes two images of the artist. The first lies with her back toward us on a hospital gurney, her head to the left, apparently anesthetized. She is wrapped in a white sheet except for her lower back, which is exposed to show two large surgical cuts dripping blood. The second figure sits facing us in a chair in front of the right side of the gurney.

The sitting figure is essentially the familiar Frida Kahlo of many self-portraits--erect, beautifully dressed in colorful Mexican style, and her face composed in spite of the tear on her right cheek. The difference here is the presence of medical paraphernalia. The upright Kahlo holds in her lap a large back brace, and she seems to be simultaneously wearing the same device under her dress. In her right hand she holds a small flag with a Spanish inscription that could be translated: "Tree of hope, stay firm."

The two figures float in space just above a lifeless and deeply eroded desert landscape. In front of them, at the very bottom of the painting, is the suggestion of an abyss. The painting is divided laterally, the left side ruled over by a sun and the darker right side (the figure’s left) ruled by the moon.

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In this disturbing work Kahlo paints herself lying on her back in a hospital bed after a miscarriage. The figure in the painting is unclothed, the sheets beneath her are bloody, and a large tear falls from her left eye. The bed frame bears the inscription "Henry Ford Hospital Detroit," but the bed and its sad inhabitant float in an abstract space circled by six images relating to the miscarriage, all tied to blood-red filaments the figure holds in her left hand. The main image is a perfectly-formed male fetus. The others refer to aspects of childbearing.

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This is a collection of Elizabeth Layton's work, organized chronologically from 1977-1991. Contents include a biography and epilogue by a 27-year-old reporter (Don Lampert) who discovered, promoted, and became a dear friend of "a depressed grandmother with a handful of drawings under the bed."

Layton discovered contour drawing when she was age 68 and claims to have drawn herself out of mental illness. Her subject matter is self-portraiture, marriage, aging, depression, grandmothering, dieting, and political commentary (nuclear holocaust, capital punishment, mythology and hospital death).

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The voice of a young girl leads us through this spare and tautly told story of a closely-knit family upon whom tragedy falls like a plague.  Before death and mental illness take up residence there, we meet the Bronstein’s, two parents and four children, in their comfortable, well-run home outside of Boston.  Hermann delicately renders the portents of change and pain that haunt all loving families. The novel opens with the nine year-old Ruby Bronstein’s discovering, while walking along the beach with her three older brothers on a winter afternoon, an old rusty pistol poking out of the sand. 

The family story deepens as the teenage Ruby recounts a sojourn with her parents to Terezin, the Nazi concentration camp where her father was interned as a child. Hermann’s restraint and precision in this sequence make this potentially familiar journey entirely new.  With her young eye trained on her father’s every muscle-twinge of reaction to what he sees, she crisply conveys the unknowability of even an adored father –let alone the events that took place within these walls. Her father’s inaccessible childhood memories are not miraculously jarred by this return to the scene of trauma – but he learns shortly thereafter of a brain tumor that soon will end his life.

One tragedy follows another, the emergence of mental illness in one brother, the death of another.  The narrative traces Ruby’s efforts to carry on in the face of these devastating losses.  Here is where the novel explodes in cold fire, in its quiet accounting of a young person’s grief as it is lived in its ordinary, daily course.  Loss begins to deform her social life, giving her the feeling that she is a freak.  The scale of things is too disproportionate; she dresses for the prom while her brother lies dying in the intensive care unit.  Carrying the stigma of disaster, she hides news of family developments for which she has no vocabulary.  What good would talking do anyhow, she asks –until she finds the listener she needs.  

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Inochi (Japanese for "life" or "spirit") are four human-sized figures with bulbous, alien-like heads over small bodies made of (plastic) flesh and machinery. Murakami directed videos to accompany the Inochi, consisting of a film sequence of an Inochi in school with a schoolboy-like crush on a girl; the Inochi tries to fit in, gets in trouble, and doesn't understand what is happening to its body when it begins to respond to the crush.

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This 1995 mixed media sculpture consists of life-sized mannequins of children moulded to one another, naked except for black sneakers, and some of them deformed by genitals on their faces.

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Two old women and one winged man peer downwards at a book held tightly by one of the women. The front cover of the books reads "Que Tal?"--Spanish for "How are Things? " or "What's the News?" Both women are elaborately dressed and made up, as though trying to cover over their age with finery and make-up. The lady on the left-hand side of the painting holding the book is dressed in black and red; she wears a veil of sorts upon her head and her clothes imply mourning. Her face is aged and nearly skeletal, her teeth appear bony and pointed, and her recessed eyes look with interest to the book she holds.

On the right hand side of the painting, another old woman dressed in white presents a visual contrast to her neighbor. Her fanciful dress is complemented by sparkling jewelry. This lady's eyes are red and puffy. She smiles as she reads, her spirit apparently engaged as her body hovers on the edge of life. Behind these two crones, Father Time approaches on his wings, holding a staff only partially revealed--it is perhaps a broom or scythe. Father Time's eyes are blackened, his hair grey, and his body well muscled. His appearance is one of age combined with strength.

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A Place Called Canterbury by social historian Dudley Clendinen, former New York Times national correspondent and editorial writer, provides readers with an intimate and revealing account of aging in a particular place at a particular time--Canterbury Tower in Tampa, Florida. The story about the author's mother, Bobbie--and so many others--begins in 1994, a few years after the death of James Clendinen, Bobbie's husband of 48 years, and known to the community as the progressive editor of the Tampa Tribune. Although she had been "falling apart, a piece here, a piece there...collapsing vertebrae...bent, frail, and crooked...subject to spells and little strokes...." (p. xii),

Bobbie Clendinen was in reasonably good health. Nevertheless, her grown son and daughter did what most children their age do--they worried. When she finally agreed to move from the home where she had lived for twenty-nine years to Canterbury Towers, room 502, two bedrooms, two baths ($88,000 in cash, $1505 each month), Clendinen and his sister were relieved. She would be cared for and safe in "the small, cream colored, obsessively well-run geriatric apartment tower and nursing wing...across a broad boulevard from an arm of Tampa Bay" (see book cover).  And, so many of her old friends were already established residents!

Clendinen was fascinated by his mother's new circumstance and by what he came to regard as the new old age. As a writer, he could not resist the opportunity before him. Although he lived in Baltimore, he could come and go, but over the twelve-year period of his mother's residence--three in the Towers and nine years in the hospital wing--he spent more than 400 days as a live-in visitor, observer, listener, interpreter. This unusual arrangement provided Clendinen with a close-up view of a 21st Century phenomenon, the comings and goings of aging people in the final setting of their lives.

Canterbury is a well-run camp and life there is a soap opera. Between his exchanges with the witty rabbi and the former jitterbug champs, the enthusiasm generated by a nudity calendar proposal (declined) and the geriatric bib enterprise (thriving), the inhabitants provided Clendinen with an abundance of riches. Whether at lunch in the dining room overlooking the Bay, over daily drinks at 5pm, or in bed in the health center, everyone of this Greatest Generation had a story to tell. This ethnographic page-turner, with its cohort of named characters--the Southern Belle, the Rabbi who escaped the Holocaust, Emyfish, the ageless New Yorker, Lucile, the warm-hearted Fundamentalist, the raunchy Atheist, the crusty Yankee, the horny widower, and the maddeningly muddled Wilber--reads like fiction. Whether rich or poor, married or widowed, Clendinen listened as they spoke and in doing so became a trusted friend and chronicler of small and great events in their collective lives: childhood, Depression, World War II, medical advancements, healthcare costs, 9/11. Because Bobbie Clendinen spent so many years in the hospital wing, much of the story describes the kind of care and staff standards that we would hope for all--including ourselves. Mrs. Clendinen died at age 91.

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George Hall has recently retired when he discovers a lesion on his hip which he takes to be skin cancer. Even though his doctor tells him that it is simply eczema, George is not reassured for long. His worry gradually becomes panic. He learns that his wife, Jean, is having an affair with an old friend of his, that his daughter, divorced single mother Katie, is going to marry a man he disapproves of, and that his son, Jamie, intends to bring his gay lover to the wedding. At this point his hypochondria becomes distinctly pathological. He attempts to excise the lesion himself with kitchen scissors and ends up in hospital.

With the help of antidepressants and psychotherapy, he begins to recover, and then, finding other marks on his skin, relapses. Things come to a climax at Katie's chaotic and (for the reader) very funny wedding, where George, on a risky mixture of valium and alcohol, makes an overly confessional speech and then physically attacks his wife's lover. Order is restored with the help of Jamie and Ray, the groom, who turns out to be heroically kind and efficient (and whose working-class status is then forgiven by George and Jean), and the novel ends with happy reconcilations. George's health anxiety has not, though, entirely disappeared and the novel ends with a clear sense of the mental effort required, especially as we age, not to give in to our fears of disease and death.

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Body of Work is a cleverly crafted memoir - or, rather, the first chapter of a memoir - of the author's medical school experience at Brown University School of Medicine in Providence, Rhode Island. Ms Montross relates the chronological course of her team's dissection of a female cadaver with no discernible umbilicus and whom they therefore name Eve. (She neglects to comment on Eve's ribs and whether she has the normal complement or a supernumerary, more masculine, rib.) As she and her team of four (later three as one student drops out of school) proceed with the orderly dismantling of Eve, bone by bone, nerve by nerve and blood vessel by blood vessel, she uses this experience as a springboard to analyze her and her team's emotional reactions to the often unnatural process of deconstructing, literally (at times with a saw), a former person now cadaver, as well as the gradual, almost imperceptible acculturation that transmogrifies medical students into doctors. In fact, she devotes the final pages to this metamorphosis and what it means to the person undergoing the transition from caring student to detached physician, and whether one can retain enough caring, while remaining sufficiently detached to function as one must as a clinician, to become both a whole person and competent physician: "How much of becoming a doctor demands releasing the well-known and well-loved parts of my self?" (page 209)

Although it primarily revolves about the axis of her gross anatomy (cadaver dissection) course, the author's narrative includes tangents that have variably relevant relationships to this course, e.g., a trip to Italy to inspect first hand the anatomy theater of Vesalius in Padua and the Basilica of St. Anthony; another trip to the anatomical wax sculptures museum in Bologna, where the author also observes the "incorrupt corpse of Santa Caterina" in a "small church called Corpus Domini" (pages 223-224); interspersed histories of the traffic of corpses for dissection, including the infamous Burke and Hare story; some flash-forwards to her second and third years; and a prolonged narration of the final illnesses of her grandmother and grandfather. This last bit of family history is worth the price of the book alone. Despite the apparently incongruous collection of such asides, the author makes it work smoothly, if not seamlessly.

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