Summary:

At 23 years of age, Caitlin Doughty went to work for a crematory in Oakland, California, and looked human mortality right in the eye. She reports on her first six years in the funeral industry, learning about it and also resolving to stay in it so that she can improve it. Her eye-witness account provides the basic narrative structure of this book. 

She makes house calls to gather up the dead and drive them to the crematory. She is fascinated by several specific bodies, giving us portraits of them and their past lives. Some of them are our least-well-off citizens, and these occasion touching prose.

Doughty realizes that her fear of death has roots of seeing, at eight years of age, a child dying from a fall in a two-story shopping mall. Her work with bodies helps her heal from her trauma. She imagines that her history may be a parallel for American society as a whole that now hides, covers up, and ignores the realities death and dying. She specifically envisions changes that will result in healthier attitudes and practices in the funeral industry. 

Doughty describes in detail how the dead are embalmed, made up to look “natural,” and presented to relatives at viewings. She criticizes these rituals as demeaning to the dead and causing unnecessary expense to their families. She describes Forest Lawn cemetery as the Disneyland of the Dead, recalling Jessica Mitford’s critical book, The American Way of Death (1963).             

Finishing her time at the crematory, she decides to stay in the industry in order to improve it. She graduates from the Cypress College of Mortuary Science and passes exams to become a licensed funeral director in the state of California. She posts her essays and manifestos on the Internet under the name “The Order of the Good Death.” Many others join her in a movement against American “death dystopia” (p. 234).  

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This memoir focuses on the various ways in which his being an African American affected Tweedy’s medical education and early practice as a medical resident and later in psychiatry. Raised in the relative safety and privilege of an intact family, he found himself underprepared for some of the blatant forms of personal prejudice and institutional racism he encountered in his first years of medical education at Duke Medical School.  One shocking moment he recounts in some detail occurred when a professor, seeing him seated in the lecture hall, assumed he’d come to fix the lights.  Other distressing learning moments occur in his work at a clinic serving the rural poor, mostly black patients, where he comes to a new, heightened awareness of the socioeconomic forces that entrap them and how their lives and health are circumscribed and often shortened by those forces.  Well into his early years of practice he notices, with more and more awareness of social contexts and political forces, how the color line continues to make a difference in professional life, though in subtler ways.  The narrative recounts clearly and judiciously the moments of recognition and decision that have shaped his subsequent medical career.    

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The extraordinary image of a six hundred pound man, spread across two beds, dying, whom the doctor might at first find to be grotesque, is transformed in the doctor's dream. In that dream he sees the man as the center of a ceremony in which healers "wrestle the souls of old bodies back to bones . . . back back to their beginnings." The doctor comes to realize that this "worthless and alien" body is beautiful.

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This book examines the rise of the obesity epidemic through the perspectives of art, literature, and medicine, particularly in Britain, with brief mention of continental Europe and North America. In the first chapter, the authors set the scene by explaining the medical significance of obesity: namely, how and why obesity leads to illness. The remainder of the book is devoted to discussing historical perceptions of obesity, the history of eating, the history of exercise, and the history of weight loss remedies. Historical perceptions of obesity are addressed from several angles, including the business of “fat folk” circus freaks; the portrayal of obese figures in art, from Paleolithic stone sculpture to seaside post cards to modern film; and the depiction of obese figures in writing, from Chaucer to J. K. Rowling. Throughout the book, the authors are careful to emphasize that obesity is not simply a self-inflicted product of gluttony and sloth, but a condition brought about by many factors, including genetics and social influences. They conclude the book by urging society to take a more aggressive stance against obesity by reminding readers that obesity kills.

David Haslam is a general practitioner in the United Kingdom, He is also Clinical Director of Britain’s National Obesity Forum, a charity formed in 2000 to increase awareness of obesity as a medical condition. Fiona Haslam is a historian of medicine and art, with a doctorate from the University of St. Andrews. She is also the author of From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth Century Britain (Liverpool University Press, 1996). 

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Fat Louise, with an eating disorder since she was nine, would diet in public and sneak candy and peanut butter sandwiches in private. Her parents pitied her and were embarrassed by her. Her college roommate caught her at the secret eating and offered to help her get control of her eating. The diet and exercise ritual, combined with smoking, brought her weight down 60 pounds and made her beautiful and eligible to be married. Her parents were proud. She got married. But often she felt "no one knew her"--that she really wasn't this slim 120 pound beauty.

Then during her pregnancy she lost the discipline and ate compulsively and secretly. After the baby was born she continued to eat--her husband disapproved and didn't want to touch her, her mother scolded. The marriage, based on appearances, started to fall apart; she looked forward to being alone with her child and able to eat anything she wanted without other people judging her.

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Eric Calhoune is known to his classmates as "Moby" because of the extra weight he has carried since grade school.  Though his mother is young and athletic, he has inherited the body type of the father he's never known.  Now, in high school, the fat is turning to muscle under the discipline of hard swim team workouts.  But that transformation has been slow in coming, since for some time Eric has taken on a private commitment to "stay fat for Sarah Byrnes."  Sarah, whose name is a painful pun, was severely burned as a small child not, as we are given to believe early on, because of an accident, but because of a cruel and crazy father who stuck her face and hands into a woodstove in a moment of rage.  She has lived with him and his threats for some time; that and her disfiguring scars have made her tough, smart, and self-protective.  Eric and she became friends as social outcasts.  Well-matched intellectually and in their subversive wit, they write an underground newspaper together.  Sarah, however, lands suddenly in the hospital, speaking to no one, making eye contact with no one.  Eric faithfully visits her and, per nurses' instructions, keeps up a running one-sided conversation as if she could hear him.  As it turns out, she can.  She is faking catatonia because the hospital is a safe place, and she has chosen this as an escape route from her father.  Eric and a sympathetic coach/teacher go to great lengths to find Sarah's mother-who, it turns out, can't bring herself to be involved in her daughter's life because of her own overwhelming shame.  Ultimately the father is apprehended, and Sarah, nearly eighteen, is taken into the coach's home and adopted for what remains of the childhood she bypassed long before.  In the course of this main plot, other kids enter the story and in various ways come to terms with serious issues in their own lives, some of which are aired in a "Contemporary American Thought" course where no controversy is taboo.

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In this collection of "clinical tales," to use Oliver Sacks' term, Sue Hall, an experienced neonatologist who spent some years as a social worker before medical school, tells a remarkable range of stories about newborns in the NICU and their parents.  As memoir, the stories record moments in a life full of other people's traumas, disappointments, anxieties, and hard-won triumphs where her job has been to hold steady, find a balance point between professionalism and empathy as young parents go through one of the hardest kinds of loss.  Each story is told with clarity and grace, sketching the characters deftly and offering useful medical information along the way on the assumption that many who read the book will do so because they are facing similar challenges and decisions.  Each story is followed by a two- to three-page "Note" giving more precise medical background and offering further resources for those who have particular interest in the kind of case it was. 

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While the film is clearly, unequivocally about families, family relationships, families in crisis--here, as experienced in the Grape family, it is also a film illuminating other human issues in astonishing ways. The family focus is on Momma (Darlene Cates), whose 600-pound frame shakes the rafters of the house in those rare moments she is able to rise; she eats on the sofa (the children bring the kitchen table to her), sleeps on the sofa (a bed is made up there every night), and watches television and her family the rest of the time.

Gilbert (Johnny Depp) is the oldest son who takes care of everyone, especially his eighteen-year-old brother, Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is mentally challenged in some way and requires constant attention. Two sisters round out the family.

Becky (Juliette Lewis) comes to town in an Airstream with her grandmother--we're never quite sure what they do other than criss-cross the country in Airstream caravans--and changes Gilbert's life from one of resignation to one of possibilities outside the dailiness of caregiving and stocking shelves at the local grocery store. The climax of the story, the death of Momma after Arnie's eighteenth birthday party (he wasn't supposed to live that long), frees each family member in life-altering ways.

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This is an anthology of 32 pieces, many directly relating to war and its aftermath, or, in general, kinds of violence humans inflict upon each other and the ensuing suffering: hence the title, "echoes of war." The pieces include short fiction, essay, a dozen poems, and a photo collection. Since none are lengthy, this is a good reader to supplement other longer texts or to serve as an anthology for a reading group. A short essay, "Suggested Longer Readers," mentions some three dozen pivotal topics, including "homecoming" and "sense of identity." 

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Most of the twenty works in this anthology are first-person narrative essays. They represent a wide range of women’s experiences of embodiment, spanning both the average lifespan and the particularity of individual lives, focusing on puberty and menstruation, weight-consciousness and eating disorders, facial disfigurement, multiple sclerosis, infertility and pregnancy, cosmetic treatments and surgery, breast cancer, and aging. A few essays offer a valuable cross-cultural lens on the experience of embodiment.

Hanan al-Shaykh’s Inside a Moroccan Bath (see this database) explores her dual experiences of being stigmatized in Middle Eastern culture for her thinness, and then having her stigma recast as value when she moved to a European city. Judith Ortiz Cofer’s "The Story of My Body," which begins "I was born a white girl in Puerto Rico, but became a brown girl when I came to live in the United States," (299) offers another perspective on the cultural instability of the criteria for female beauty. Linda Hogan’s "Department of the Interior" positions her experience of embodiment within the intertwined contexts of American Indian culture and the physical landscape of the West.

Some of the contributors are well-known for their texts on embodiment ( Lucy Grealy, Nancy Mairs, and Naomi Wolf, for example), whereas others are well-known creative writers (Margaret Atwood and Linda Hogan). Pam Houston’s Out of Habit, I Start Apologizing is also annotated in this database.

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