Showing 91 - 100 of 518 annotations tagged with the keyword "Women's Health"

The Blood Spilt

Larsson, Asa

Last Updated: Sep-01-2010
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Attorney Rebecka Martinsson returns to her northern Swedish home to recover from a traumatic experience. She becomes involved in the investigation of the murder of Mildred, a woman priest who was found hanging from a beam in her own church. The investigating police office, Anna Maria Mella, meets opposition, especially from the local organization of hunters, who clearly resented Mildred for having offered shelter on the church lands to a stray wolf. 

It is clear that Nalle, a large, mentally challenged boy, was close to the dead priest, and that his single parent father Lars-Gunnar did not appreciate their friendship. Nalle begins to trust Rebecka, as he trusted Mildred, and he appears to know something. But Anna Maria learns that Mildred had another enemy in her jealous, male colleague; moreover, some of the women in town resented her freedoms.

The many historical and personal ways in which the members of this isolated community are entwined becomes part of the investigation, but before it is complete Mella is confronted with two more murders and two suicides.

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Summary:

Art. Rage.Us. Is a powerful collection of works by more than 70 artists and writers with breast cancer whose creative impulse was to transform their illness into an artistic form not only as part of their own healing but also for others to learn from their experiences. The expressions are varied, from poetry recording the experience of breast imaging, breast reconstruction, or chemotherapy; to self-portraits after mastectomy; to a collage of conflicting research reports and alternative therapies; to short autobiographical prose pieces.

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Annotated by:
Clark, Stephanie Brown

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Criticism

Summary:

Co-authored by a Professor of English Literature and her physician husband, a Professor of Medicine, this is a readable interdisciplinary commentary on fourteen operas (19th and 20th century) in which particular diseases are represented, including mostly epidemic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis, cholera, and AIDS. The analysis of each opera combines solid literary analysis of language and metaphors with fascinating historical information on the contemporaneous medical understandings of the diseases, and a sophisticated discussion of the social, sexual and cultural representations of these diseases.

The most persuasive chapters include "The Tubercular Heroine" in La Boheme, and La Traviata; "Syphilis, Suffering and Social Order" in Parsifal; "The Pox Revisited" in 20th century operas, Lulu and Rake’s Progress; the final chapter, "Life-and-Death Passion" compares theatrical representations of AIDS in Angels in America (see annotation) with cholera, TB, and syphilis.

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The Odds of Recovery

Friedrich, Su

Last Updated: Jun-01-2010
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

This is an imaginative documentary film by director-producer Su Friedrich, of her experiences with health problems, physicians, the health-care system, and how these affected her relationship with her female partner over a period of more than two decades. The narrator-subject takes us through her numerous surgeries, hormonal (prolactin) imbalance, and her growing disenchantment with the traditional health-care system.

She films herself: getting dressed into the "humiliating" paper garb prior to being examined by her physician; in exchanges with her various physicians; reading from medical texts and self-help books as she tries to understand her condition(s); taking t'ai chi classes and preparing herbal potions; gardening and doing needle work. As the film ends, she is grappling with the prospect of menopause, but she feels that she has taken charge of her body and of her own care, that she tends herself as she tends her garden.

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Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Driving-school instructor Marco (Marcello Mastroianni) feels unwell, especially in the mornings; his stomach swells, and he develops emotional lability. His wife, the hairdresser Irène (Catherine Deneuve), is sympathetic – but only to a point--and insists he seek help.

The woman doctor – a suave smoker--diagnoses pregnancy, and refers him to a specialist. At first skeptical, the specialist is soon convinced that a man can  indeed have a baby, and the two doctors make news holding scientific conferences on the world’s first pregnant man, “the most important event since man walked on the moon.”

Meanwhile Marco becomes a sensation – his gestational condition spawns a new line of clothing, new trends in masculine behaviour, and lucrative celebrity endorsements. Irène is concerned about her business and slightly irritated by the attention given her husband, as the advent of a baby deflects her plans.

Suddenly the bubble bursts. Marco turns out not to be pregnant after all. The special attention vanishes overnight, but the couple has grown closer and greets the private news that Irène is expecting with great joy.

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Summary:

Some 40 years after a ceasefire that ended the Cylon wars, the 12 human colonies across the galaxy have been lulled into a state of calm complacence.  This is abruptly interrupted by a Cylon attack that annihilates billions of humans, leaving only 50,000 survivors in a small fleet of ships, led by the one remaining ship from the Colonial Fleet, the Battlestar Galactica.  Fleeing the Cylons, they set out to find the legendary 13th Colony: Earth.

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Push

Sapphire

Last Updated: Mar-22-2010
Annotated by:
Wear, Delese

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Narrated by Precious Jones, a 16-year-old African-American girl pregnant for the second time with her father's child, Push is a novel tracing her movement from anger, illiteracy, resignation, and self-contempt to some version of hope. The voice of Precious, raw and almost unintelligible at the beginning of the story, is changed when a courageous African-American teacher relentlessly inspires Precious, along with several other seemingly doomed teenagers, to learn to read, to discover what and how they feel, and to put it all down in a diary. The novel ends with everything uncertain and unfinished, but with a young woman changed by the appearance of self-respect.

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Annotated by:
Wear, Delese

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Wasted is the story of a young woman, now in her early twenties, that recounts her fourteen years spent "in the hell of eating disorders," having been bulimic by the age of nine, anorexic at fifteen. The book is also a chronicle of her six hospitalizations, one institutionalization, relentless therapy, the back and forth between being "well" then "sick" then "well" then "sicker." The author dismisses most common notions of persons with eating disorders, instead revealing a complex set of causes, some familial, some cultural, some wedded to her own personality.

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Annotated by:
Wear, Delese

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Prozac Nation is Wurtzel's memoir of her depression, which she traces from the age of 11 to her senior year in college in chapters marking different phases or manifestations of her illness. The book situates her illness squarely within her family dynamics where she found herself the "battlefield on which [her] parents' differences were fought," and describes in excruciating detail her inner life that at any given time was marked with a "free-flowing messy id" to nihilism, numbness, rage, and fear, ultimately leading to a suicide attempt. The last few chapters chronicle her slow "recovery," due to her conflicted relationship with psychopharmacology and an extraordinary psychiatrist.

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Summary:

This edited anthology, which includes poems, essays, short stories, and other creative forms (e.g., a radio diary, a letter to a social service agency), is organized into sections that include Body and Self, Diagnosis and Treatment, Womanhood, Family Life and Caregiving, Professional Life and Illness, and Advocacy. Most works found their way into this collection through a call for submissions, although a few selections are well known, such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz's "So You're Going to Have a New Body !," or an excerpt from Rachel Naomi Remen's Kitchen Table Wisdom (see annotations). In addition, the anthology also includes essays by scholars such as Arthur W. Frank and Rita Charon, who theorize gendered illness narratives.

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