Summary:

Retired professor Nariman Vakeel, suffering at 79 from Parkinson’s disease and a broken ankle that won’t heal, is more or less cast out of his home by his stepchildren to be cared for by his married daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad, and their two sons. The novel is a portrait of family life and the strife among siblings amidst moments of grace when an aging parent requires care; it is also a rich account of life in Bombay’s Parsi community in the mid-1990s.

View full annotation

Summary:

Perhaps the strongest piece in Jhumpa Lahiri's collection Unaccustomed Earth "Only Goodness" is the story of an American Bengali family and their alcoholic son Rahul. He takes his first drink in high school when he visits his sister Sudha at college. By the time he is dismissed from college several years later, he is an alcoholic who has devastated his parents and destroyed their high expectations for him. The once precocious and promising Rahul returns to live in his parents' home and finds work in a laundromat. Other disappointments and fractures to their relationship occur as he becomes further estranged from them. Finally serious about his recovery, he sends a postcard to Sudha, now living in London with her British husband and their baby, and asks to visit them. The visit goes very well until Rahul gets drunk while babysitting his infant nephew and leaves him alone in the bathtub as he is passed out in bed. Sudha, unable to make excuses for him, asks him to leave their home the following morning.

View full annotation

Summary:

Dr. Paul Brand, who grew up son of English missionaries to South India, achieved world renown for his research on leprosy and related research on the dynamics of pain. This book, one of several of his reflections on physiology, combines autobiography, stories of research, and reflections on pain and pain management. The three topics roughly correspond to three discrete sections.

It opens with a story of the early death of a child with a rare neurological dysfunction that made her insensitive to pain. Brand's long work with victims of leprosy in India and then in Carville, Louisiana, gave him wide exposure to the consequences of life without adequate pain. Having spent 27 years in India, 25 years in England, and 27 years in the U.S. before writing this retrospective, many of his reflections include observations about cultural variables in perception of pain, how pain is communicated and managed, and how people deal philosophically with the problem of pain.

View full annotation

Summary:

The protagonist, Anderson, has a skin cancer growing dangerously close to one of his tear ducts. An aging "idler and playboy," he has spent too many years in the sun (67). Anderson consults and promptly becomes infatuated with his facial plastic surgeon, Dr. Kim, "who turned out to be a woman, a surprisingly young Korean-American who even in her baggy lab coat evinced considerable loveliness" (67). Anderson is fascinated with Dr. Kim's body, her visible pregnancy, her way of moving and speaking, and her face. He enjoys the "bliss of secure helplessness" of the surgery itself, performed by Dr. Kim and two female nurses who "rotate[]" around him conversing as they work (67).

While successful, the surgery leaves a small bump on his face that Anderson asks Dr. Kim to correct surgically. The second surgery achieved, Anderson returns a third time for the much more ambitious project of tucking his somewhat saggy eyelids. His goal, however, is not just to tighten slack skin but to make his lids look like Dr. Kim's, "with an epicanthus" (69). The six-hour surgery is both successful and satisfying to Anderson--until he sees a photo of Dr. Kim's husband.

View full annotation

Summary:

Leprosy looms large in this story about transformation and loss set in post World War II Japan. A nineteen-year-old pearl diver notices a numb red spot on her forearm. Later on, another blemish appears on her lower back. These two lesions are manifestations of a mild case of leprosy. Her infection will be arrested by medication and never get any worse. The girl is forcibly transported to the Nagashima Leprosarium, an island where she will spend the rest of her life except for a few brief excursions and one extended "escape" at the age of sixty-four.

Despite the introduction of new and effective drugs--Promin (sulphone) and dapsone--authorities still fear allowing the leprous patients to return to society. Inhabitants of the sanatorium are admonished on arrival that their past is erased. Each individual must begin a new life and select a new name. The protagonist chooses the moniker Miss Fuji. She is a kind and sensitive young woman who eventually functions as a nurse and caregiver for the other patients incarcerated in the sanatorium. As a punishment, Miss Fuji is required to attend abortions and dispose of the dead fetuses.

As the decades pass, conditions on the island improve. The number of residents with leprosy still living there dwindles from about two thousand people to six hundred. Even a bridge connecting Nagashima to the mainland is constructed. It no longer matters. Emotional and psychological barriers remain. When Miss Fuji has an opportunity to create a new life for herself away from the sanatorium, she still returns to the place and the people that have been her home and family for so many years.

View full annotation

Summary:

Worlds Apart is a set of four documentary videos designed to stimulate thought and discussion about the effects of culture on communication and medical decision-making. Each video encapsulates the story of a real patient and his or her interactions with physicians and family.

The four videos are: (1) Kochi Story--an Afghan man, diagnosed with stomach cancer, decides about chemotherapy amidst miscommunication due to translation issues and religious convictions; (2) Chitsena Story--the mother of a four-year-old girl from Laos is caught between physicians who tell her that her daughter needs surgery to correct an atrial septal defect, and her mother who upholds the traditional Khmu beliefs that scars, including surgical scars, are injurious to a person in future lives; (3) Phillips Story--an African-American man on dialysis discusses the prejudices against black people in the health care system, particularly the decreased chances for receiving a renal transplant; (4) Mercado Story--a 60-year-old Puerto Rican woman who lives in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, explains the complex social situation which affects her ability to take care of her chronic health problems, such as diabetes and hypertension.

The films depict the patients and families in various settings--in doctors' offices, at other health care facilities, at home or work, during religious ceremonies. Phillips Story is different in that only the patient speaks during the film--in the other three stories we hear family members, translators, and physicians. The pitfalls of translation by a family member or friend are discussed, as well as the need for the physician to elicit information from patients about the social contexts that may affect their health and decisions.

For example, Mr. Kochi's religious beliefs contravene the use of continuous infusion chemotherapy, but not other regimens--this distinction is not elucidated for many months. Hence cultural competency in health care requires that the provider not assume reasons for patients' behaviors and decisions but rather emphasizes communication to understand the particulars of the situation.

View full annotation

Summary:

A memoir of raising a daughter with autism and an anthropological and historical investigation into autism around the world, Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism draws upon Grinker's own experiences, those of families of children with autism in the United States, Korea, India and South Africa, and a variety of experts and caregivers.  Putting the story of autism into a historical, anthropological, and personal context, the book deals with hot-button topics - the question of an autism epidemic, of etiology, of treatments - with a careful, patient approach.

View full annotation

Summary:

Not quite the familiar home-for-the-holidays genre of a dysfunctional family, this one has a twist.   April is a late-teen "problem" daughter who has run away to New York City where she lives with her boyfriend, Bobby (Derek Luke).  April, played by a grungy, pigtailed, and probably tattooed Katie Holmes, has invited her parents, siblings, and grandmother to Thanksgiving dinner.  This reunion, we gather, is the first since April left home.  The family is coming to her lower East Side tenement, a situation that bristles with possibilities.  

Moving back and forth from April's low rent apartment to tension in the crowded car as it moves from a scenic suburb to cityscape, viewers are able to watch both April's unskilled efforts as she struggles with the slippery turkey, a can of cranberry sauce, crepe paper decorations, a broken oven, etc. and an inexplicable drama slowly unfolding in the crowded car.  In spite of crisis situations in both settings, the separate family members do get together for a dinner that neither could have planned. 

View full annotation

Summary:

Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a Tokyo City Hall bureaucrat near retirement, discovers he is dying of stomach cancer. Reflecting on his life, he finds that it has been empty, that he has not really lived. He devotes the time he has left to modestly exploring the possibilities of living. In a final effort to give his life meaning, he forces a reluctant bureaucracy to turn a badly drained neighborhood area into a park for children.

View full annotation

Summary:

Thirteen-year-old Matilda lives on a south Pacific island with copper mines. Rebels and other more official warriors are tearing the place apart. A blockade has made resources scarce and communication impossible; fathers are absent at distant work. Along with everything else, the local school collapses. 

Mr. Watts, the only island white man, offers to take over the education of the children, but he has no experience, few materials and just one book: his treasured copy of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. He begins reading a few pages every day. Captivated by the story, the children repeat it to their mothers when they go home each night.  

Matilda believes that she loves Mr. Dickens more than anyone else and she is both bemused and irritated by her stern mother's suspicion of the strange, possibly godless, white man and her feigned disinterest in Pip. Parents are invited to the school to pass on their own expectations about learning. Students accept these moments with pride and embarrassment.

The political chaos deepens, homes are destroyed, and the book vanishes. But Watts (nicknamed Mr. Pip) turns the loss to advantage by helping the students to recover fragments in a lengthy effort of collective recollection.

The ever menacing warriors return. Little more than frightened children in an incomprehensible conflict, they indulge in senseless brutality and killing. With courage absorbed from her mother, Matilda escapes, rediscovers her father, and finds a scholarly future—a life she embraces because of Mr. Dickens and Mr. Pip.

View full annotation