Summary:

Christ stopped at Eboli, say the southern Italians, meaning that they are "not Christian," uncivilized, forgotten, and deprived. Physician, writer, and painter, Levi was arrested and 'exiled' from his home in Turin for opposing Fascism during the Abyssinian war (1935). This is the memoir of his life as a political prisoner under house arrest in a malaria-ridden village in Lucania (Basilicata).

The peasants immediately seek his advice for their ailments, but the two local doctors are jealous, as well as incompetent, and they have him stopped. Grinding poverty, illness, superstition, and despair work on each individual in different ways; but the peasants move with the cycle of seasons and religious festivals. The feast of the black Madonna (Chapter 12) and an unforgettable pig castration (Chapter 19) are vividly described. In the 'atmosphere permeated by divinities' (p. 151), the animal, human, and spiritual spheres combine (Chapters 8, 13, 15).

The closing chapters are a political meditation. Deprivation and isolation make the south an irrelevant and different country to the powerful middle class that runs the Fascist party. In return, Fascism finds no supporters here other than corrupt, petty officials. Levi contends that "the State" of any political stripe will never solve the problems of southern Italy until peasants are involved.

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Written by a medical historian who is also a physician, The Breast Cancer Wars narrates how breast cancer diagnostic methods and treatments have developed from the early twentieth century. More significantly, the book describes the debates and controversies that permeated this evolution and the ways in which not only clinicians and researchers, but, increasingly, women patients/activists shaped how we view, diagnose, and treat breast cancer today.

Individual chapters explore the influential (and ultimately contested) radical mastectomy procedure of William Halsted, the development of the "war" against breast cancer as a full-blown campaign developed and conducted within the public media and consciousness of the United States as well as within medical practice and research, the intertwined development of feminism and breast cancer activism, the "fall" of the radical mastectomy, and the continuing controversies surrounding mammography and genetic testing as modes of early detection and risk assessment. Lerner draws on a range of primary sources including texts from the archives of the American Cancer Society, the papers of doctors and patients, and advertisements from popular and professional magazines throughout the century.

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In a mountainous village in Spain, a man in the prime of his life has labored fifteen years constructing a museum of miniatures that no one has yet seen. Just before completing his project, the artist Gregorio has an accident and both his hands are terribly crushed by a piece of marble. There is little hope that he will ever regain complete use of his hands.

Gregorio is treated by the town's elderly physician, Dr. Xavia. The doctor narrates the story and also dreams about the contents of the mysterious museum. One day Dr. Xavia finds that the door to the museum is unlocked and has been open all along for anyone wanting to enter it. The doctor discovers that the three story building housing the museum contains a complete and perfect recreation of the village that he finds both familiar and strange.

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The narrator of this historical novel, Anna Frith, works as a servant in the household of the local minister. The story recounts the horrific events in a plague-ridden village of 17th-century England. Anna, having lost her young husband in a mining accident, loses both her sons to the plague, as well as a boarder in her household who seems to have been the first case in the village.

After these losses, she stays her grief by tending the sick in many families. Particularly after the village works out terms of quarantine with the earl, no help but food and supplies comes in from outside. She learns much from the local herbalists, two midwives whose work she carries on after their violent deaths. In this work she develops a close partnership with the pastor's wife.

The story takes us through the whole trajectory of loss, accusations, spiritual struggle, shared grief, creative adaptations, and eventually emergence from sickness and quarantine. Anna's own journey takes some surprising turns as her confidence and clarity about her own mission grow and deepen.

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This is a portrait of the head and upper body of a woman who sits leaning back against her chair. The view is at an angle so that we see primarily the left side of her face. Her left eye seems to be looking vacantly into space while her right eye appears almost closed. Her mouth is slightly open--she seems to be smiling faintly but she looks weary.

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This collection continues the work of mourning that characterized Hall's collection, Without (see this database). Hall's wife, poet Jane Kenyon, died of leukemia in 1995, at age 47. Hall, considerably older than Kenyon, was married to her for more than 20 years; they wrote their poetry at home, in the farm house that he inherited from his family. The painted bed of the book's title is their marriage bed, as well as the sick bed where Hall nursed Kenyon, and the bed in which she died.

The book is divided into four sections. The first is a six-page poem, "Kill the Day," a detailed rendering of the huge absence so present in Hall's daily activities during the month and even years following his wife's death. The poem is rich with expressions of loss and the daily effort to continue living, and, as time passes, the need to remember a fading presence. "When she died, at first the outline of absence defined / a presence that disappeared." "There was nothing to do, and nothing required doing." " . . . her pheromones diminished. / The negative space of her body dwindled as she receded . . . ."

The second section, "Deathwork," is a series of short poems about the final period before Kenyon died--during which Hall and Kenyon both knew that she was dying--the period after her death, Hall's recollections of earlier times together, the painful process of disposing of Kenyon's belongings ("Throwing the Things Away"), of letting her garden go untended, of "letting go" ("Her Garden," "The Wish"). There are many striking lines: "You think that their / dying is the worst / thing that could happen. / Then they stay dead." ("Distressed Haiku") "Now I no longer . . . call her 'you' / in a poem" ("Ardor"), and, indeed, Hall in this book refers to his dead wife as "she," and "Jane," in contrast to the direct address he used in Without.

Section 3, "Daylilies," is a long (13 page) chronicle of life in the family farm house, reflecting back to Hall's childhood and moving forward to his adult ownership of the house. This poem evokes the life cycles of nature, the march of generations, the repetition of birth and death, the farm house in New Hampshire as a microcosm of the universe, and seems to mark the beginning, in Hall, of some renewed joy in life. In the final section, "Ardor," Hall writes of re-awakened sexuality.

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This collection of poems chronicles moments of felt experience in the writer's life before and after her diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Starting with a memory of a carefree childhood lived in an era when streets were sanitized with DDT, and a poem entitled "The Body is the Repository of Memory," the poems move freely from close-ups of moments in the hospital or grieving at the waterside to wide-angle views of a life that has been and still is normal, worth living, pulsing, albeit a bit more irregularly, with creative energies.

Cumulatively the poems explore the paradox that illness (and a terminal prognosis) changes everything and also, but for the shadow it casts, changes very little. "Still," she writes in a final line, "my wild heart beats." The poems are interspersed with prose-poems that shift the focus toward the writer's reflections upon the project and circumstances of creating this "memory board"--a term borrowed from the Luba people of Africa, who bead boards that represent memories to pass on as visible legacies of lives they believe worthy of being remembered.

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This book contains 47 poems about the accidental drowning of the author's son, Andrew, when he was almost six years old. This cycle of elegiac poems begins with the author's memory of Andrew's birth, then quickly plunges into the specifics of his drowning and the details of his family's daily life and survival since. All of the poems are excellent--direct and well crafted.

Outstanding poems include "The Boxes," which recounts how the police searched the author's house when she first reported her child missing; "Wet," in which Andrew's grandfather comes to his house for a blanket with which to cover his newly-discovered body; "The Limousine" and "Thomas Birthday" which describe the funeral and the birthday party held the day after the funeral for Andrew's older brother, showing how grief and happiness collide; "The Pearl," in which the author laments all things undone and not said, yet recognizes that "The pain that has come between us / will someday be our pearl"; "Faded," which expresses a common fear: that if grief fades, so will memory of the loved one; "Communion," in which, on the first anniversary of Andrew's death, the author mimics the religious ritual as she eats peanut butter and jelly at her son's place at the table, drinks from his plastic cup: "When I finished, / I wiped my eyes with your napkin, / gave thanks, / ate the bread and drank the milk."

Other important poems are "Dust," "In Our Beds," "Again," "Foxes," "The Dance," "Your Questions" (a long poem in which she speaks to those who wonder how she can bear such loss), "To My Parents," "Driving" (a stunning poem in which the author, years after Andrew's death, thinks she sees him in a passing car), and "I Thirst." In this last and final poem, the author's lines might well be taken to heart by all caregivers: "Fear of loss / and walls of self protection / will kill me / long before a broken heart. / I pray, / let every death / break me so."

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Unmarried, fifty-four year-old Virginia Miner (Vinnie), a professor at Corinth who specializes in children's literature, is off to London for another research trip. Her work has been trashed by a Professor L. Zimmern of Columbia and she is hoping to produce an important new book about playground rhymes that will restore her reputation and confidence.

A 'pro' at long flights, her serenity is ruffled by her seatmate, a garrulous married man, Chuck Mumpson, of Tulsa who wishes to chat. She puts him off with difficulty. But the smoking and drinking Chuck is persistent. He could use help with a research trip of his own to trace his family history. Vinnie slowly becomes involved with his project, and then with him.

Meanwhile, her young colleague, Fred Turner, has left his wife, Roo, at home for his own sabbatical; they have quarreled. Soon, he consoles himself with the affections of Lady Rosemary Hadley. Quite by accident and with the encouragement of Chuck, Vinnie becomes an emissary for Fred's estranged wife in an improbable midnight walk on Hampstead Heath.

Just as she begins to think Chuck's affections have cooled, because of his silence of several days duration, she is visited by his daughter who describes his sudden death while climbing the stairs of a small town hall. When her publisher patronizes his memory, she realizes with surprise that he loved her and she loved him. She returns to her life in Corinth, solitary and unloved, but altered for having loved and been loved.

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This is an excellent review of the authors' choices of the ten greatest medical discoveries. They arrived at the ten selected after narrowing five thousand or more possibilities down to one hundred and then finally down to ten based on these three components in the field of medicine: 1) structure and function of the human body, 2) diagnosis of medical conditions and 3) treatment of such maladies. Finally the ten selected were approved by four avid and informed physician collectors of rare and important medical publications.

Chronologically, the anatomical observations of Vesalius come first with his publication of the Fabrica in 1543. Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood is considered the single most important discovery. Leeuwenhoek gets credit as the founder of bacteriology, but Koch and Pasteur are included in a discussion of this discovery. Jenner gets his just recognition for introducing vaccination and Roentgen for discovering the X-ray beam.

Crawford Long is recognized for the initial use of surgical anesthesia and Fleming for the discovery of penicillin. More unlikely choices are Ross Harrison for tissue culture, Anichkov for the relation of cholesterol to atherosclerosis and Wilkins, rather than Watson and Crick, for the DNA story.

Each chapter describes not only the discovery but also tells the life stories of the chosen "discoverers" and others who contributed to extension and usefulness of the discoveries. The authors conclude that it is not genius so much as curiosity and the ability to conduct methodological investigations that distinguish these men.

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