Summary:

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the second in a planned series of seven books (see annotation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for an introductory summary). Harry's summer with the Dursley family is initially more pleasant because the Dursleys are afraid of Harry's wizard powers and do not realize that he is forbidden to use magic outside of school. However, after a magic spell is performed by a visiting, self-flagellating house-elf, Dobby, Uncle Vernon is informed of this school rule and imprisons Harry in his bedroom.

With this maneuver and others, Dobby tries to not only warn Harry that his life is in danger but also prevent Harry from returning to Hogwarts. Barred and sealed in his room, Harry is forced to live off meager portions of soup, which he shares with his owl, Hedwig, until he is rescued by several of the Weasley boys.

Though Harry (now age 12) and Ron miss the train to Hogwarts, they manage to arrive, meet the Whomping Willow (a violent magical tree that beats anything near it), and are nearly expelled by the strict but kind-hearted Transfiguration Professor Minerva McGonagall, head of Gryffindor House. Many of the students, teachers, assorted creatures and magical items (e.g., the invisibility cloak) return in this book, and again a dangerous adventure features Harry, Ron, and their brainy friend, Hermione.

Ron's younger sister, Ginny, is now an impressionable Gryffindor first year student. The adventure leads Harry to the past, a young but evil Voldemort, and more encounters with snakes, Snape, spiders, the Malfoys, and Moaning Myrtle, the ghost of the girls' bathroom.

Illness, particularly an altered, petrified state, plays a prominent role in this book, requiring the healing powers of Madame Pomfrey and the maturing of mandrakes nurtured by Herbology Professor Sprout. Famed author and narcissist Gilderoy Lockhart, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, muffs the healing of Harry's broken arm, a Quidditch injury, and Harry must go to Madame Pomfrey in the hospital wing for the proper, though painful treatment. Madame Pomfrey is also helpful with a Polyjuice potion gone awry--the potion is supposed to transform the drinker into another person for an hour.

Fawkes, Dumbledore's phoenix, whose flaming death and rebirth is witnessed by Harry, helps in numerous ways, including the healing powers of its tears. But perhaps, as in the first book, Dumbledore's concern and wisdom are most soothing for Harry. Harry, worried about his strange capabilities that link him with Voldemort, such as their shared ability to talk with snakes (Parseltongue), and that the Sorting hat considered placing Harry in Slytherin House and only put him in Gryffindor due to Harry's request, is reassured by Dumbledore that Gryffindor was the right choice: "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." (p 333)

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Summary:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third of a planned series of seven books (see annotation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for an introductory summary). Harry, forced to suffer another summer with the Dursleys, has just turned thirteen. When Uncle Vernon's sister arrives and proceeds to abuse Harry, he rebels, runs away with his heavy school trunk and is picked up by the Knight Bus, a wizard transportation vehicle. Meanwhile, the nine-member Weasley family, usually short of money, have won a wizard lottery and are using the money to visit the eldest son, Bill, in Egypt.

Sirius Black, whose motorcycle was featured in the first chapter of the first book, has escaped Azkaban and the prison guards known as Dementors. Sirius was imprisoned just after the death of Harry's parents when he was caught at the scene of another horrendous crime. Special precautions for Harry's safety are arranged by Dumbledore and the Ministry of Magic, led by Cornelius Fudge. When Harry meets a Dementor on the train to Hogwarts, he blacks out as he feels a rush of coldness, a complete lack of happiness or future, and relives his worst memories. Remus Lupin, the mysterious, gentle and periodically ill Defense of the Dark Arts Professor, provides the antidote: chocolate.

Thus begins Harry's third year at Hogwarts. Hermione signs up for an especially busy, seemingly impossible, schedule of classes. Ron's old pet rat, Scabbers, takes a turn for the worse, despite Ron's attention and care. The invisibility cloak again proves useful, as does a magical map. Hagrid, cleared of the cloud that had been hanging over him since his school days, is promoted to teacher: Care of Magical Creatures. However, an injury to Draco Malfoy by Buckbeak the hippogriff (a flying bird-horse) during the first class leads to another investigation.

Bizarre characters, such as the doom-predicting Divination teacher, Sibyll Trelawney, exciting Quidditch matches with a new broomstick for Harry, more run-ins with Snape, and a peek at Hogsmeade, an all magic village, round out the story. Ron, Hermione, and Harry's dangerous adventure leads to the exposure of Sirius Black, the truth of his connection to Harry's parents, and new discoveries for Harry about his father. Our heroes also discover who is the servant to Voldemort, the Dark Lord.

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One morning, while pondering the stress of his latest assignment at his uninspiring job, the narrator of Kangaroo Notebook feels an itching on his leg that seems to indicate an unusual hair loss. The next morning he wakes to discover that he is sprouting small radishes on his shins. After battling to be seen in his local medical clinic, he enters a hospital, where a physician prescribes hot-spring therapy in Hell Valley.

Hooked to a penile catheter and an IV bottle, the narrator begins a harrowing journey on his hospital bed through the underworld that seems to lie beneath the city streets. Here, he seeks health not so much as he seeks simple explanations for what is happening to him and the strange people he meets: abusive ferreymen, waiflike child demons, vampire nurses, a chiropractor who runs a karate school and works a sideline as a euthanist.

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In this collection of new poems Goedicke presents us with a stark, frequently harsh, and uncompromising perspective on the relentless march of love and life toward death. Nature's rhythms--of the sea, the seasons, organic growth and decay--are both metaphor and reality as the poet takes note of changes in her mate and in their relationship against a backdrop of snow, night, natural and man-made disasters, and "lint and cat fur" ("What the Dust Does").

The book is dedicated to "Leonard," "for we who are one body." Many of the poems concern a long, deep, relationship, now become turbulent because of change: "Thirty years . . . now this // after hours of bitter contention / because nothing's right / anymore" ("The Things I May Not Say"). Two people who have been so close now face the inevitable but they are not fading happily into the sunset: "I know you'd mother me / forever, and I you, /but here, at the end of everything / we know // even the kindest / words scrape against each other like seashells" ("What Holds Us Together").

Yet there are times of pleasure and tranquillity: "everything we do, even the egg / sandwiches we eat stick to the ribs / like caviar: / because you make me laugh" ("Old Hands"). "For last night, in your faded photograph album of a voice, / you sang us both to sleep" ("Alma de Casa"). And where there is deterioration, there is also devotion: "The shell around us is cracked / and you're in my arms, shaking. Over the crumbling / excavations beneath us. Where I won't, / I will not drop you" ("The Ground Beneath Us"). "Children are coming to grief, / cars burning in the streets. / In the brightest light of all, / I would like to catch him when he falls" ("The Brightest Light").

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The purpose of this collection of essays written by teachers of literature and medicine is to serve as a guide for those who are preparing courses or seminars in the field. The collection is divided into four sections, each one approaching the theory and pedagogy of the discipline in a different way: one section is made up of model courses; a second views the subject matter from the standpoint of individual texts, authors, or genres; the third takes a broader look at some effects of literature on the practice of medicine and/or nursing and the role illness and medicine have played in the creation of literature; the fourth is a collection of resources available in the field. There is blurring of some of the boundaries of the sections, but read in the whole, the collection provides a good sense of the way medicine and literature is being taught in this country at this time.

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In this complex poetry collection (divided into three sections, "Body," "Home," and "World"), the author moves from the specifics of the individual diseased or dying body to the more universal realm of suffering and politics. Not so much a poet of narratives as a conjurer of images, Levin writes from changing points of view: first as a man, then as a woman; as a surgeon, then a patient.

Poet Louise Glück's introduction states that the book's power "derives from ambiguity: the raised scalpel-healing that looks like assault," and Levin's raw imagery is indeed both challenging and celebratory. In the opening poem, "Lenin's Bath," we watch with Dr. Sergei Debov as Lenin's corpse is tenderly submerged in a vat of embalming fluid. Debov imagines the germs that crawl along the cadaver "seeking a way in."

In the next poem, "Eyeless Baby," the reader becomes a caregiver searching a deformed infant's face that is nothing but a single nostril and a cleft palate. In "Bathhouse, 1980," we see (as the blind baby cannot) through a young homosexual man's eyes both the human longing for passion and the viral "scourge" that, again, seeks entrance. The angels that gather in the bathhouse's corner become nurses ("The Nurse") who swarm like moths over a hospitalized patient's body.

This interweaving of place and point of view continues throughout, creating a magical, disturbing world in which a reader can be both body ("The Baby on the Table") and healer ("In the Surgical Theatre"). Other powerful poems include "Personal History," "The Beautiful Names" (in which a young boy learns to name the sexual organs and so discovers their beauty), and "Witness."

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Ten-year-old Becky Zaslow is diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) just before her class talent show. The sudden changes in her world include a hospital roommate whose experience with chemotherapy has left her rude and embittered; a lively nurse who levels with her; and parents who react strongly and differently to her illness. Even though the treatments leave her bald and weakened, she shows up at the talent show just before her bone marrow transplant, to the acclaim of all but one of her classmates.

A key coping strategy for Becky is an increasingly vivid fantasy life in which she finds friends among a herd of zebras and one monkey. Holding her stuffed zebra, she "travels" to Africa to escape the pain and trauma of treatments. Gradually she loses ground; as her body gives way, her mind and spirit move increasingly to the other world where an old zebra offers wisdom and help for the crossing she is about to make. She dies, leaving behind a journal that becomes her younger brother's incentive to learn to read, a task he has been resisting.

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Sometime in the 1970s, the historian Lou is sent by her Institute to research the life of a nineteenth-century colonel on the island he once owned in the middle of a wide river in northern Ontario. A magnificent house remains with a shack behind where a huge male bear is chained.

At first Lou is afraid of the bear, but gradually she feels sorry for it, allows it into the house, and eventually into her bed. The experience leads her to reevaluate her life, her friendships, and her loves. The summer passes and a wistful Lou returns to the city, and the indifferent bear, to his captivity.

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This is a scholarly book and the author, who is an exceptionally good writer, has gone to great lengths to search out original source material, much of which has not been examined by previous authors. Instead of retelling Elizabeth Blackwell's story she relates in some detail that of Sarah Adamson Dolley, another important pioneer woman physician who was the third woman medical graduate in America. She also was one of the eight founding members of the earliest society of women physicians in the United States.

The book also details the period in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds which was referred to as "maternalist medicine," when women began to pursue their careers in public health. After being "sidelined" in the first half of this century, the numbers of women physicians began to slowly increase, greatly aided by the new women's movement and the equal opportunity era.

Dr. More does an excellent job of bringing together the history of women physicians with the history of medicine from 1850 until the present. Her descriptions of women physicians' lives and problems are evenly presented and make interesting reading. The evolution of medical education in general is also well described. Her conclusion is not unexpected--that the greatest obstacle facing women practitioners today is the need to accommodate the demands of childbearing and child rearing with their professional lives.

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In the title story of this collection, "Survival Rates," a husband's thyroid cancer appears to be a greater threat to his marriage than it does to his health. The young girl who survives an accident in "Jumping" ends up a casualty anyway. In "Howard Johnson's House," a plastic surgeon repairs a nine year old girl's nose after it is severely damaged by a dog bite. Even before the injury, however, the child's nose was hideous. When the surgeon gives her a cosmetically perfect nose, the girl's mother is not merely disappointed but outraged. Two girls must adapt to life after colon surgery in "Krista Had a Treble Clef Rose."

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