Summary:

First published in 1971 and subtitled, The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, the novel is a satire of the limits of technology, the medicalization of the human spirit, and the trivializing tendencies of 20th century medical science. Dr. Tom More is an "impaired" psychiatrist: an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a half-hearted clinician. He develops the lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit with which he plans to cure humankind’s spiritual illnesses. Living daily with the contempt of his colleagues, he tries to prove himself and runs into all kinds of mischief, allowing the author to spoof the ills of medicine as it is practiced today.

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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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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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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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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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This film documents the quiet devastation of Alzheimer's disease from a daughter's perspective. Using home movie clips and up-close footage of conversations with her 84 year old mother (Doris Hoffmann), a skilled film maker/daughter (Deborah Hoffmann) provides a sustained and poignant documentary of Alzheimer's devastating ability to transform a vibrant and intelligent woman's life.

Interspersed with conversations that reveal her mother's disoriented recollections of the past and the glitches and confusion of daily life routines, home movies and other artifacts provide a contrasting impression of this woman's family and life then and now. Captions and clever title cards are used to organize events and to add gentle humor.

Frances Reid, the camera woman, is mentioned from time to time as someone known to both Deborah and Doris; eventually and without special emphasis, we learn that Frances and Deborah have a lesbian relationship and how Doris adjusted to the couple over the years.

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The speaker in this short poem is a physician whose father's "castrated body" is "crooked in prostatic pain." From the family home in Tennessee, the dying man's wife provides daily phone reports to the son about her husband's deteriorating condition. The speaker's mind swirls with conflicting feelings: he thinks about "Dr. Death," whose efforts he has just come to understand; he thinks about the suffering experienced by his father and his mother's "terminal voice"; and he considers "how many of those little pain killers it might take."

Similarly, recollection of the Hippocratic vows intrudes to counsel against the kind of assistance his filial nature wants to provide. The internal debate about choices directs readers back to the title's imperative, "let's talk about it," suggesting, I believe, the need for social and professional discourse about quality of life, futility, and physician-assisted-suicide.

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Oscar, the narrator of this fresh fictional gem, is ten years old. Because his form of leukemia has not responded to treatment, he has been living in a French hospital for a very long time. His parents, who bring him gifts and surely love him, are uncomfortable during their infrequent visits. Dr. Dusseldorf and the nurses are kind, but indirect and distant in their communications with him. Because no one talks to him about his illness or what is likely to happen, he feels isolated, alone, and miserable.

When Mamie-Rose, a very elderly hospital "pink lady" (hospital volunteer) with an exotic past, enters Oscar's life, she brings honesty, warmth, and comfort to the lost child known as Bald Egg. Guided by this incredible person--a blunt-spoken, irreverent woman who touches him, kisses him, and tells him wondrous stories of her wrestling feats--the boy grows stronger. Who wouldn't under the influence of the Strangler of Languedoc?

Of course Oscar is going to die. In addition to her generous companionship and her introductions of him to other children in the hospital, Mamie-Rose suggests letters to God as a way of feeling less lonely. "So God, on the occasion of this first letter I've shown you a little of what my life in the hospital is like here, where they now see me as an obstacle to medicine, and I'd like to ask you for clarification on one point: Am I going to get better? Just answer yes or no. It's not very complicated. Yes or no. All you have to do is cross out the wrong answer. More tomorrow, kisses. P.S. I don't have your address: what do I do" (65).

With Mamie-Rose treating him like a real kid, "move your but . . . we're not ambling along like snails" and Oscar scripting very candid letters to God, the first-person story about loneliness, love, and compassion is presented with spirited imagination. Oscar's story is quite extraordinary--and unforgettable.

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The title refers to a Veteran’s Administration hospital regulation concerning the withholding of full medical benefits if an ailment is not specifically related to military service. In an oftentimes comic battle between the forces of good--physicians and vulnerable patients--and those of evil--the administrators and their minions--the story has currency and direct appeal to viewers.

The Darth-Vader-like administrators are self-serving, inhumane bureaucrats with emotions that run the gamut "from A to B" (Dorothy Parker). Physicians, especially the character played by Ray Liotta, but also his dedicated colleagues, are imaginative and non-rule abiding in their central concerns: the patients. They listen to stories and sympathize; in addition, they turf, lie, steal, and do whatever is necessary to protect, serve, and treat their patients. When the government denies a heart bypass, for example, the docs schedule prostate surgery for the official record and do, instead, the needed heart surgery.

At times, it’s as if the Marx Brothers or the Keystone Cops have donned white coats to sneak around the hospital with patient-centered antics. In the absurd bureaucracy, viewers, perforce, must cheer enthusiastically for the merry band of renegade docs.

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The title recalls Clotho, the Fate charged with spinning the thread of life which would someday be clipped by her sister, Atropos. The two-stanza poem describes the circumstances of illness within a hospital setting. In stanza one, with a patient unable to urinate on his own, the poet employs desert images to suggest the dryness felt by the incapacitated sufferer ("throat-filling Gobi," "dry as Arabia," sunburnt cage of bone," "shekel," "rugs," "camel," etc.).

Stanza two begins with the riddle of the sphinx, another reiteration of desert imagery, but moves quickly to modern medical intervention by substituting the cane, the third leg of the elderly, with an IV pole for liquid sustenance and the "snake-handlers fist of catheters," ridding the body of its wastes. Clotho's role has been usurped by technology's miracles, and an appeal is made for the "kind, withdrawn face trained in the arts of love."

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