A Good Time to Be Born

By Perri Klass,

Book cover of A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future

Book description

Only one hundred years ago, even in the world's wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers-of diarrhea, diphtheria and measles, of scarlet fever and meningitis. Culture was shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, poets and writers wrote about and lamented them. Not even the high and mighty…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A Good Time to Be Born as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I met Perri Klass several times back in the 1990s, and I was struck by how well she managed to be a mother to young children, a full-time pediatrician, and an author.

That connection inspired me to buy this book, but what started as a merely curious read soon turned into a gripping one. This is a solid work of historical scholarship, but Klass expertly turns the topic into a story that is variously shocking, moving, alarming, and uplifting—while deftly inserting occasional moments from her own experiences as a doctor.

I’m very far from being an expert on this topic,…

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Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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