99 books like Fighting for Life

Every book by Annemarie Mol is good but The Logic of Care is simply the best book on what medicine should be. It is short, deceptively simple but leaves no hiding places. Everyone will be able to understand it in the same way from a teenager up through a Professor of Medicine to a Minister for Health but don’t expect any Ministers to admit to reading it any time soon. Mol outlines a relationship-based rather than technology-based medicine. How do we ensure medical techniques help us to live the lives we want to live rather than force us to live lives that suit the companies that make the technologies want us to live? How do we care for people rather than service them?

Modern medicine has dramatically extended life expectancies. But as our life spans extend, our fear of death grows. As our hope of living a long life and seeing our children survive grew, we became more rather than less anxious about losing out. We might have expected the opposite. Aries vividly illustrates how people viewed death as a part of life before the nineteenth century and how they reconciled themselves to it. He picks out 1886 as the point where Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Illych recognized that medical advances were creating anxiety rather than hope. This book may make you less fearful of death. It will ask you whether you can now achieve serenity half as well as those before us did and whether medicine is bad for our sanity? 

Most of us figure doing evil, even if good results, is not ethical but without this, there would be no medicine. Martin Pernick covers the discovery of anesthesia and the ethical dilemmas this new ability to save lives by poisoning people posed. Anesthesia is a technique and techniques are amoral. How do we ensure they enhance rather than diminish us? How do we avoid seduction into a sleep during which we can be cosmetically enhanced? Is there a limit to how many drugs we give children to manage their behaviour – just because we can? Treating and stopping are not the same as not treating. Pernick doesn’t tell us how to manage this calculus, but he makes us aware modern life involves more of a calculus than we might have thought.   

AIDS was the pandemic before Covid. Unlike Covid, it mobilized people to take the science and efforts to find a cure into their own hands – especially people on the fringes of society. Nothing like this had ever happened before. It appeared to mark a watershed where medicine would become a servant of the people rather than people being enslaved to its commercial priorities. Sadly this is not how things worked out. The discovery of Triple Therapy was a high point of modern medicine but we have gone downhill since then with few if any drugs saving lives the way Triple Therapy did. Impure Science shows you vividly what we are up against.

I once heard Elizabeth Brundage talk about how she sees the thriller plotline as something to attach larger ideas to. That made so much sense to me. It was hard for me to choose which of her books to recommend, but I decided on The Doctor’s Wife because it has a new resonance with the current debate around reproductive rights. There are two characters in this book who are on opposite sides of the abortion debate. Brundage’s characters can do monstrous things but they are not monsters; they are complex, hurt, angry, loving, and so recognizably human.

This book is the third installment in the The Rev. Clare Fergusson & Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries.

This series features a small town, upstate New York police chief (Van Alstyne) and an Episcopal priest (Fergusson). When the series starts Van Alstyne is happily married, and Fergusson is new to her church.

By this book, it’s clear that the cop and the priest are attracted to each other. There’s this single scene when they’re driving in his pickup as they gather clues to solve the murder. They look at each other and it’s one hundred percent clear that not only do they have an attraction that can’t be denied.

Also they’re going to have to break their vows, his to marriage, and hers to the priesthood.

If you read one biography/memoir of a Gilded Age criminal, make it this one. It tells the story (often in his own words) of the celebrated pickpocket George Appo, an odd little half-Chinese, half-Irish, one-eyed fellow who could make $800 in a few days when most working men made less than that in a year. Appo would rivet New Yorkers when he testified about his second career as a “green goods” con man, working to swindle gullible out-of-towners who came to buy purported counterfeit money at a discount, only to discover that there was nothing but sawdust inside the packages they carried away. Appo refused to name names, though, as he was a self-described “good fellow.”  

It takes courage to name your book that. Especially in the 90s before self-publishing became a thing. Which did not stop its renegade author from selling xeroxed copies of it in the streets.

Its titular protagonist, who is jobless and homeless after his girlfriend kicks him out, is based on the author himself. He struggles with feelings of inadequacy and a sense of purposelessness. He works odd jobs, writes an occasional poem, meets eccentric strangers, engages in substance abuse, and gets into sticky situations on account of his bad decisions.

While I don’t know about you, I can strongly relate to the character. The book's dark humor is also enough to make it one of my favorites.

Maybe not a hidden gem (it was a Good Morning America Buzz Pick), but this one surely should be in everyone’s book bag.

New York City’s the bustling backdrop of this wildly witty novel about two adult daughters and their meddling advice columnist mother. Clementine struggles with working and bringing up her six-year-old boy, and her one comfort is the beautiful Queens home she thought she owned—right up until she discovers her husband has mortgaged their house for his failing start-up.

Sister Barb has a cheating girlfriend, and advice columnist mom has issues of her own! Can Wendy swoop in to save the day? Or does she? Smart, smart fun.

Joe Keenan’s madcap farces made me want to write my own. They’re the kind of books that make you laugh so hard you just have to read lines from it to the person sitting next to you (preferably someone you know because strangers on mass transit don’t appreciate that kind of thing). As zany as they are, his novels are rooted in the real, doing-whatever-you-can-to-make-it lives of theater people. So they’re not as far-fetched as you might think. Life in New York City really can be that wildly glamorous. And hilarious.