Fans pick 98 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.

Joseph Mitchell was the city reporter for the New Yorker for about half a century. This is a collection of his magazine stories. Many of them involve the old Fulton Fish Market, but he also wrote about weird things like dime museums, gypsies, and stag banquets. 

To me, every story in this collection is like a time capsule. This is the book that made me want to write about New York City because it suggests there is a history on every block there worth recording. If you don’t like a chapter or two, then skip to the next one, but I’ll vouch for 80% of this book being the best non-fiction writing that I have ever read (and I practically read for a living).

In 1951, Sydney Taylor invented the memorable Brenners—papa, mama, five sisters, and baby brother—a Jewish family on the Lower East Side in turn-of-the-century New York. Taylor’s words and Helen John’s illustrations in this book, the first in a series, set the scene. A calendar in the parlor announced that it was 1912. Tenements lined city streets. When I read these novels as a child, I did not yet know that they were closely based on Taylor’s own life. When the entire series was republished in 2014, I quipped: I became a Jewish historian because of these books. 

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.

Anyone who is curious about other cities and cultures will love the complete series of the This Is… books by Miroslav Sasek. They are filled with exciting facts and the colorful illustrations are truly delightful. From New York, to London, to Hong Kong, and many more, these books will inspire you to travel the world!