Here are 94 books that Singular Intimacies fans have personally recommended if you like
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I think our collective fascination with medical training is understandable. What bizarre sorcery molds otherwise sensible college graduates into fully functioning physicians? Is it possible to maintain your humanity in the process? Or any semblance of a normal relationship? While my book remains the only novel about medical school training, many great physician memoirs detail the typically exhausting, frequently bizarre, and ultimately gratifying experience of becoming a doctor. After graduating from Wesleyan University, I obtained my medical degree at New York University School of Medicine and trained in the primary care internal medicine program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. I live in Maryland with my wife and two children.
Dr. Au adapts her popular, quirky blog into a candid memoir that explores her journey to become a doctor, employing both humor and a weary fortitude.
In the second half of her book, she balances pregnancy and early motherhood with the protracted hours and perpetual stress endemic to medical training. I found these later vignettes exploring the competing demands and her mounting insecurities particularly compelling.
Michelle Au started medical school armed only with a surfeit of idealism, a handful of old 'ER' episodes to reference, and some vague notion about 'helping people'. This is the story of how she grew up and became a real doctor. Through her years in medical training, she also attempts to maintain a life outside the hospital as she and her resident husband decide to have a baby. A new mother struggling to balance long days and nights in the hospital with her 'real' life, Au finds herself in the classic struggle of working motherhood, trying to do two equally…
I think our collective fascination with medical training is understandable. What bizarre sorcery molds otherwise sensible college graduates into fully functioning physicians? Is it possible to maintain your humanity in the process? Or any semblance of a normal relationship? While my book remains the only novel about medical school training, many great physician memoirs detail the typically exhausting, frequently bizarre, and ultimately gratifying experience of becoming a doctor. After graduating from Wesleyan University, I obtained my medical degree at New York University School of Medicine and trained in the primary care internal medicine program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. I live in Maryland with my wife and two children.
The future Dr. Lawrence sustains two traumatic brain injuries right before starting medical school. After inexplicably not taking any time off to recover, he trundles ahead despite short-term memory loss. What follows is an entertaining and chaotic four years of surmounting formidable obstacles while suffering an imposter syndrome that lingers throughout his training.
I think every medical student aside from the most incurable narcissist feels they are playing doctor much of the time. This memoir is highly relatable.
Ready to learn how to be a doctor? Well, neither was John...
#1 Best Seller " I stayed up far too late, often crying with laughter, reading about the medical mishaps and blunders..." - #1 New York Times Bestselling Author, Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada and When Life Gives You Lululemons)
Playing Doctor is a medical memoir full of laugh-out-loud tales, born from chaotic, disjointed, and frightening nights on hospital wards during John Lawrence’s medical training and time as a junior doctor. This candid autobiography will demystify medical education and inspire you. Equal parts heartfelt, self-deprecating humor, and irreverent,…
I think our collective fascination with medical training is understandable. What bizarre sorcery molds otherwise sensible college graduates into fully functioning physicians? Is it possible to maintain your humanity in the process? Or any semblance of a normal relationship? While my book remains the only novel about medical school training, many great physician memoirs detail the typically exhausting, frequently bizarre, and ultimately gratifying experience of becoming a doctor. After graduating from Wesleyan University, I obtained my medical degree at New York University School of Medicine and trained in the primary care internal medicine program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. I live in Maryland with my wife and two children.
This fast-paced and often humorous memoir explores both medical school and the childhood experiences that led to Dr. Youn’s path as an outsider from the only Korean family in his small Michigan town to a celebrity plastic surgeon.
His redemptive progression from immature, sexually frustrated nerd to altruistic, dedicated physician should provide inspiration and hope for many anxious pre-meds.
Tony Youn grew up up one of two Asian-American kids in a small town of near wall-to-wall whiteness. Too tall and too thin, he wore thick Coke-bottle glasses, braces, Hannibal Lecter headgear, and had a protruding jaw that one day began to grow, expanding Pinocchio-like, protruding to an unthinkable, monstrous size. After high school graduation, while other seniors partied at the shore or explored Europe, Youn lay strapped in an oral surgeon's chair as he broke his jaw, then reset it and wired it shut for six weeks.
Ironically, it was this brutal makeover that led him to his life's…
I am a retired, Scottish, NHS consultant forensic psychiatrist, who worked with mentally disordered offenders in prisons, hospitals, and in the community. I am passionate about raising awareness, destigmatisation of mental illness, and introducing the human beings behind the sensationalist newspaper headlines. They are all someone's son or daughter, who didn't ask to get ill. Occasionally mental illness makes good people do bad things. It was my job to find, treat and rehabilitate them. I believe entertaining medical memoirs can engage readers and inform thinking by challenging attitudes and assumptions.
I loved this memoir because it was humorous and it transported me back to my own days as a junior doctor in a District General hospital, in the mid-1980s.
The black humour of a medic combined with the real human stories made it very relatable. This, merged with an easy-to-read diary style, captured the true life experiences and dilemmas of a junior doctor working in the NHS perfectly.
It was a walk down memory lane for me and it would provide an amusing insight for non-medics.
The acclaimed multimillion-copy bestseller, This Is Going to Hurt is Adam Kay’s equally "blisteringly funny" (Boston Globe) and “heartbreaking” (New Yorker) secret diaries of his years as a young doctor.
Welcome to 97-hour weeks. Welcome to life and death decisions. Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter. Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships. Welcome to the life of a first-year doctor.
Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights, and missed weekends, comedian and former medical resident Adam Kay’s This Is Going…
I used to think one had to choose a career and work at it, giving up the parts of himself that didn’t fit neatly into that category. I was wrong. As a man in my late thirties, I am an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but I’m also a writer. It’s books like the ones I’ve recommended here that convinced me that one does not need to turn off the parts of himself that are creative in order to be a doctor or even a grown-up. In fact, cultivating those same parts can be additive to this whole experience of being an adult.
Dr. Koven and I are on the same broad faculty at Harvard Medical School, though we had never crossed paths until our medical memoirs were released the same year. I got to know her a bit in that time, but even more so in the pages of her wonderful memoir, Letter to a Young Female Physician. This book so clearly elucidates and humanizes the complex path of becoming a physician as a woman and the lessons she learned along the way. Its pages are as charming as they are poignant.
In 2017, Dr Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by women doctors, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome"-a long-held, secret belief that she was not clever enough or good enough to be a "real" doctor. Accessed nearly 300,000 times by readers around the world, Koven's Letter to a Young Female Physician has evolved into a work that reflects on her career in medicine, in which women still encounter sexism, pay inequity and harassment. Koven tells engaging stories about her pregnancy during a gruelling residency in the AIDS era; the illnesses of her son and parents…
I’m a novelist with a PhD in Literature from NYU. My background is Modern British, and I’ve always been drawn to literary stylists. But, over the years, I’ve developed a passion for reading and writing novels that deal with themes of betrayal either within families or between close friends. I’m drawn to domestic suspense in which the characters’ psychological growth isn’t secondary to the plot.
Flynn Berry’s book is another example of this author’s ability to make me care deeply for her character while also sweeping me into a mysterious plot.
While keeping up a fast pace, the author delves into fascinating themes: how a close family member can betray you, how a sociopath can escape society and reinvent himself, and how one recovers from the trauma of a murderous past.
'A THRILLING PAGE-TURNER' Paula Hawkins 'SHOCKING AND SATISFYING' New York Times, Editor's Choice 'WHAT A BOOK!' Clare Mackintosh 'BEAUTIFULLY PACED AND SATISFYINGLY OMINOUS' Observer
'Confirms the promise of Berry's debut, Under the Harrow... Mesmerisingly effective' The Sunday Times | 'Shocking' Guardian | 'Berry gives the well-worn story of Lord Lucan a fresh twist with this clever tale' i (Best Beach Reads for Summer) | 'A compulsive page-turner' Daily Mail | 'A damning dissection on class and privilege. Fans of Elizabeth Day's The Party will love this' Sarra Manning, Red Online | 'Psychological suspense has a new reigning queen' New York…
I’m a Minnesotan, so I thought I was a cold-weather badass, but it wasn’t until my younger sister winter-overed at South Pole Station in the early 2000s that I realized that Minnesota is a balmy paradise compared with the ice chip at the bottom of the earth. Her adventures at 90 South inspired my interest in Antarctica, the history of how humans interact with extreme and dangerous natural environments, and the social dynamics of a community trying to survive in the most remote location on the planet. That interest grew so intense that I ended up spending four years researching and then writing a novel set on the seventh continent—South Pole Station.
Icebound is not a literary masterpiece nor is it a tale of exploration. It is, however, an essential Antarctic text, not just for the personal account found in its pages, but also because of the controversy still raging among Antarctic veterans
regarding the decision to extract the author from Antarctica during the polar winter. Dr. Jeri Nielsen was the doctor at South Pole Station during the 1998 season. Her account of the challenges of polar medicine (Superglue is an essential medical supply at 90 South) and the stories of warm relationships with support staff at the station are fascinating. But the real story here is the diagnosis she made of her own breast cancer, which became a global news story when she was evacuated from the base during a dangerous winter flight.
Typically, there are no flights to South Pole Station during the polar winter due to exceptionally dangerous conditions…
Jerri Nielsen was a forty-six-year-old doctor working in Ohio when she made the decision to take a year's sabbatical at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on Antarctica, the most remote and perilous place on Earth. The "Polies," as they are known, live in almost total darkness for six months of the year, in winter temperatures as low as 100 degrees below zero--with no way in or out before the spring.
During the long winter of 1999, Dr. Nielsen, solely responsible for the mental and physical fitness of a team of researchers, construction workers, and support staff, discovered a lump in her…
Heather Clark is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, and a Book of the Year at The Guardian, O the Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Times (London), Lit Hub, Good Morning America Book Club, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a new group biography about the Boston years of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Maxine Kumin, under contract with Knopf. She is a professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield in Yorkshire, England.
Janice P. Nimura digs deep into the diaries and letters of the Blackwell sisters, who were among the very first women in America to be trained as doctors. The book reads like a novel without sacrificing historical accuracy and scholarly rigor. I found myself deeply moved by the sisters’ struggles to be taken seriously as physicians in an entirely male world. Jeered in lecture halls and treated as curiosities off-campus, they maintained a dignified courage and a relentless work ethic. Eventually, they shamed their skeptics and opened the doors for future generations of women doctors. This is a compelling tale told well.
Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician.
Exploring the sisters' allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph. Together,…
I first volunteered overseas as a teenager. Driven by an insatiable desire to change the world, I helped to found a rural development organisation, PHASE, but found myself confronted with and paralysed by the complexities of the aid world. So as not to become jaded, I since shifted my focus to tackle what I believe to be the root causes of injustice in the world through global education, including researching and writing Learning Service: The Essential Guide to Volunteering Abroad. I now mainly work as a consultant to improve the ethical practices of volunteer organisations.
A poignantly written memoir about a couple’s decision to volunteer in remote Nepal with their three young sons, one with a severe disability. Jane is a doctor and her husband is an engineer, and while they attempt to make a difference in the lives of the people they live and work amongst, they also strive to provide the best possible lives for their children. This includes baby David, whose alternative life is to be stocked up with medication and given daily blood tests in UK hospitals, as an ‘interesting medical case’.
A zoologist by training, Wilson-Howarth’s prose is wonderfully observant of the natural environment, and little David is bound to capture every reader’s heart.
Set against the backdrop of one of the most colourful countries in the world, A Glimpse of Eternal Snows is an inspiring story of courage, love and a family's determination to give their child the best life possible. In pulsating, polluted Kathmandu and an idyllic village at the foot of the Himalayas, 'Doctor Jane' and her engineer husband Simon hope to make a difference: Jane to fulfil her vision to heal and advocate for the poor, Simon to avert the floods that threaten to devastate the country every monsoon season. The Nepali people are accepting of whatever fate flings at…
As a writer or horror and suspense books myself, I’ve always sought out exceptional works in the genre that are able to scare me and keep me on the edge of my seat. As a student of the horror film genre as well, a number of the books recommended on my list were made into thrilling movies as well, including Phantoms, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Tommyknockers.
If you like your scary stories mixed with a dash of science fiction, Stephen King’s The Tommyknockersis highly recommended. Set in fictional Haven, ME, the book revolves around the discovery of a spaceship buried in the woods. As Bobbi Anderson, a local writer, uncovers the ship, both she and the rest of the townspeople are physically and mentally transformed by it. Not all of the changes are welcome – Bobbi loses interest in food and starts losing hair and teeth, but in turn becomes part of a shared consciousness that makes her capable of the most amazing inventions, including a telepathic typewriter. Only Jim Gardner is immune due to a steel plate in his head, and it is up to him to stop the hypnotic spell of The Tommyknockers.
“Stephen King never stops giving us his all” (Chicago Tribune) in this #1 national bestseller about the idyllic small town of Haven, Maine, and its encounter with a deadly evil out for a diabolical invasion of body, soul—and mind.
Something was happening in Bobbi Anderson’s idyllic small town of Haven, Maine. Something that gave every man, woman, and child in Haven powers far beyond those of ordinary mortals. Something that turned the town into a deathtrap for all outsiders. Something that is buried in the woods behind Bobbi’s house. With the help of her friend, Jim Gardener, they uncover an…
