Here are 92 books that The Beauty In Breaking fans have personally recommended if you like
The Beauty In Breaking.
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During my medical career, specializing as a psychiatrist in a cancer hospital in England, I observed huge variations in the way patients respond to the diagnosis of physical disease. Some become overwhelmed by distress, some carry on just as before, but others make positive and creative changes that are inspiring to witness. Coping can be especially challenging and complex for clinicians who find themselves in the role of patient. My five chosen books are all written by doctors and illustrate how the illness experience has shaped their lives. Now retired from medicine, I am based in New Zealand, and I have interests in writing, choral singing, and animal welfare.
Dipping into this uplifting book before bed each night gave me gentle reminders of the deeper meaning that can be found even in the most mundane of incidents. The folksy title doesn’t do justice to the quality of these 70-odd short stories, which are based on the author’s experience in medical practice and personal life.
Rachel Remen developed Crohn’s disease in her teens, and despite continuing ill health requiring multiple surgeries and an ileostomy, she went on to have a long career as a doctor. I don’t know if she kept a reflective journal about daily events, but this book made me wish I had done so myself.
"I recommend this book highly to everyone." --Deepak Chopra, M.D.
This special updated version of the New York Times-bestseller, Kitchen Table Wisdom, addresses the same spiritual issues that made the original a bestseller: suffering, meaning, love, faith, and miracles.
"Despite the awesome powers of technology, many of us still do not live very well," says Dr. Rachel Remen. "We may need to listen to one another's stories again." Dr. Remen, whose unique perspective on healing comes from her background as a physician, a professor of medicine, a therapist, and a long-term survivor of chronic illness, invites us to listen from…
As a woman physician who struggled with depression, the words “Physician, heal thyself” have particular resonance for me. In my own quest for healing, I’ve explored alternative modalities like acupuncture and reiki, as well as conventional psychotherapy. I’m always interested in reading about other women who faced the ever-present sexism of medicine, as well as those who dealt with mental health challenges and traumatic events before and during their medical training. I want to know what the factors were that helped them and healed them. Therapy? Other healing modalities? Mentors, friends, lovers? Finding a loving life partner? We all have so much to learn from each other.
This thoughtful, well-written memoir of a medical doctor and historian reminded me of why we doctors practice medicine.
The story of her years at Laguna Honda, a long-term rehabilitation hospital for indigent patients, presented me with a kind of medical practice as different as possible from the intensive care I myself practiced: Slow Medicine, which promotes close observation and deep listening, just sitting together, allowing time to do at least some of the healing. Laguna Honda was a place of hospitality, community, and charity.
I take comfort in knowing that there is still a place for these values in today’s highly fragmented, technologized, and speeded-up “healthcare system.” I was particularly moved by Sweet’s reflectiveness and vibrant humanity as she allowed “God’s Hotel” to heal her even as it—and she—healed her patients.
Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now!
For readers of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a medical “page-turner” that traces one doctor’s “remarkable journey to the essence of medicine” (The San Francisco Chronicle).
San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God’s hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves—“anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times” and needed extended medical care—ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed…
I grew up in an era of feminism but did not necessarily see opportunities outside of the traditional female roles. I became a teacher, mother, and now grandmother, and I am more passionate than ever about the challenges of being a woman, especially in this strident time in America. I think it is imperative that women stand up for themselves and fulfill the dreams that some of our ancestors were not able to achieve. We should never move backward in terms of allowing all citizens to strive toward their pursuit of happiness. Consequently, I have gravitated towards books with strong women protagonists in my reading selections.
If there ever lived a strong, persistent woman, it is Jaouad. This is Jaouad’s memoir of fighting and surviving leukemia at age 22. I came to love her as a person as she suffered the broken dreams of her youth and her future.
The insightful writing is from her unique perspective as a young woman who speaks multiple languages and is raised in several countries, including the United States. In her post-treatment year, she completes a road trip around the United States, which brings more revelations.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New…
I have always been fascinated with bodies: the meaning we make of them; the suffering, joy, and indignities we receive through them; the outer limits of what we can do to and with them. I’ve worked in careers that have asked a lot of my own body, and I write about the brutalities humans inflict upon our own and other bodies. My work is obsessed with questions of how and why we endure suffering. Also, I’ve done a lot of dumb shit to and with my own body that has given me (in addition to a lifetime of medical problems) a highly specific perspective about intensity, hazard, and pain.
What if you got hit by lightning? What if the lightning came from inside your body? What if you are such an obsessive writer and researcher that you then had to trace the supply chain of the failed medical device that did that to you?
KS does body writing as a research quest, taking her battered heart back and forth across the Atlantic in pursuit of answers to the question of what, exactly, she’d been carrying around in it. The sense of vulnerability—medical, economic, and otherwise—that she creates within the narrative is so felt that I couldn’t shake it when I was done reading.
What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator.
In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly…
I am a University Distinguished Professor at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. I have devoted my career to studying service quality and ways to improve it, first in the commercial sector and, since 2001, in healthcare. I started my healthcare journey studying at the Mayo Clinic, and I have since done in-residence research at other health systems, most recently, Henry Ford Health in Detroit. My work includes research on improving the patient and family experience in cancer care. Kindness and dignity are vitally important in healthcare – and too often missing. I am on a personal mission to enhance healing in all its forms.
Oh, how I loved this book. It is the true story of her experience as a critical care physician at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, becoming, in an instant, a critically ill patient. What captivates me is the beauty of the writing–it reads like a novel–and her bravery in writing it.
Cared for in her own hospital, she writes not only about how the medical staff saved her life but also how it often undermined her dignity, especially with the language used in her presence, such as, “She is circling the drain.” Dr. Awdish’s experience changed her as a physician; reading her story supercharged my passion for improving kindness and dignity in patient care.
'Tense, powerful and gripping... her writing style is often nothing short of beautiful - evocative and emotional.' Adam Kay, Observer
At seven months pregnant, intensive care doctor Rana Awdish suffered a catastrophic medical event, haemorrhaging nearly all of her blood volume and losing her first child. She spent months fighting for her life in her own hospital, enduring a series of organ failures and multiple major surgeries.
Every step of the way, Awdish was faced with something even more unexpected and shocking than her battle to survive: her fellow doctors' inability to see and acknowledge the pain of loss and…
As a woman physician who struggled with depression, the words “Physician, heal thyself” have particular resonance for me. In my own quest for healing, I’ve explored alternative modalities like acupuncture and reiki, as well as conventional psychotherapy. I’m always interested in reading about other women who faced the ever-present sexism of medicine, as well as those who dealt with mental health challenges and traumatic events before and during their medical training. I want to know what the factors were that helped them and healed them. Therapy? Other healing modalities? Mentors, friends, lovers? Finding a loving life partner? We all have so much to learn from each other.
I LOVE the author’s voice in this memoir: she is eloquent, funny, and blisteringly honest about the dehumanization that has plagued medical training from its inception to this day.
I found it enlightening to see that a woman who is a concert pianist and turned down a full scholarship to Oxford to go to medical school suffered the same level of self-doubt as a medical student and resident that I did! I found her descriptions of sleep deprivation, the anxiety of being on call, and the pager as “the box of pain” highly relatable, even as I laughed out loud—or sometimes shed a tear.
I was inspired by her redemption through what she called “Doctor Rehab,” a Zen mindfulness retreat which gave her a whole new take on her calling.
When we need help, we count on doctors to put us back together. But what happens when doctors fall apart?
Jillian Horton, a general internist, has no idea what to expect during her five-day retreat at Chapin Mill, a Zen centre in upstate New York. She just knows she desperately needs a break. At first she is deeply uncomfortable with the spartan accommodations, silent meals and scheduled bonding sessions. But as the group struggles through awkward first encounters and guided meditations, something remarkable happens: world-class surgeons, psychiatrists, pediatricians and general practitioners open up and share stories about their secret guilt…
As a woman physician who struggled with depression, the words “Physician, heal thyself” have particular resonance for me. In my own quest for healing, I’ve explored alternative modalities like acupuncture and reiki, as well as conventional psychotherapy. I’m always interested in reading about other women who faced the ever-present sexism of medicine, as well as those who dealt with mental health challenges and traumatic events before and during their medical training. I want to know what the factors were that helped them and healed them. Therapy? Other healing modalities? Mentors, friends, lovers? Finding a loving life partner? We all have so much to learn from each other.
I loved this memoir because it is a story of incredible resilience.
I was deeply moved by the author’s ability to recount the stark facts of the heartbreaking intergenerational trauma she suffered while showing how her early life experiences of deprivation and abuse helped pave the way for her compassionate work with patients and populations. I nodded in recognition and sometimes laughed out loud at her account of her Catholic school education, which I could relate to my own experience.
I was awestruck by her grit and determination to rise above her difficult circumstances without any kind of model and little or no encouragement. I was inspired by her ability to find love and a fulfilling career after such a rocky start, and I’m sure her patients appreciate the depth of her compassion.
As a woman physician who struggled with depression, the words “Physician, heal thyself” have particular resonance for me. In my own quest for healing, I’ve explored alternative modalities like acupuncture and reiki, as well as conventional psychotherapy. I’m always interested in reading about other women who faced the ever-present sexism of medicine, as well as those who dealt with mental health challenges and traumatic events before and during their medical training. I want to know what the factors were that helped them and healed them. Therapy? Other healing modalities? Mentors, friends, lovers? Finding a loving life partner? We all have so much to learn from each other.
This novel by a neurologist/palliative care physician appealed to me because of its highly idiosyncratic yet spot-on accounts of many things I experienced in my own medical training.
I found her writing style challenging because of the novel’s highly fragmented structure, but I appreciated her trenchant observations and stunning language. Like other authors I’ve recommended, her protagonist comes from a devastatingly traumatic background. I could really relate to this fictional medical trainee’s struggles with despair and suicidality.
Reading this book was like a dash of ice water to the face, and I pondered it for weeks after I finished it.
I’m a family physician and therapist, but I was a book-lover first. At age seventeen, I had to choose between studying medicine or literature, and I chose a profession with a clear-cut career path. But books and writing never lost their hold, and I began to write seriously in my late thirties. I’ve had four novels published, and I’m well into my fifth. Being a writer makes me a better doctor, more empathic and curious, and more engaged with patients’ narratives. Medicine is such a rich and fascinating field, and I feel privileged to write about it from an insider’s point of view.
I loved this book for its empathic and nuanced description of a family that teeters on the edge.
While first and foremost a narrative about the myriad effects of grief on a small family, this gentle, tender novel also explores how personal crisis impacts the work of emergency doctor Jin as he struggles to function in the wake of unbearable loss.
A wise and moving story about a family navigating grief, hope, and healing through a bond with a new pet rabbit.
“How rare, this delicacy―this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom.”―Helen Garner
The Burrow follows members of the Lee family as they navigate grief and hope in their quiet Australian suburb: Jin, an emergency physician and father; Amy, a published author and mother; Lucie, their bookish and introverted ten-year-old; and Pauline, Amy’s mother who’s trying to make amends. Racked with grief for Ruby―Lucie’s baby sister who died in a shocking accident―the family adopts a rabbit in the hopes of bringing much-needed cheer…
Thrillers are just that—thrilling. But thrillers with lots of explosions and gunfights aren’t that appealing to me since I know the hero will make it. With realistic domestic, at-home-style thrillers, the thrilling nature is how the scenarios could really happen. Those are the most thrilling ideas, the ones I can see how they could actually happen to someone—or to me. That makes it exciting. This is why I read many of them and have written quite a few, too, because there’s nothing more thrilling than thinking your home, or the people in it, isn’t as safe as you thought.
One of the best books I’ve ever read. The story’s puzzle is terrific, and the action is constant, intense, and entirely plausible.
This novel was one of the reasons I fell in love with the thriller genre, thanks to its continuous redirection and explosive revelations sprinkled throughout. Completely devourable.
If there was ever a novel I wish I could read again for the first time to be shocked all over again, this is unquestionably the one.
Every year, the Doctor David Beck and his young wife, Elizabeth, meet at the same deserted lake to rediscover their love for each other, and inscribe one more year into 'their' tree. But that year was the last. Elizabeth was kidnapped and Beck knocked unconscious. By the time he woke up, his wife had been discovered dead, and horribly mutilated. For eight years he grieves. Then one afternoon, he receives an anonymous e-mail telling him to log on to a certain web-site at a certain time, using a code that only the two of them knew. The screen opens onto…
