Travel and writing are my two great passions. Since I was a child, I escaped reality by escaping into my own mind. I had relied on my stories of the warrior queens ever since I learned about them as a child. It was only a few years ago, when I lived in Geneva, that I had a memory flash at me of the statue of Queen Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi on a rearing horse with a curved sword held in one hand. I knew then that it was time to tell a story—my own story and that of my favorite warrior queens.
This is a surprising book because while it is certainly macabre, it’s not morbid (at least not for me) and is strangely entertaining. It demystifies the human body and the process of death and dying.
Even as the author delves into every aspect of dead bodies, she does so with compassion and humor. Rooted and backed up with science, this book held my interest from beginning to end, and I read it non-stop for over a day and a half. Despite its grave subject matter, this book is not dark or scary. It’s matter-of-fact and very educational.
For two thousand years, cadavers - some willingly, some unwittingly - have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. "Delightful-though never disrespectful" (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should…
As a historian of race and gender in European women’s history, “misbehaving” women confound me! I am rendered speechless when women negate their own humanity in the drive toward the same power structures that subjugate them. Vulnerable women who were often in the clutches of those same women–and yet are unrelenting in their determination to survive within systems to which others have relegated them–inspire me. These books and their stories take women’s lives–their oft-horrible choices, their scandalous mistakes, and their demands for autonomy–seriously. I hope you find their stories as compelling as I do!
In Central Park, there used to be a statue of J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology.” Mercifully, it was removed in 2018, but the memory of his and other white doctor’s butchery on the bodies of several enslaved women isn’t so easily erased.
This book uncovers how Sims performed experimental (and anesthetized) cesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on powerless Black women and scores of poor Irish women. In turn, those medical “breakthroughs,” which were medical experimentations, were used to benefit middle–and upper-class white women’s reproductive lives. While properly eviscerating Sims, Owens also highlights the medical skills of the same enslaved women disregarded by doctors.
I was infuriated at the mental hopscotch needed to render these women both skilled practitioners and nameless bodies to be cut up at will. You won’t feel good when you finish reading this essential book, but you will remember Lucy, Anarcha,…
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistulae repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as ""medical superbodies"" highly suited for medical experimentation.
In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as…
I’ve been a sci-fi/fantasy fan ever since my dad introduced me to the original Star Trek (in reruns) and The Lord of the Rings in my youth. I’ve always loved thinking about possibilities—large and small—so my work tends to think big when I write. I also write poetry, which allows me to talk about more than just the everyday or at least to find the excitement within the mundane in life. These works talk about those same “possibilities”—for better or worse, and in reading, I walk in awareness of what could be.
This book scratches my genre itch and is also “literary” at the same time. Cronin’s superb world-building is so subtle that you don’t realize that the book’s world and ours are separate until you are half-way through the book and see that there were clues all along the way.
Amy Harper Bellafonte is six years old and her mother thinks she's the most important person in the whole world. She is. Anthony Carter doesn't think he could ever be in a worse place than Death Row. He's wrong. FBI agent Brad Wolgast thinks something beyond imagination is coming. It is. THE PASSAGE. Deep in the jungles of eastern Colombia, Professor Jonas Lear has finally found what he's been searching for - and wishes to God he hadn't. In Memphis, Tennessee, a six-year-old girl called Amy is left at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy and wonders why her…
I was lucky enough to land a job teaching English at the University of Montevallo, a small public liberal arts college where I have had the opportunity to explore my strange academic interests and teach classes with titles like “Am I Human?” and “Southern Neogothic II: Disability, Hicksploitation, Meat.” When I got tenure, I also had the time and freedom to try my hand at writing the kind of Southern Gothic, Bizarro, and Horror tales that I have always adored. From Mad Magazine to MaddAddam, I have always craved dark satire, body horror, and the grotesque. It’s in my blood.
I love this novel because it mixes Southern Gothic with speculative fiction in a hilarious epic struggle between man and hog. When middle-aged taxidermist Romie Futch becomes a research subject in the shady Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, he becomes both super genius and guinea pig, his middle-aged brain now brilliant beyond comprehension. Troubled by errant downloads that track his thoughts and actions, Romie turns taxidermy into pop art as he hunts down the legendary super pig “Hogzilla.” This is the funniest, wittiest book I’ve read in a long time.
From the author of The Wilds, which Publishers Weekly called “a brilliant combination of emotion and grime, wit and horror,” comes a debut novel that is part dystopian satire, part Southern Gothic tall tale: a disturbing yet hilarious romp through a surreal New South where newfangled medical technologies change the structure of the human brain and genetically modified feral animals ravage the blighted landscape.
Down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife, South Carolina taxidermist Romie Futch spends his evenings drunkenly surfing the Internet before passing out on his couch. In a last-ditch attempt to pay his mortgage,…
In 2016, I started thinking about art’s power to unite diverse people. The recent presidential election coincided with a sharp spike in anti-immigrant rhetoric, but artists, musicians, creatives, and performers were fierce defenders of the value of cultural difference. In my own life, I’ve always found inspiration and solace from creative practice. For years now, I’ve been part of an eclectic friend group I first met in painting class. The joy art brings to my life also made me wonder who gets credit and what even constitutes “art.” Is an expensive oil painting really worth more than a comic book, if someone loves the comic book just as much?
A work of science writing might be a surprising addition to this list of storytellers, artists, and designers, but surely the life of the African American woman, mother, and cancer sufferer whose cell tissue became one of the most widely used biological lab media in contemporary medical research epitomizes creation and creativity.
Lacks’s history is a terrible story of racial anonymity and exploitation, which Skloot tells with extraordinary sensitivity. Always being sure to keep Lacks and her descendants at the forefront, Skloot both details the atrocities that sometimes underlie civilization’s progress and restores Lacks’s long overdue credit for making possible some of the most important medical advances of the twentieth century.
This book achieves the highest level of nuanced, deeply human storytelling. To me, it is one of the finest works of nonfiction ever.
With an introduction by author of The Tidal Zone, Sarah Moss
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Born a poor black tobacco farmer, her cancer cells - taken without her knowledge - became a multimillion-dollar industry and one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta's family did not learn of her 'immortality' until more than twenty years after her death, with devastating consequences . . .
Rebecca Skloot's fascinating account is the story of the life, and afterlife, of one woman who changed the medical world for ever. Balancing the beauty and drama…
I grew up thinking I liked reading about NYC more than I’d like living there. It was too hectic and loud for a bookworm like me, I thought, too dirty and dangerous. Then my husband was accepted to Cornell’s MD/PhD program, and we moved to Manhattan. Immediately, I found that while the city is as dirty as I’d feared (and it smells), its advantages far outweigh the rest. I can’t get enough of the parks, museums, food, diversity, or the history, much of which drives The Light of Luna Park. So, without further ado, here are my five favorite books that take place in New York from the 1800s to today.
Bluebird by Sharon Cameron took my breath away. It’s a thriller, a mystery, a romance, and the best type of historical fiction all rolled up together, and though it’s officially young adult, it’s too good for adults to pass up. The novel follows a German girl named Eva who flees Germany for New York City in 1946 seeking justice as much as safety. The daughter of a Nazi mastermind, Eva is hunting down her father for reasons both personal and political, and her journey is filled with both physical and psychological danger. Bluebird is fast-paced and fascinating, as well as thought-provoking and full of well-researched history on everything from Nazi propaganda to Quaker humanitarian relief in New York City.
Author of Reese's Book Club YA Pick The Light in Hidden Places, Sharon Cameron, delivers an emotionally gripping and utterly immersive thriller, perfect for fans of Ruta Sepetys's Salt to the Sea.
In 1946, Eva leaves behind the rubble of Berlin for the streets of New York City, stepping from the fiery aftermath of one war into another, far colder one, where power is more important than principles, and lies are more plentiful than the truth. Eva holds the key to a deadly secret: Project Bluebird -- a horrific experiment of the concentration camps, capable of tipping the balance of…
I fell in love with historical fiction as a child, devouring books like Johnny Tremain and The Door in the Wall. While I always wanted to be a writer, and I always loved history, it took a special discovery to align my two interests. In college, I learned that “real history” had happened in my little hometown in northern New York in the 1920s. A small girl had gone missing, and local anti-Semites accused the Jewish community of murdering her for a ritual sacrifice. It got ugly. Decades later, this incident became the subject of my first novel, The Blood Lie.
This engrossing book, inspired by the true history of a thriving deaf community on Martha's Vineyard in the early 1800s, triumphantly probes our perceptions of ability and disability. I’m always drawn to stories that explore what it means to be and/or feel different. Too many youngsters (and adults) equate being different with being less than, whether the different person is themselves or someone else. I don’t know if our species will ever fully break free of that false belief, but novels like this one go a long way toward achieving that goal.
Winner of the 2021 Schneider Family Book Award * NPR Best Books of 2020 * Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2020 * School Library Journal Best Books of 2020 * New York Public Library Best Books of 2020 * Chicago Public Library Best Books of 2020 * 2020 Jane Addams Children's Book Award Finalist * 2020 New England Independent Booksellers Award Finalist
Deaf author Ann Clare LeZotte weaves a riveting story inspired by the true history of a thriving deaf community on Martha's Vineyard…
I began working in prisons 50 years ago. I was just out of grad school and I accepted the challenge of starting a literacy program in the Philadelphia Prison System. The shock of cellblock life was eye-opening, but the most unexpected revelation was the sight of scores of inmates wrapped in bandages and medical tape. Unknown to the general public, the three city prisons had become a lucrative appendage of the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School. As I would discover years later, thousands of imprisoned Philadelphians had been used in a cross-section of unethical and dangerous scientific studies running the gamut from simple hair dye and athlete’s foot trials to radioactive isotope, dioxin, and US Army chemical warfare studies. My account of the prison experiments, Acres of Skin, helped instill in me an abiding faith in well-researched journalism as an antidote to societal indiscretions and crimes.
Welsome investigates a particularly repugnant episode in medical history; doctors secretly injecting hospital patients with plutonium as part of the Manhattan Project. Designed to weigh the increased threat of cancer during the outset of the atomic era, the book navigates the governmental and scientific concerns of a new nuclear world, the prestigious players who argued for human experimentation, and the unwitting victims - all hospital patients - who’d be used as test material. In addition, Welsome also explores other Cold War examples of atomic abuse such as “radioactive cocktails” given to pregnant women and radioactive breakfast cereal given to five and six-year-old “morons” at state institutions.
In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon fed radioactive isotopes along with their morning oatmeal....In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman, believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium by Manhattan Project doctors....At a Tennessee prenatal clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails"--in truth, drinks containing radioactive iron--as part of their prenatal treatmen....
In 1945, the seismic power of atomic energy was already well known to researchers, but the effects of radiation on human beings were not. Fearful that plutonium would cause a cancer epidemic among workers, Manhattan Project doctors…
I’m a writer who writes across genres, but everything has a dark edge. As a reader, I want to be able to relate, engage, and connect in some way to the characters and story, but as I come from an abusive childhood, that means they can’t be light and fluffy; there has to be something off-kilter and warped because that reflects how my life has been. In my own writing, I try to do the same and create something that is emotive and real while still allowing the reader to escape. I originate from Surrey, in the south of England, but I have lived in theNetherlands since 2002.
This book was my introduction to this famous horror author, and though occasionally Koontz gets repetitive with his characters and storylines, this was something out of the ordinary.
We have a character that can only go out at night, and we have non-human escapees from a military research institute. A perfect mix for a gripping read, although for me, I was sold on the friendships and relationships in this book.
The lead character’s pet dog and his rich surfer dude friend and how they all interact with each other adds humour and lightness to a truly scary story that involves genetically modified animals who can understand humans. Again a supernatural and out-of-the-box story idea that kept me enthralled and made it stand out.
If you delight in the suspense of Stephen King and The Stranger by Harlan Coben chilled you to the bone (in the best possible way), you'll love Fear Nothing - the classic thriller by Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz. 'Not just a master of our darkest dreams but also a literary juggler' - The Times.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Christopher Snow is athletic, handsome enough, intelligent, romantic, funny. But his whole life has been affected by xeroderma pigmentosum, a rare genetic disorder that means his skin and eyes cannot be exposed…
I began working in prisons 50 years ago. I was just out of grad school and I accepted the challenge of starting a literacy program in the Philadelphia Prison System. The shock of cellblock life was eye-opening, but the most unexpected revelation was the sight of scores of inmates wrapped in bandages and medical tape. Unknown to the general public, the three city prisons had become a lucrative appendage of the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School. As I would discover years later, thousands of imprisoned Philadelphians had been used in a cross-section of unethical and dangerous scientific studies running the gamut from simple hair dye and athlete’s foot trials to radioactive isotope, dioxin, and US Army chemical warfare studies. My account of the prison experiments, Acres of Skin, helped instill in me an abiding faith in well-researched journalism as an antidote to societal indiscretions and crimes.
Known only to true devotees of medical ethics and the history of human research, Jay Katz’s hefty volume (1,150 pages) is a comprehensive encyclopedia of humans used as research material. Information-packed chapters cover everything from Chester Southam’s use of senile hospital patients in cancer cell injection studies during the 1960s, and the legal fallout from such indiscretions, to the ethical obligations of researchers, and the evolution of informed consent as a pillar of ethical human research. Impressive in both detail and scope, this imposing piece of scholarship is a valuable resource for anyone looking to learn the many moral and legal issues inherent in experimenting on humans.
In recent years, increasing concern has been voiced about the nature and extent of human experimentation and its impact on the investigator, subject, science, and society. This casebook represents the first attempt to provide comprehensive materials for studying the human experimentation process. Through case studies from medicine, biology, psychology, sociology, and law―as well as evaluative materials from many other disciplines―Dr. Katz examines the problems raised by human experimentation from the vantage points of each of its major participants―investigator, subject, professions, and state. He analyzes what kinds of authority should be delegated to these participants in the formulation, administration, and review…
