Review: The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

Arrrrrrgh, this book. This book, this book, this book. I've been putting off reviewing it for ages because my notes are a garbled mess of exclamation points, page numbers and quotes, and every time I think about this book my heart (and head) hurt all over again. It's a brilliant, brilliant book and, even if you can't make it to the end of this mess of a review, I really encourage you to read it.

Summary: 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous – the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls.

As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses. The very thing that had made them feel alive – their work – was in fact slowly killing them: they had been poisoned by the radium paint. Yet their employers denied all responsibility. And so, in the face of unimaginable suffering – in the face of death – these courageous women refused to accept their fate quietly, and instead became determined to fight for justice.

Drawing on previously unpublished sources – including diaries, letters and court transcripts, as well as original interviews with the women’s relatives – The Radium Girls is an intimate narrative account of an unforgettable true story. It is the powerful tale of a group of ordinary women from the Roaring Twenties, who themselves learned how to roar.

This is technically a non-fiction work about the women who earned a living by painting luminescent dials on watches in the 1920s. I say 'technically,' because I have never cried this much over a non-fiction book (or any fiction book either, in fairness). The tone is a rarely-seen perfect mix of the emotional and the technical - although every single page contains near constant quotes from the women and their families, the remaining text tells the women's story with a very sympathetic narrative.

That's not a criticism. I never felt like I was being emotionally manipulated and it would be very, very difficult to write a book of this nature and be objective. Aside from the original horror of the women being told to put radium in their mouths in the first place, they were lied to nigh-on continuously by the company and even so-called medical experts. Their bodies collapsed, their hearts broke and their bank accounts emptied, but the company continued to Appeal, even after the Courts had already made a decision.

The tone of the text is light and very accessible, but the subject is not. Their jaw bones literally fell out of their mouths. There are photographs in the middle of the book - most are included to emphasise that these women were real, human, living people (temporarily, at any rate) but there are a few that show the size of tumours, disintegrated bones, etc. There is one particular photo that I kept turning back to and I cried every single time I looked at it. One of the women collapsed during a Court hearing after she was told that her condition was fatal (her well-intentioned doctors had decided to keep this information from her) and a photographer somehow got a shot mid-collapse. It really demonstrates the lack of knowledge provided to these women and their emotional state at that time.

There aren't words to describe how much these women suffered. It's not just the physical horrors, but the way they were treated. One woman was posthumously slapped with a 'syphilis' label even though there was no indication of any sexually transmitted disease and another woman's body was pretty much stolen from the hospital by the organisation before the family could pay their respects. They were shunned by their communities for creating trouble for the factories that provided jobs for local people and some of the women's husbands became jealous of their (later) wealth and threatened to gas them.

I cried on a train, I cried on a bus and I cried in a cafe. This was real, this happened and people did nothing. My eyes are watering with angry tears as I write this six weeks after I read it.

It's very hard to separate the topic from the book, but I'm going to try because I don't think Kate Moore's skill deserves to be overshadowed by the tragedy she writes about. She writes very well - to say that a good 300 pages of The Radium Girls is about a legal battle, it flows, it's interesting and it's engrossing. She has clearly put a tremendous amount of effort into research and interviewing the relatives of the deceased, and she appears to genuinely care about the plight suffered of the radium girls. 

And Grace Fryer was never forgotten. She is still remembered now – you are still remembering her now. As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story.

Please read this book. Firstly, it's important that we acknowledge these brave and strong individuals who were so profoundly abused in so many different ways. Their bodies and their fight went on to form the basis of ground-breaking legislation that is still in place in the US today, and allowed for progress to be made with preventing radiation toxicity in others. They were ignored and shunned when they were alive, and that was not acceptable. At least now we can look back and retrospectively apologise.

Secondly, I'm desperate to talk about this book so hurry up and read it! I want to talk about the women, the people and especially how radium affected the whole town. The factory was eventually used as a meat locker - so naturally everybody who ate the meat became severely ill. After that the factory was knocked down... and the rubble was deposited around town. Dogs died prematurely, citizens developed an inordinate amount of tumours... you get the idea. I want to talk about it. 

Lastly, it's just a brilliant, brilliant book. Kate Moore is a wonderful writer who has tackled an extremely difficult subject with dignity and grace. Every second that I wasn't reading this book, I wanted to be. It's riveting and completely engrossing.

So there, you go. Read The Radium Girls because it's important, discussion-provoking and enjoyable.
  

Read Ellie's review of The Radium Girls at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm. 

Review: Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame by Mara Wilson

For the benefit of those of you slightly younger than me and for those of similar age who were living under a rock during their childhood, Mara Wilson was the child actress who starred in Matilda, Mrs Doubtfire, Miracle on 34th Street, etc. She doesn't act much anymore but after stumbling across her Twitter and, subsequently, her blog, I desperately wanted to read her recent memoir.

Summary: Mara Wilson has always felt a little young and a little out of place: as the only child on a film set full of adults, the first daughter in a house full of boys, the sole clinically depressed member of the cheerleading squad, a valley girl in New York and a neurotic in California, and one of the few former child actors who has never been in jail or rehab. Tackling everything from how she first learned about sex on the set of Melrose Place, to losing her mother at a young age, to getting her first kiss (or was it kisses?) on a celebrity canoe trip, to not being “cute” enough to make it in Hollywood, these essays tell the story of one young woman’s journey from accidental fame to relative (but happy) obscurity. But they also illuminate a universal struggle: learning to accept yourself, and figuring out who you are and where you belong.

I loved this book from the second I started flicking through it on the train on the way home, and from the minute I began sneaking pages when I was meant to be cleaning. The Boy is used to this by now, however, and my wails of 'BUT IT'S MATILDA!' did not prevent the obligatory eye roll and dramatic presentation of furniture polish.

It's brilliant because I now love Mara Wilson both as a person, and because she can actually write really, really well. I admit that I haven't given her a whole lot of thought since I last turned off Matilda because, well, why would I? I had no idea what she was doing with herself nowadays and it hadn't occurred to me to wonder. I probably wouldn't have reserved her book if I hadn't had a glimpse of her writing on her blog and felt compelled to read more.

I really love that it's not a chronological memoir - it's not 'I was born here and then I did this, and then I went to this school...', but it's not really an essay collection either. It's a wonderful blend of those two things. It is about Mara's life and her experiences, obviously, but cutting out the boring bits that come with chronological memoirs, and without briefly skating past topics like with the standard essay-style collections.

Topics include her experiences with competitive choir as a teenager, her childhood anxious existentialism, the need for feminism and, of course, her transition from childhood star to... not. I adore how candid she is about this period of her life. She freely admits that she was a cute child who grew up to not really conform to the Hollywood standards of beauty, so she was Out. She puts it much more bluntly, of course:

Even with my braces off, with contact lenses and a better haircut, I was always going to look the way I did. I knew I wasn’t a gorgon, but I guessed that if ten strangers were to look at a photo of me, probably about four or five of them would find me attractive. That would not be good enough for Hollywood, where an actress had to be attractive to eight out of ten people to be considered for even the homely best friend character.  

 I (now) know that she has experience in writing (both academically and through her one-man shows, etc) so perhaps it's it's only to be expected, but she writes very well. Not just '... for a celebrity,' but it's actually, objectively, good. I felt angry when she was describing the joys of seeing comparisons of your childhood and adult faces of the Internet when you least expect it, and I teared up when she was expressing her sadness over the loss of Robin Williams. She's very self-deprecating and never woe-is-me, but you end up sharing her emotions, or at least those she chooses to project.

Every week or so, a well‑meaning friend or fan sends me an article about me. Below some variation of “What Do They Look Like Now?” there is inevitably an unflattering photo of me and hundreds of comments from people who think I'm ugly.

Some are delighted, schadenfreudic: I was once paid to be cute, but now the child actor curse has caught up with me, and I'm not so cute anymore, am I? Others seem angry. My image belongs to them and they aren’t happy that I don’t match up to what they pictured. This type is the most likely to give advice: I should colour my hair, get a nose job, lose twenty pounds, go die in a hole somewhere.

There are, of course, humorous anecdotes about shooting those iconic films with Danny DeVito and Robin Williams. There's a whole chapter dedicated to the former, which was expected, but none the less moving for it.

I'm gushing, I know, but Where Am I Now? is a wonderful, surprising book, and one that I wanted to reread immediately after finishing it. I feel that I now know more of her as an insightful, self-deprecating person, not just a former childstar. I'll honestly read anything she ever writes. 

Visit Mara's blog, Mara Wilson Writes Stuff, or find her on Twitter. 

A Life of Sensation Read-a-Long: EPOCH FOUR

I'm a little bit late with my check-in this week - three days at Scout Camp doesn't leave a whole lot of time for reading (I love my Scout Kids, but they're exhausting) and in any event I got totally distracting by racing through the first book in the Wheel of Time series.

Anyhow, we're back to Wilkie now. A short read this week, luckily, and I'm thrilled to finally see The Moonstone make an appearance.

Here are the highlights of this week:

• Wilkie has met the second lady of his life, Martha Rudd. It's heavily implied that she was on the curvier side, whilst Caroline was a little more petite. The author refers to her as a 'buxom wench.' The author. Nice.

• 'A feature of mid-Victorian sexuality was that men were often aroused by women in socially inferior positions.'
  
  Yeah, but... really? Are you sure it's not just that those were the women they could abuse because they weren't really able to say no? Because, honestly, I'm pretty sure it's that. 

• Apparently Wilkie was drawing on his own experiences of opium whilst he was writing The Moonstone. You don't say.

• It does note, however, that he treated the Indians in the story with respect, with a fitting and appropriate conclusion, unlike other authors of the time period *cough* Dickens *cough*
  
  I think I said much the same thing when I reviewed it a few weeks ago, passive-aggressive Dickens references aside.

• Dickens and Wilkie are sort of falling out now. My favourite burn ever is 'It is part of the bump in Wilkie's forehead that he will not allow his brother to be very ill.'

• I really want to read Man and Wife, for his take on the injustice of the matrimonial laws. I can't seem to find a decent copy though.

• Caroline went off, married somebody fifteen years younger, decided she didn't like it and came back to live with Wilkie again. So now she's married to someone else whilst living quite comfortably as a mistress.

• Oh, but the biggest WHAT THE FUCK moment in the whole thing is where Wilkie has a second child with Mistress B... and calls it the same name as the child of Mistress A. 

• What!? No. Why would you DO that!? I mean, I know that some names were fairly common in Victorian England, but there were more than two names, you selfish, inconsiderate wazzock. At this point I'm really starting to wonder if these two women were as fiiiiiine with the situation as history makes out. 
  
  
  
  

  Next week, we're finishing the book. Stay tuned! 

Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation Read-a-Long

I was so excited when I stumbled across this book in a charity shop recently. I'd been desperate to read ever since read-a-longing The Moonstone a few years ago, but I think it was listed on Amazon at a ridiculously extortionate price. Imagine my subsequent excitement then, when I found that Reading Rambo is hosting another read-a-long for this biography!

The timing is perfect - I've only had the book a few weeks and I was starting wonder when I was going to realistically read this hefty hardback on my own. Thanks Alice!

As this classes as my introductory post, let's answer some questions!

1) Where are you located?

The North of England. I live near Haworth, where the Brontes grew up and where Heathcliff spent far too much time sulking on the moor.

2) What do you know about Wilkie Collins already?

Not that much. I know he was a friend of Charles Dickens (or at least, I think I know that?) and that he had an interesting life, which is why I picked the book up in the first place. I recall some tidbits from the last read-a-long, but nothing concrete.

3) What have you read of his?

My first was The Moonstone, as part of the read-a-long. I've just checked and that was November 2013, good Lord. Oh, I remember now! I got all excited because it took place sort of near my house. I made a map and everything :)   

I also read The Woman in White the year before last.

4) How much do you love the cover of this book?

I have the somewhat more genteel gold shiny version, not the funky pink one, but I like them both!

I can't wait to get started on this. Click here to sign up.     

Review: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematorium by Caitlin Doughty

I'm a sucker for the morbid. Whilst I like medical and mental health related non-fiction, I have a guilty pleasure for the more macabre books. I find how people have dealt with death throughout history fascinating, particularly the associated rituals and beliefs, but also how the body naturally reacts to death in a physiological sense. See Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found and also Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.

I was blown away by Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - not only is it a much deeper and wider examination of death practices than expected, it's actually written very, very well.

Summary/synopsis: From her first day at Westwind Cremation & Burial, twenty-three-year-old Caitlin Doughty threw herself into her curious new profession. Coming face-to-face with the very thing we go to great lengths to avoid thinking about she started to wonder about the lives of those she cremated and the mourning families they left behind, and found herself confounded by people's erratic reactions to death. Exploring our death rituals - and those of other cultures - she pleads the case for healthier attitudes around death and dying. Full of bizarre encounters, gallows humour and vivid characters (both living and very dead), this illuminating account makes this otherwise terrifying subject inviting and fascinating. 

Caitlin Doughty is apparently relatively famous in the field of, I don't know, death people? She's most renowned for her YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician, as well as founding The Order of the Good Death, which promotes a more natural acceptance of death. Before all this, however, she started out at Westwind Cremation and Burial as a crematorium operator, responsible for moving soon-to-be-cremated bodies into the incinerator and all the associated tasks, of which there are a surprising amount. The anecdotes she recounts are somehow both hilarious and mildly disgusting, and at certain points I definitely laughed out loud.

This is not a book for those of a sensitive disposition. We read about decay, leaking and mechanisms for keeping the eyes of the deceased firmly closed (spoiler alert: they use caps with spikes on). I like that about this book though. I like that it goes slightly beyond the realms of propriety to explain the details that I had never considered were an issue. For me, the most interesting chapter dealt with the bodies of babies, both pre- and post-term, and the associated problems. It wasn't exactly pleasant reading, but it was fascinating and I have respect for the author for discussing what most people would rather brush under the carpet.

Caitlin Doughty speaks with respect and humanity throughout. Although her book made me laugh out loud at points, the book never makes fun of the deceased or their families, and it appears that the corpses were treated with respect at the material time as well. Mishaps happen, of course, but not through any carelessness or lack of compassion.

This humanity underlies the 'agenda' of this book and the issues that Caitlin Doughty currently works to highlight. She writes that there is a culture of death denial prevalent in the modern world. Where death was previously accepted as a natural fact of life, attempts are now made to hide ourselves away from the very existence of death, as evidenced by the multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry, the rise of embalming and the ability to cremate your loved ones via the Internet.  

She supports family members preparing their own deceased for burial, as decomposition and decay are inherently natural and cannot harm us. By being afraid of the sight of death, we are denying what is an absolute fact of life.

Less than a year after donning my corpse-coloured glasses, I went from thinking it was strange that we don't see dead bodies any more to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world.

Corpses keep the living thethered to reality. I had lived my entire life up until I began working at Westwind relatively corpse-free. Now I had access to scores of them - stacked in the crematorium freezer. They forced me to face my own death and the deaths of those i loved. No matter how human technology may become our master, it takes only a human corpse to toss the anchor off that boat and pull us back down to the firm knowledge that we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses.

Whilst I can't say that I enjoyed the latter chapters as much as the former sections where the author discussed her day-to-day life as a crematorium operator, this book really made me think and I can't get these issues out of my head. Whilst I found a few of her ideas a little too out-there for me, like her desire for her corpse to be left in the open to be devoured by nature, I feel that this surely proves her entire point. The concept shouldn't make me uncomfortable and it's not 'out-there' at all - after all, it's entirely natural and it's only very recently that such endeavours stopped being the norm. It's a lot to think about.  

I really, really recommend reading Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Even the prose is written to a much higher standard than one would usually expect for a memoir-style work of this nature. It doesn't try too hard to be pithy, nor does the author come across as preachy or naive. I was disappointed when this book ended and I will happily and enthusiastically read anything Caitlin Doughty ever writes.

Visit Caitlin Doughty's YouTube channel or read more about The Order of the Good Death. Alternatively, find her on Twitter here.

Review: Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine by Dr Paul Offit

Whilst I'd be the first to say that I've read a lot of great non-fiction this year, Bad Faith was my absolute, undoubted favourite (and I've only gotten round to writing a review because I'll need to add it to my Top Ten Books of 2016 list shortly). I read quite a lot of medical non-fiction due to my career, but I'd never read one that was as accessible, well-written and thought-provoking as this one.

Summary: In recent years, there have been major outbreaks of whooping cough among children in California, mumps in New York, and measles in Ohio’s Amish country—despite the fact that these are all vaccine-preventable diseases. Although America is the most medically advanced place in the world, many people disregard modern medicine in favor of using their faith to fight life threatening illnesses. Christian Scientists pray for healing instead of going to the doctor, Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood transfusions, and ultra-Orthodox Jewish mohels spread herpes by using a primitive ritual to clean the wound. Tragically, children suffer and die every year from treatable diseases, and in most states it is legal for parents to deny their children care for religious reasons. In twenty-first century America, how could this be happening?

In Bad Faith, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Paul Offit gives readers a never-before-seen look into the minds of those who choose to medically martyr themselves, or their children, in the name of religion. Offit chronicles the stories of these faithful and their children, whose devastating experiences highlight the tangled relationship between religion and medicine in America. Religious or not, this issue reaches everyone—whether you are seeking treatment at a Catholic hospital or trying to keep your kids safe from diseases spread by their unvaccinated peers.

I'm not going to discuss the content of this book. Anybody who knows me even vaguely will know what side of the fence I fall on and hundreds of people (Dr Offit included) have explained their views far more eloquently than I ever could. Yes, Hanna is keeping her mouth shut for once.

This book contains a variety of topics from a close examination of Christian Science (which believes that illness is an illusion caused by ignorance of God - therefore, as illness is not actually real, the only way to treat it is prayer), televangelists, child abuse, abortion, etc. It's a well-balanced book with case studies, excerpts from the Bible and also scientific studies, which results in a discussion, not a rant.

What impressed me the most was the balanced nature of Bad Faith. Dr Offit is a Pediatrician specialising in infectious diseases and is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. It's fairly safe to say that his sympathies are going to lie with science and medicine, and so I was more or less expecting a diatribe on the dangers of religion and how their beliefs are ineffectual and redundant. As it turns out, I completely misjudged both Dr Offit and his work. Several chapters discuss how much good religion has brought about with regard to healing and how their efforts can be misintepreted by the more cynical. It's only the (usually) well-intentioned few who are the cause of the controversy.

Faith healing parents often argue that they were only doing what Jesus would have done. But what would He have done? - this man who dedicated his life to relieving the illness, poverty, and death around him; who wept at the suffering of children; who stood up for those who couldn't stand up for themselves. One can only imagine Jesus would have used whatever was available to prevent that suffering, much as Christians have been doing in His name for centuries.

What I loved about this book is that I still can't tell if Dr Offit believes in God or not. He never once suggests that God does not exist and, to an extent, I don't suppose it really matters in this context. It's more about the ways in which the fervent, zealous beliefs of a few (not of religion as a whole) have affected the treatment of many.

Several case studies are discussed in depth (including the Texas measles outbreak and the case of Matthew Swan that led to the large-scale investigation of faith healing) and Dr Offit references a huge amount of papers and studies to back up his opinions. Whilst this is definitely a popular-interest book, its based on thorough research and investigation.

I think I would have preferred a little more discussion on abortion, euthanasia, vaccination (although I understand he has a whole book dedicated to vaccination, so perhaps he didn't wish to repeat himself), etc, instead of the slight repetition with regard to faith healing, on which Bad Faith mainly dwells. My favourite section was (unsurprisingly) the part about the statutes which make it so difficult to prosecute faith healing parents.

Bad Faith is heart-breaking and shocking. I finished this book whilst getting a train to York to see a show, and I couldn't get it out of my head during the train ride or the show itself. Sorry, Alan Cumming. Some aspects hurt me, some angered me and others just caused bewilderment at how anybody could think that was acceptable.

This is a compassionate yet logical discussion of how a misunderstanding of certain religious tenets can lead to severe harm, despite the multitude of scientific advances. Dr Offit has written several other books which I'm looking forward to reading, including Killing Us Softly: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine, which I've totally already bought.

I recomend reading Dr Offit's article in the New York Times - What Would Jesus Do About Measles?  - or listen to an interview with him about this book here.

Review: Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering

This is an interesting book to read on the train, or in a hospital. At least your fellow passengers and patients seem to regard you with some interest anyway... or maybe that's just concern. To some extent though, that's Dr Bering's point with this book. Sexual deviance is far more common and far less dangerous than is commonly believed, and shouldn't be regarded with fear or disgust. Even if you are sat across from a grouchy looking redhead reading a suspect-looking book.

Summary: “You are a sexual deviant. A pervert, through and through.” We may not want to admit it, but as the award-winning columnist and psychologist Jesse Bering reveals in Perv, there is a spectrum of perversion along which we all sit. Whether it’s voyeurism, exhibitionism, or your run-of-the-mill foot fetish, we all possess a suite of sexual tastes as unique as our fingerprints—and as secret as the rest of the skeletons we’ve hidden in our closets.

Combining cutting-edge studies and critiques of landmark research and conclusions drawn by Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and the DSM-5, Bering pulls the curtain back on paraphilias, arguing that sexual deviance is commonplace. He explores the countless fetishists of the world, including people who wear a respectable suit during the day and handcuff a willing sexual partner at night. But he also takes us into the lives of “erotic outliers,” such as a woman who falls madly in love with the Eiffel Tower; a pair of deeply affectionate identical twins; those with a particular penchant for statues; and others who are enamored of crevices not found on the human body.

Moving from science to politics, psychology, history, and his own reflections on growing up gay in America, Bering confronts hypocrisy, prejudice, and harm as they relate to sexuality on a global scale. Humanizing so-called deviants while at the same time asking serious questions about the differences between thought and action, he presents us with a challenge: to understand that our best hope of solving some of the most troubling problems of our age hinges entirely on the amoral study of sex.

I actually ended up really liking this book. It's been on my wishlist for a while, but I never took the plunge and got a copy in case it was one of those heavy, dry scientific non-fictions or one of those fluffy popular science books. In the end, it was neither. Dr Bering writes very well and avoids, for the most part, becoming stuffy or condescending. It was an accessible read and one that I enjoyed picking up in the evenings.

The point of Perv, in a nutshell, is that the sexual preferences of others (homosexuality, acrotomophilia, sadism, etc) is completely and utterless harmless in itself and should be treated as such. If it isn't causing any damage, why does it matter? It sounds fairly logical, but then Dr Bering brings up the concept of paedophilia. The meaning has been distorted in recent years, but he points out that the word refers only to those with a preference for young children not those who act upon their desires or have been convicted of a sexual offence. Suddenly the 'has any harm been caused?' doesn't seem so innocuous, but what's the alternative? Imprisoning people for their thoughts?

It's an interesting point. He raises the example of a (hypothetical) necrophilia club that devised a way for their members to have sex with dead people. Each member would donate their body to the club after death so the other members could have sex with the corpse. A study asked participants whether it would be wrong for a man to have sex with a dead woman who has given her body to the club.

Most participants in this study defaulted to a 'presumption of harm' in their moral reasoning. Even when they were told explicitly that the woman didn't have any family members who might get upset if they found out what happened to her corpse, that the club isn't interested in recruiting or harming living people, that neither the man nor any of the other club members suffer any regrets or anguish about their sexuality, that the group's activities are kept private and consensual, that the man used protection to prevent disease, and per her instructions, that the club cremated the woman's body after the man was done having sex with it, people still insisted that somehow or other, someone, somewhere, must be getting harmed.   

Perv looks at why/how we attempt to impose our own morality on others by assuming that a certain sexual preference is 'wrong' and therefore must be harming someone, even when there's zero evidence to support that view. That said, it's not a preachy book at all. Dr Bering doesn't look down from his high horse to lecture on how we should all be more open-minded. It's more of a psychological perspective than a sermon.

I particularly appreciate that the book took the time to explain the differences in sexual 'deviance' between men and women, and gay and straight people. For example, men are much more likely to have a paraphilia (an abnormal sexual desire) than women, but sexuality was irrelevant. A lot of similar books either lump everybody together or only deal with heterosexual male preferences, so the expansive explanation was interesting.

I do recommend reading this. I learned a lot but, more importantly, I actually enjoyeding reading this book too. I was quite happy to just sit with it for several hours on the go - it's fascinating, accessible, thought-provoking and downright enjoyable.

What non-fiction books have you been reading this year? 

Review: Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

Last year I read and reviewed Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, and immediatley ran out and purchased everything else that Atul Gawande had ever written. See, we say things like that a lot in our little book blogging world, but in this case that is genuinely and literally exactly what I did. These books are perfect in a lot of different ways and I really recommend them to everybody, whether they have a medical background or not.

Summary: In this unflinching look at medicine today, gifted surgeon and bestselling author Atul Gawande visits battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, a polio outbreak in India and malpractice courtrooms. He charts the race to extend cystic fibrosis patients' lives and discusses the ethical implications of doctors' participation in lethal injections in the United States. Examining everything from the influence of money on modern medicines to the contentious history of hand washing, this book provides a rare insight into what it takes to go from good to better.

The key thing to know about this book is that it's not about how doctors can make their patients better, it's about the ways they can improve to make their own practice and treatment regime better. That said, it's far from a manual aimed at lecturing hospital staff, it's an accessible and engaging collection of thoughts that I would say is aimed at the general public.

Mr Gawande has divided his book into three sections - Diligence, Doing Right and Ingenuity - which he says are the three core requirements for success in medicine, or any endeavour that involves risk and responsibility.

Diligence was perhaps my favourite of the three sections as it focuses more on doctors as people, and the tiny little everyday responsibilities that I find fascinating. It looks at how, despite the movement started in the 1840s to encourage doctors to wash their hands, a surprisingly large amount of them still forget when running from patient to patient. We also examine the huge-scale campaigns to eradicate polio and the effort required to vaccinate every single child in India, and the brave doctors who accompany the military to Iraq, Afghanistan and every other campaign across the globe.

Doing Right looks at the obligations that doctors and other medical professionals are under, and whether they are always strictly fair. For example, there's a chapter on whether it should be obligatory for a doctor to attend during a state execution or whether this directly contravenes their purpose, which is to heal people. I also really enjoyed the chapter about how doctors examine the more intimate areas of a person's body and whether a chaperone should be required.

Lastly, we look at Ingenuity, which covers the introduction of the Apgar score (which assesses the health of a newborn baby) as well as looking at how medical centers and hospitals and can improve by comparing the statistics of other, similar centers.

“It is unsettling to find how little it takes to defeat success in medicine. You come as a professional equipped with expertise and technology. You do not imagine that a mere matter of etiquette could foil you. But the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific--matters of how casual you should be, how formal, how reticent, how forthright. Also: how apologetic, how self-confident, how money-minded. In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating. How each interaction is negotiated can determine whether a doctor is trusted, whether a patient is heard, whether the right diagnosis is made, the right treatment given. But in this realm there are no perfect formulas.”

However, the topics almost fall into irrelevance when compared to Mr Gawande's prose. He writes with such humanity and grace that you'd be forgiven for thinking he was an author by trade, not a surgeon. I was also impressed by his seeming complete lack of bias. There's a chapter on medical malpractice lawsuits which was angering me more and more as I read on (as a disclaimer, I defend doctors from lawsuits for a living!) but he maintains a perfect tone throughout that accepts that doctors are people too. Mistakes are made, some are unavoidable whilst some are not, but perhaps patients do deserve some compensation when an avoidable mistake is made.

I'm unsure which of the two books, Complications or Better, I prefer. The topics are slightly different but naturally there is some overlap. Complications focuses more on surgical procedures but therefore involves more case studies, which doesn't really interest me because I do nothing but nosy at other people's illnesses at work. I can see how that might interest people not quite as pompous as myself, however.

Better doesn't feature any case studies and the sections on execution chambers and eradicating polio (amongst others) were fascinating. However, there are a few chapters on the cost of treatments, statistics and medical hierarchy that just weren't applicable to countries other than America. I ended up skipping the section on funding because it made so little sense to me. It's written just as well as the remainder of the book, but it just didn't appeal to me as a UK resident.   

To solve the comparison problem, I'd honestly just read both of them. And also Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End. I haven't read it yet, but I don't see it being anything less than amazing if his previous books are anything to go by. My one complaint about these series is that the silver leaf around the edges of the book does tend to rub off, which looks quite scruffy 280 pages later.

Read my review of Complications here. And then go read both these books!

Review: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande

Oh how I loved this book. It might be because I was just relieved to read something, anything, that wasn't Armada, but I don't think that would be doing Atul Gawande justice. This book is beautifully written, occasionally heart-warming and so much more than one of those generic 'horrific tales from A&E' memoirs. 

Summary: Gently dismantling the myth of medical infallibility, Dr. Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is essential reading for anyone involved in medicine--on either end of the stethoscope. Medical professionals make mistakes, learn on the job, and improvise much of their technique and self-confidence. Gawande's tales are humane and passionate reminders that doctors are people, too. His prose is thoughtful and deeply engaging, shifting from sometimes painful stories of suffering patients (including his own child) to intriguing suggestions for improving medicine with the same care he expresses in the surgical theater. Some of his ideas will make health care providers nervous or even angry, but his disarming style, confessional tone, and thoughtful arguments should win over most readers.

I should begin by saying that this relates directly to my day job - I advise and defend Doctors and other health professionals who are the subject of legal claims due to an alleged negligence. I've worked on neurosurgery, retained objects and delayed diagnosis claims, amongst others, so this book has a certain amount of interest for me.

Complications is far from merely a collection of anecdotes about 'when things go wrong,' however, and I do think it would interest everybody. Instead, Dr Gawande examines the concepts of surgery itself and discusses the different theories behind why things go wrong and the difficulty of actually implementing improvements. It's absolutely fascinating.

Two things really got me about this book - 1) the beauty of the writing, and 2) the humanity behind it. I propose to deal with them in turn, if I may. The prose in Complications is amazing though. He doesn't just write well 'for a surgeon,' Atul Gawande has a style that any author would be proud of. I've seen how surgeons write, and usually you're lucky if they've managed to spell the patient's name correctly. Mr Gawande is eloquent, articulate and patient as he guides us through the unforeseen conundrums of what surgery actually entails.

However, he doesn't beat the reader over their head with his qualifications. Obviously he references his job fairly often, as well as anecdotes that have come from his colleagues. What impressed me though, is that he also refers to his personal life and isn't above admitting fallibility when it comes to personal, medical decisions. There's a chapter that discusses the need to train new surgeons v providing the best possible care for patients. Trainees need to 'practice,' but who really wants an inexperienced student cutting into them? Mr Gawande refers to his own experience, in which he was asked whether he minded a surgical trainee performing his son's operation. Despite all his logic to the contrary, he refused. 

This is the uncomfortable truth about teaching. By traditional ethics and public insistence (not to mention court rulings), a patient's right to the best care possible must trump the objective of training novices. We want perfection without practice. Yet everyone is harmed if no one is trained for the future. So learning is hidden, behind drapes and anaesthesia and the elisions of language. Nor does the dilemma apply just to residents, physicians in training. In fact, the process of learning turns out to extend longer than most people know.

The book is divided into three parts, called Fallibility, Mystery and Uncertainty. The first section deals with the topics I've touched on - the best way to train surgeons, when/why good doctors go bad, the lessons learned from surgical conferences, etc. 

The second part, Mystery, was my least favourite, although still interesting. Essentially it discusses three cases and the conceptual issues that arose from those particular matters. There's a TV presenter that undergoes surgery to control her chronic blushing, for example, and Mr Gawande touches on the judgement she's since received since her surgery was performed. They're interesting, but I personally preferred the more abstract chapters.

The Uncertainty chapters swing back into the discussion, dealing with topics like the inevitable requirement to take chances when performing surgery, the extent to which patients should be given control over their own care and whether human instinct or computers are better at providing accurate diagnoses.

Complications is perfectly accessible for a layperson. Every term and every abbreviation is seamlessly explained within the text, without the need to flick back to a glossary or consult a footnote. There are only one or two places that the mildly squeamish may balk at, but you can see them coming so it would be easy to gloss over them if necessary.

I hadn't realised that this was published way back in 2002 - it's just recently been rereleased in a pretty cover to match his other, newer books, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance and Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End. Still, as the focus is on conceptual discussion more than particular treatments, I wouldn't think Complications is horrendously out of date. I just know I'm already desperate to read his other books. This one is perfect.'

Visit Mr Gawande's website here.    

Review: The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller

Or, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (And Two Not So Great Ones) Saved My Life, to use the full and imposing title.

I'd really expected to love this book, and I did end up liking Andy Miller's voice, at least for the most part. I was just a a bit confused about the overall point of the book and slightly immensely uninterested by same-y novels chosen to discuss.

Summary: A working father whose life no longer feels like his own discovers the transforming powers of great (and downright terrible) literature in this laugh-out-loud memoir.

Andy Miller had a job he quite liked, a family he loved, and no time at all for reading. Or so he kept telling himself. But, no matter how busy or tired he was, something kept niggling at him. Books. Books he'd always wanted to read. Books he'd said he'd read that he actually hadn't. Books that whispered the promise of escape from the daily grind. And so, with the turn of a page, Andy began a year of reading that was to transform his life completely.

This book is Andy's inspirational and very funny account of his expedition through literature: classic, cult, and everything in between. Beginning with a copy of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita that he happens to find one day in a bookstore, he embarks on a literary odyssey. From Middlemarch to Anna Karenina to A Confederacy of Dunces, this is a heartfelt, humorous, and honest examination of what it means to be a reader, and a witty and insightful journey of discovery and soul-searching that celebrates the abiding miracle of the book and the power of reading.

The blurb seemed to imply to me that this book is about a man who had never known the joy of reading, but who started to feel the lack and therefore challenged himself to read fifty of the greats. His life would be forever altered, etc etc. It's definitely not that... but I'm not really sure what it is, either.

It turns out that Andy Miller is a previously published author, ran a successful chain bookstore and subsequently worked as an editor for a large publishing house. Not exactly the unread eejit implied. The book just doesn't know what it wants to be - there are rambling anecdotes about irrelevant topics, musings about bookish topics, snobbish rants about authors I've never heard of and the occasional smugness about his List.

Ah, the list. Let's talk about that. Andy has created a 'List of Betterment' by choosing ten books that he feels would, obviously, better his life by reading. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I'd had any interest in the ten books he chose to read (right - click to enlarge).  Of these ten, I have read two and only wish to read one further. I have an almost anti-interest in four of them, for God's sake.

He likes left-wing political symbolism and half-mad, epic, rambling monologues, but dislikes Pride and Prejudice! That's fine, to each their own, but I was never going to get on with a bookish memoir written by this person.

So Andy finishes his List about halfway through this book, which prompts a change of tone somewhat. His ten books are completed... so he just decides to read forty more. The thing is, he doesn't tell you what the list consists of or where it's from, and he starts to like the sound of his own voice a bit more. It becomes less about the novels and more about his life, but not the funny parts - just monologues of how he idolises novelists I've never heard of.

It's a shame because I really had expected to love this book, but I ended up actually avoiding picking it back up once I'd put it down. We started off well enough - I really like Andy Miller's narrative voice and he made me giggle out loud a few times as he discusses his daily life and his reading history.

Most straight men are an embarrassment; that much is clear. They enjoy porn, Sky Sports, racing cars, barbecues and gadgets; they stink of Lynx deodrant. Though they mostly prefer the company of other men, they are scared stiff of being mistaken for women or homosexuals. In general, as we have seen, they perceive reading as a feminised activity and, although they do read books, these tend to be about either Joe Strummer or the Mafia, or have some rigid practical application, e.g. How to Cook Great Food without Looking Too Gay. According to a survey from the National Literacy Trust, four out of five fathers have never read a bedtime story to their children, either because they see it as the mother's job or because We're Going on a Bear Hunt doesn't have enough lesbians in it.

It's very contradictory, which irritates me. Even aside from the 'I need more books in my life, even though I'm an editor with an impressive reading history' shtick, Andy Miller never seems to be able to consistently convey one opinion. He states at one point that everybody has their own list and should read for pleasure, not what they're told to... but then spends pages and pages blasting Dan Brown (a pet hate)! God knows why he read it in the first place as it wasn't on his list, but there was no discernible reason for it. Sometimes I wonder if authors don't spend so much time abusing Dan Brown just because he's infinitely more successful.

Then again, there is a mild tone of snobbishness from around the halfway point, so perhaps I shouldn't be too surprised. He and his wife decide to read War & Peace together, and I swear you'd think they were the only people to ever have done so. There's a lengthy pretentious paragraph about how his wife swears she will never need to read another book, which ends with a rather condescending 'you go girlfriend!' 

The full list of Andy's List of Betterment has been thoughtfully included at the back of the book, with helpful little asterisks to denote which books are the easiest to get into... and it makes zero sense. Anna Karenina and The Master and Margarita but NOT Lord of the Flies or The Code of the Woosters? This is just confusing.

I just didn't get on with The Year of Reading Dangerously. It's hard to tell how much of that is due to inherent flaws within the book and how much is simply because my tastes vary quite drastically from those of the author. Either way, I was irritated by the pretentious tone, inconsistencies and my confusion over what the damn point of the book was.

What books do you think should be on any 'List of Betterment?'

Review: My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

This book has languished on my TBR shelf for so long that I can't even remember why I wanted to read it in the first place. I had a vague idea that Ellie liked it, but other than that it had just become bedroom furniture. I was used to seeing that shiny blue spine blinking out at me. But no more! I finally pulled it down because we were in the last weeks of War & Peace and I wanted to read something, anything, that didn't involve sudden anti-climactic deaths or peasant infantrymen being shot by the side of the road. My Family and Other Animals seemed like a reasonably safe bet.

Plot summary: Sometimes it's pretty hard to tell them apart... my family and the animals, that is. I don't know why my brothers and sisters complain so much. With snakes in the bath and scorpions on the lunch table, our house, on the island of Corfu, is a bit like a circus. So they should feel right at home...

I keep wavering over whether to file this under fiction or non-fiction. It's about half-and-half between family anecdotes and descriptions of the wildlife of Corfu. I know most bookshops and even Amazon have it filed under either Natural History or Biography, but it feels like fiction. The anecdotes are just too perfect and too witty to be completely true, which surely makes it fiction... but then the wildlife parts are too lengthy and too technical for it to be purely fantasy. I can't even explain how much this distresses me.

Essentially, this is the mostly true story of when a young Gerald and his family decided to up sticks and move to Corfu. Along the way they accumulate a whole host of absolutely mental animals including dogs, snakes, scorpions, turtles and gulls, to the not-always-amused reactions of the whole family.

LATER: AH! I just remembered why I bought this! I started writing 'they accumulate a zoo of animals,' and THEN I realised I bought this off the back of We Bought A Zoo. HA!!! Victooooooory!

Having said that, I loved this book from the first page when it made me laugh out loud on a train, and I immediately texted Ellie to let her know I loved it. It's funny and light and will just generally cheer you up, no matter how miserable you feel.

Dodo decided quite early on in her career that Mother belonged to her, but she was not over-possessive at first until one afternoon Mother went off to town to do some shopping and left Dodo behind. Convinced she would never see Mother again, Dodo went into mourning and waddled, howling sorrowfully, around the house, occassionally being so overcome with grief that her leg would come out of joint. She greeted Mother's return with incredulous joy, but made up her mind that from that moment she would not let Mother out of her sight, for fear she escaped again. So she attached herself to Mother with the tenacity of a limpet, never moving more than a couple of feet away at the most. If Mother sat down, Dodo would lie at her feet; if Mother had to get up and cross the room for a book or a cigarettte, Dodowould accompany her, and then they would return together and sit down again, Dodo giving a deep sigh of satisfaction at the thought that once more she had foiled Mother's attempts at escape.

I have to admit that I preferred the family anecdotes an awful lot more than the wildlifery bits, and yes yes, I know that the animal parts are the basic point of the book's existence. In my defence, some of them are long and quite technical, and honestly, I just don't care enough about how a gecko walks to want to read two full pages on it. So there. Those parts are written well and everything, but they just weren't interesting to me.

Whilst I suspect the funny parts are heavily edited, (they're just too perfect, you know?) it doesn't matter because they're hilarious. I had to stop reading at one point because I kept getting strange glances at work. I cried. I actually cried. 

Some of the characters are a little annoying, but I suspect that's to liven up the humour a bit. It definitely didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book. 

I finished My Family and Other Animals with that lovely warm fuzzy feeling you get when you've just finished an amazing book. Admittedly it helps when your only recent base for comparison is War & Peace. I immediately started looking up Gerald Durrell's other books and I'm looking forward to reading them... even if I can't figure out where to file the bloody things.   

Visit the Gerald Durrell Foundation here.