100 Books Like Been There, Done That

I first encountered medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris when she published The Butchering Art, a biographer of pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister. This is another gore-flecked narrative that focuses on facial surgeon Harold Gillies’ pioneering work formulating ingenious surgical innovations and transforming the lives of patients disfigured fighting in WW1.

Plastic surgery has been around since the French Revolution, but attempts at facial reconstruction were limited. Gillies became fascinated by plastic surgery after watching French surgeon Hippolyte Morestin remove a cancer tumor from a patient’s face and cover it with a flap of skin taken from their own neck. In 1916, he requisitioned a ward at Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot, to cope with the grotesque procession of disfigured men disembarking from the hospital trains. He assembled a team of retired doctors, medical students, and even a vet to try to give these men their dignity back. A Daily Mail reporter at… show more.

Women are more than their vaginas—but guess what? Vaginas are, themselves, utterly fascinating, powerful, provocative! This book takes a look backward through history, all the ridiculous things that make doctors thought vaginas did (like wandering womb syndrome), and then gives us the scoop of modern understanding. The clitoris, for instance, is so much more than we might expect—and made of erectile tissue, just like the penis! Speaking of penises, we hear a lot about ducks. Ducks are weird, man. It’s a delightful romp through anatomy and science, medicine and history, and it just might break us from thinking that vaginas are taboo. 

This book does my favorite thing: It takes peculiar historical and scientific facts, and then gives them back to readers as a riveting, funny, bizarre journey. It’s just the sort of book that makes you stop, call a friend, and say did you know?? I am, myself,… show more.

Two pharmacists sit in a Boston courtroom accused of murder. The weapon: a fungus. The death count: 100 and rising. These facts set the stage for a true-crime thriller by investigative journalist Jason Dearen, and it has the makings of a horror movie. There’s scientific hubris, sketchy ethics, a cover-up, and a monster, too: a slimy, sticky, fungal mold that infected patients and began eating their brains alive. It’s riveting, packed with information about how fungal spores managed to contaminate a medical supply chain, and frankly hard to put down. I have done my share of forensic research, and never have I encountered killer fungus before; I consider this an unmissable book.

I loved this book because it’s a completely fresh perspective on death. While Stiff goes into the “lives” of cadavers and how they benefit society through research, this book covers the people who work with them in every aspect.

She talks to embalmers, crime scene cleaners, and death mask makers, and it’s just completely fascinating to me to learn about others’ experiences working among the dead. Plus, it’s beautifully written, with a kind and compassionate voice.

Using a truly interdisciplinary approach anchored in queer studies and affect theory, Frazier subverts the common approach to sex as privatized and located in individual subjectivity by looking at desire as a central component of political culture and power. The book explores a variety of Chilean political projects and actors throughout the twentieth century including feminists, the revolutionary left, and the military dictatorship to understand the ways in which both sexual and non-sexual practices and ideologies were intrinsically connected to emotions and ideas of pleasure and to sexualized and gendered discourses and experiences.

I originally read this book in my late teens, but I never forgot how much it taught me not just about flappers, but how history can leap off the page. I even cited this book as an influence in my book proposal for Glitter and Concrete.

Flappers were such a vibrant group of women, and Zeitz does them justice bringing them to life. I wanted the drag artists in my book to do the same. 

Michel Foucault had a variety of interests and wrote about many different topics – ecology and limits to growth were definitely not among them. I have found this book super useful though in thinking about what I call self-limitation, the processes through which individuals and collectives voluntarily craft the limits of their action and their power. Foucault’s book analyses how ancient Greeks perceived sexuality, and how they managed their bodies and desires. For the Greeks mastery over one’s wants was seen as key to personal freedom and development. Sexual freedom was part and parcel of the self-regulation of sexual desire. I can´t say I understand everything Foucault writes, but this is definitely one of his clearest books, with a more American style short prose than his previous labyrythical French writing. Reading about a civilization that was so similar, but also so different from ours, and how it regulated without suppressing… show more.

I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.

But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.

The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.

Helen Hamilton Gardener secured crucial support from leading politicians in Washington, DC for the 19th Amendment’s ratification. Despite her significance, few know the story of her exciting and controversial life. Fortunately, Kimberly Hamlin tells Gardener’s dramatic story in her book Free Thinker. Born Alice Chenoweth in 1853, she had to leave her job as a teacher in Ohio after an affair with a married school commissioner in 1876. She adopted the name Helen Hamilton Gardener and a range of modern ideas: women’s rights, opposition to the sexual double standard, and freethought. Gardener eventually became the highest-ranking female official in the federal government by the time of her death in 1925. Free Thinker provides a fascinating glimpse into the behind-the-scenes politics that led to the 19th Amendment’s ratification.

It is all very well and good to talk about the sexual revolution in places like New York City or San Francisco. But what did it look like in places like Kansas? This book tells you. It might surprise you that for college students the sexual revolution started with dorm rules in the 1950s. Or that concerns about overpopulation fueled distribution of the Pill. And that women’s liberation was a big deal even in fly-over country. Ultimately, this book makes clear that the changes that we connect with the Sexual Revolution happened in every corner of the United States.