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.

Focusing on the often misunderstood and unknown aspects of the vagina, uterus, and ovaries, this book demystifies the female body through science, research, and individual stories, all while pointing out the inequities that exist when it comes to knowledge about women’s health relative to men’s.

This book serves as a rallying cry to people everywhere: Vaginas and their surrounding organs are under-researched and misunderstood—and that has major consequences for everyone. We both learned so much from reading this book! (For example: Did you know your eggs choose which sperm to let in?) 

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.

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.

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.

It is all the fault of the corridor… I’ve always been fascinated by the family – what is a family, how does it function?

But where did we get the idea that it should be a tight nuclear unit? In medieval times, family encompassed a swathe of relations and hangers-on who lived together in large unprivate households.

When I stumbled across Lawrence Stone’s controversial, but utterly compelling, analysis of the changes that resulted in the modern nuclear family, I was hooked. Once corridors, which allowed rooms with doors to open off them, were put into buildings, privacy became the norm, and the smaller family began to take shape.  

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.

I read Tropic of Cancer at the beginning of my writing career, soon after I’d begun living on my own for the first time. Miller’s life as a Brooklyn boy in Paris, struggling to survive and to write, seemed similar in so many ways to my own life in Manhattan. I’ve since read Tropic of Cancer multiple times and have portions memorized. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Henry Miller—that’s how taken I was by his voice. Miller taught me that it’s possible to write a great book that’s voice-driven rather than plot-driven.