Books like Been There, Done That — picked by fans

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.

A small number of Scots at the end of the Victorian era and throughout the Edwardian era were eager to live in a world ungoverned by Protestant Christianity and unrestricted by its strict sexual morality.

Cheadle introduces readers to socialists, freethinkers, and writers in Glasgow and Edinburgh who advocated for sexual freedoms grounded in new forms of political, religious, and cultural thought. One example is Jane Hume Clapperton, who was deeply involved in the suffrage movement, described birth control methods in her 1888 novel Margaret Dunmore, and demanded full sexual freedom for women. 

Sexual Progressives brings them to life, showing how they questioned dominant morality and envisioned a way of life in which people could prioritize sexual freedom and pleasure. You won’t forget them.

Katerina Liskova’s intriguing sociological and historical study provides a deep dive into the creation of “expert knowledge” by progressive sexologists in the former socialist state of Czechoslovakia. She argues convincingly that while American housewives pottered around their kitchens in the 1950s, Czechoslovak women experienced a sexual revolution after abortion was legalized, same sex love was decriminalized, and scientists focused on how to improve women’s sex lives. State efforts to promote the ideal of full gender equality within romantic relations gave women new opportunities for education and professional advancement that their mothers and grandmothers could scarcely have dreamed of.

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. 

Every generation believes that they see further and think deeper – and weirder – than every one that came before. From this perspective, we imagine that we can do everything differently that those who preceded us. In this book, one of the creators of the so-called New Journalism shows just how wrong we are. In particular, Talese provides a tour of the history of sexual mores, how cultures reflect those mores, and how tradition turns out to be a more powerful cultural magnet than we expect. We can try to make our own new ways in a lot of areas, but the biological pull we all experience invariably pulls us back to a few tendencies and trends we will likely never shake as a species.

Clement explores the working class environment that produced what we think of as “normal” relations between young men and women.

The commonly used term at the time, “treating,” has disappeared. But in the early 20th century this practice, which shared some features with prostitution, turned a search for fun, gendered scripts, and wage discrepancies between men and women into the general model of what would become the classic practice of dating.