Here are 100 books that On Call fans have personally recommended if you like
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Healthcare and the system that delivers it have been central to my life since I was a child. I was born with hemophilia and experienced many complications and hospitalizations. I received a liver transplant thirteen years ago because a blood transfusion-acquired Hepatitis C damaged it. I have been active in advocacy organizations, including being President of the Hemophilia Association of New York, being on the Board of LiveOnNY, and being the founder and President of the Hemophilia Services Consortium. I have interacted with many patients and their families and strongly felt the need to offer a book that informs, inspires, and helps them manage the challenges of a scary diagnosis.
This is a fascinating book about the history of medical advances. It is an engaging and well-written book that offers short and sweet – yet inspiring – stories of medical conquests and progress.
These include development of drugs, advances in knowledge that lead to improvements in the care of heart disease, cancer, and even childbirth. I have often said that advances in medicine are akin to building a brick wall one brick at a time. This book informs the reader about many of the most important bricks.
It is inspiring to see the progress that has been made, and one should expect will continue to be made.
Human history hinges on the battle to confront our most dangerous enemies - the half-dozen diseases responsible for killing almost all of mankind. The story of our medical triumphs reveals an inspiring tapestry of human achievement, but the journey was far from smooth. It is a tale replete with dramatic episodes as spellbinding as any blockbuster Hollywood movie.
In The Masters of Medicine, Dr. Andrew Lam, an award-winning author and retinal surgeon, distills the long arc of medical progress down to the crucial moments that were responsible for the world's greatest medical miracles. He brings to life heroic tales of…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Healthcare and the system that delivers it have been central to my life since I was a child. I was born with hemophilia and experienced many complications and hospitalizations. I received a liver transplant thirteen years ago because a blood transfusion-acquired Hepatitis C damaged it. I have been active in advocacy organizations, including being President of the Hemophilia Association of New York, being on the Board of LiveOnNY, and being the founder and President of the Hemophilia Services Consortium. I have interacted with many patients and their families and strongly felt the need to offer a book that informs, inspires, and helps them manage the challenges of a scary diagnosis.
Dr. Magee had a career that spanned everything from working as a primary care doctor to working for the government to working for big pharma. He is very open about all his experiences and in explaining why the healthcare system is so complex and dysfunctional.
He shares individual stories that take place in each of these venues that are entertaining and informative, and I very much liked.
"Code Blue" is the phrase customarily announced over hospital public address systems to alert staff to an urgent medical emergency requiring immediate attention.
How has the United States, with more resources than any nation, developed a healthcare system that delivers much poorer results, at near double the cost of any other developed country-such that legendary seer Warren Buffett calls the Medical Industrial Complex "the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness"? Mike Magee, M.D., who worked for years inside the Medical Industrial Complex administering a hospital and then as a senior executive at the giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer, has spent the last…
Healthcare and the system that delivers it have been central to my life since I was a child. I was born with hemophilia and experienced many complications and hospitalizations. I received a liver transplant thirteen years ago because a blood transfusion-acquired Hepatitis C damaged it. I have been active in advocacy organizations, including being President of the Hemophilia Association of New York, being on the Board of LiveOnNY, and being the founder and President of the Hemophilia Services Consortium. I have interacted with many patients and their families and strongly felt the need to offer a book that informs, inspires, and helps them manage the challenges of a scary diagnosis.
This book is a wonderfully frank and eloquent story of a young boy with big dreams who is crippled by polio and must come to terms with his new reality.
The book focuses on what it means to be masculine with paralyzed legs and redefined ambitions. Kriegel is an accomplished writer who combines erudite and intellectual writing with the candid thoughts and emotions of a teenager. The book offers brilliant writing and wisdom for anyone learning to cope with any perceived limitations.
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Healthcare and the system that delivers it have been central to my life since I was a child. I was born with hemophilia and experienced many complications and hospitalizations. I received a liver transplant thirteen years ago because a blood transfusion-acquired Hepatitis C damaged it. I have been active in advocacy organizations, including being President of the Hemophilia Association of New York, being on the Board of LiveOnNY, and being the founder and President of the Hemophilia Services Consortium. I have interacted with many patients and their families and strongly felt the need to offer a book that informs, inspires, and helps them manage the challenges of a scary diagnosis.
Can one be poetic about coming to terms with a genetic condition that results in weak and atrophied muscles that prevent normal movement?
This book, originally written in Norwegian, is structured as a memoir, but each episode in Grue’s life reveals his coming to terms with his disease and finding success and satisfaction with his work and his family.
In the final analysis, Grue concludes that he has found a “life like yours.”
My soul still possesses a little of my teenage self, which is why I set my latest book in 1987. Whitney Houston had one of the biggest songs, Dirty Dancing was released, and a little girl nicknamed Baby Jessica was rescued from a well. I’m told this makes The Totally True Story of Gracie Byrne “historical fiction” which, honestly, is a little alarming, because sometimes 1987 doesn’t seem like that long ago. Other times it feels ancient. I picked a few of these books because they’re full of nostalgia for a slower, analog time. But mainly I chose them for the voice, characters, and great writing.
Tell the Wolves I’m Home is literary and lyrical and it broke my heart into a thousand pieces while simultaneously piecing it back together again.
When June loses her beloved Uncle Finn at the height of the AIDs epidemic, she also loses the person who understands her the most. Then she forms a friendship with the partner he left behind, Toby, and together they help each other through the loneliness they both feel without him.
I liked that this book isn’t afraid to explore complicated relationships – especially between siblings. It also shines a light on a time when ignorance caused so much pain, through characters who are confused, flawed, and deeply human. The writing is beautiful.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A heartfelt story of love, grief, and renewal about two unlikely friends who discover that sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost someone until you’ve found them
“A dazzling debut novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Tremendously moving.”—The Wall Street Journal “Touching and ultimately hopeful.”—People
1987. The only person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus is her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can be herself only in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too…
I came of age in Oklahoma as a gay youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s, keeping myself hidden out of safety and shame. Once I was old enough to leave my small-minded town and be myself, I crashed headlong into the oncoming AIDS epidemic. It set me on a path to understanding the world and my place in it as a homosexual. I turned to reading about the lives and histories of those who came before me, to learn about their deaths and survivals in what could be an ugly, brutal world. These works continue to draw me, haunt me, and inspire me to share my story through my writing.
Oh, Was, how I love your relentlessly bleak, depressing sadness.
This is a strangely inventive novel that twines reality and fantasy into a brutal, desolate, yet gorgeous story of pain and survival. Told from the points of view of numerous characters, each story is tethered in some way to The Wizard of Oz, that venerable fable about good versus evil in the search for home.
Ryman introduces us to a main trio of characters whose lives are all equally harrowing–Dorothy Gael (the imagined inspiration for The Wizard of Oz heroine and the victim of familial sexual abuse), Frances Gumm (who becomes the tragic Judy Garland), and Jonathan (an actor experiencing AIDS-related dementia)–whose stories he intricately weaves together like a master craftsman. And while the novel is not a “happy” read by any stretch of the imagination, what has stayed with me throughout the past thirty years is its…
Dorothy, orphaned in the 1870s, goes to live with her Aunty Em and Uncle Henry. Baby Frances sings with her family on stage in the 1920s. From the settling of the West and the heyday of the studios, to the metropolis of modern Los Angeles, this book follows the development of the USA.
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
From the start, tented under bedcovers with a flashlight and diary, writing has been sheer joy and discovery. When I became aware that I was bisexual in my twenties, I wrote a memoir to make sense of my body, especially in light of my Christian upbringing, which became Swinging on the Garden Gate. When a fire burned all my belongings, including decades of writing, I found comfort in keeping a journal and was amazed that the practice still gave me hope. How? Why? My curiosity led to three books on writing as a transformational practice and countless workshops. The mystery of how creating something creates the creator fuels everything I do.
Some of the worst memoir-writing advice I’ve ever heard is, “Don’t write in the midst of emotional turmoil.” If Mark Doty had listened, readers would have never received the gift of Heaven’s Coast. No doubt this memoir began as a journaled record of Doty losing his beloved partner to AIDS.
His record of love, loss, and grief packs a punch because it’s so raw. It has lasting power because Doty took time to revise, adding eloquence, perspective, and insight. This is also a great model for integrating reflection into a story.
HEAVEN'S COAST is an anatomy of loss: tender, heartbreaking, consoling and, ultimately, incredibly moving. Beginning with the first onset of AIDS and its lengthening shadow over a blissful relationship, the book follows the shifting patterns between two loves as the illness takes hold - the change in them and the change in the way they perceive the world, through the lens of grief. Doty examines the nature of AIDS as opposed to other illnesses, the responses of society, the frustration of medical care and the exhausting - and occasionally uplifting - burden of caring for the dying at home.
My passion for this topic dates back to my childhood and being impressed by the scary diseases and unhygienic toilets that were part of my family lore. I grew up to be a historian of medicine, which allowed me to indulge my interest in deadly diseases—at a safe historical distance! That curiosity led me to write the Gospel of Germs, a history of popular understandings of the germ theory of disease. Post-COVID, I am thinking about how to get ready for the next big pandemic that climate change and globalization will likely throw at us: will it be bird flu, dengue, mpox, or some new COVID variant?
Of the many riveting books written about the other “big one” of the 20th century—the AIDs pandemic, still ongoing—I especially love France’s account because it combines the power of a personal memoir with a “you are there” description of the plague’s unfolding in the United States.
I also like how France shows the positives in an otherwise tragic story. When faced with a deadly new disease, grassroots activists waged brilliant fights to get attention to its dangers and, in the process, changed American science for the good.
Winner of The Green Carnation Prize for LGBTQ literature
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT non-fiction
Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2017
'This superbly written chronicle will stand as a towering work in its field' Sunday Times
'Inspiring, uplifting and necessary reading' - Steve Silberman author of Neurotribes, Financial Times
How to Survive a Plague by David France is the riveting, powerful and profoundly moving story of the AIDS epidemic and the grass-roots movement of activists, many of them facing their own life-or-death struggles, who grabbed the reins of scientific research to help develop the drugs that…
I’m the global health reporter for The New York Times, the latest iteration in 30 years as a foreign correspondent. I’ve covered wars and humanitarian disasters, but it’s health stories that have always drawn me most. Health stories are intimate and personal, but they’re also about politics and economics, and social norms – about power. I’ve written about the Zika virus crisis in Brazil, child malnutrition in India, teen suicide in the Arctic – but no story has drawn me in and kept me riveted like Africa’s AIDS pandemic has over the past 25 years. I intend to keep reporting on it until the day a cure is found.
Craig Timberg was a reporting colleague when I was a correspondent in South Africa, and became a friend, one with whom I often passionately disagreed.
That’s why I suggest this book: it offers a very different perspective than mine. Craig and his co-author Halperin, an epidemiologist whose work had a big influence on Craig’s thinking, draw a clear through-line for how Western powers created the sparks of the African epidemic then vigorously fanned them.
A significant chunk of the book focuses on solutions (Halperin is a vociferous champion of male circumcision as an intervention to drive down the spread of the virus). It’s a brisk read that makes complex epidemiological dynamics accessible.
In this groundbreaking narrative, longtime Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg and award-winning AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin tell the surprising story of how Western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and then fanned its rise. Drawing on remarkable new science, Tinderbox overturns the conventional wisdom on the origins of this deadly pandemic and the best ways to fight it today.
Recent genetic studies have traced the birth of HIV to the forbidding equatorial forests of Cameroon, where chimpanzees carried the virus for millennia without causing a major outbreak in humans. During the Scramble for Africa, colonial companies blazed new routes…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I first travelled to Zimbabwe in 1984, eager both to “build scientific socialism” but also to answer two big questions. How can people proclaim rage at certain injustices yet at the same time perpetuate them against certain other people? And, could I learn to be a better (more empathetic) man than my upbringing inclined me towards? Years of teaching in the rural areas, and then becoming a father taught me “yes” to the second question but for the first, I needed to continue to pursue that knowledge with colleagues, students, mentors, friends and family. Today, my big question is, how can we push together to get these monsters of capitalism, patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and ecocide off our backs?
A big mistake in much radical analysis is to characterize problems in dualistic terms that externalize responsibility from Africa (Rodney, of course, is wide open to that critique). Thus, colonialism is not just irredeemably bad but simple to identify and directly related to white skin. The end of formal colonialism provided new targets in sometimes caricature form: black-skin-white-mask neocolonialism and neoliberalism, notably. Such things undoubtedly exist. However, Kenworthy’s brilliant, gob-smacking analysis of the unintended consequences of life-saving technologies reveals levels of complexity and complicity that belie easy dualisms. How does something that promises liberation from mass suffering and death (anti-retroviral drugs) become a machine to entrench corrupt elites and opportunistic NGOs, to sell cheap textiles in America, and to exploit poor women’s unremunerated care work? Read, weep, and lose your illusions about corporate social responsibility.
As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly ""scaled up"" programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts.
In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political…
