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Year of the Tiger

Review by Claire Fallon

Alice Wong’s memoir is a moving addition to her celebrated body of work as an activist, community organizer, media maker and editor of the 2020 anthology Disability Visibility. In Year of the Tiger, Wong creates a collage of blog posts, artworks, interviews and other ephemera with disability at its center, seasoned generously with her quick wit and fierce calls to action. 

Wong emphasizes connection with others as a generative, necessary force in her life, and she incorporates a chorus of voices in these fragments to illuminate the experiences of people who are constantly confronted with a world built without disabled people in mind. In seven thematically distinct sections, Wong collects conversations with artists, activists and thinkers, each offering new perspectives and delights. She chats with W. Kamau Bell about disability representation in the 1999 film The Bone Collector and riffs on reframing ideas of beauty and attraction with the artist and author Riva Lehrer. Though they are often brief, these dialogues and excerpts come together into a kaleidoscopic image of Wong’s life, illuminated by her revolutionary ideas of interdependence and care. Access is love, she says, and love for the disabled community resounds throughout.

Wong’s thoughtful use of multimedia elements—cheeky cat-themed graphics, photographs from her Indiana childhood and a clever crossword puzzle, to name a few—adds playfulness and dimension to Year of the Tiger. She maintains the compelling conviction that pleasure and joy are crucial to activism and liberation, and these offerings demonstrate that belief. They also imbue the book with the scrappy spirit of zine-making, and others looking for creative encouragement will certainly find it here. 

In “No to Normal,” Wong writes, “Every day I experience the very real distance between myself and the nondisabled world, which, by the way, is the default we all exist in,” and this notion is the undercurrent that moves through the entire book. As this stylish memoir demonstrates, each person, disabled or not, can demand more from a world that is largely built without access in mind. Wong wants better for us all, and she will stop at nothing to get there.

In Year of the Tiger, Alice Wong creates a collage of blog posts, artworks and interviews about disability, seasoned generously with her quick wit and fierce calls to action.
NonfictionSocial Science

Raising Lazarus

Review by Alice Cary

“I can’t imagine another disease on the planet where if somebody didn’t get better, everybody in their life would abandon them,” said Chris Schaffner, director of a harm-reduction program in Peoria, Illinois. And yet, that’s the attitude many of us have toward people with addictions, thanks to America’s long-standing war on drugs mentality. After tackling the origins of the opioid crisis in Dopesick, along with its devastating effects on families near her adopted hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, Beth Macy continues this essential conversation in Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. Her fourth book zeroes in on why this crisis continues and how things can change, and the facts she presents will enlighten you and likely change your opinions on many important overdose-related issues.

Beth Macy shares some of her reasons for feeling hopeful about the future of the opioid crisis.

Once again, Macy’s up close and personal reporting is riveting as she weaves together multiple storylines. She profiles numerous front-line heroes like Tim Nolan, who, after his full-time job is done, works as a traveling nurse practitioner in North Carolina, delivering harm-reduction supplies out of his Prius. Nolan works alongside the Reverend Michelle Mathis, co-founder of Olive Branch Ministries, which offers addiction triage, counseling, food and hygiene supplies in 10 western North Carolina counties. “I’m like the grandma that does syringe exchange and delivers biscuits,” Mathis said. In West Virginia, there’s 30-year-old Lill Prosperino, who puts their 4’10”, 125-pound frame to work helping about 800 people who use drugs. These activists share many admirable qualities, including the ability to greet substance users with “unconditional positive regard,” as one mental health counselor advises.

Macy also follows the diverse, dedicated group that brought the OxyContin-pushing Sackler family to court, including the renowned photographer Nan Goldin, who staged a series of “die-ins” and other protests at museums around the world to pressure them into removing the Sackler name from their halls and galleries. Commenting on Goldin’s success, Macy writes, “That it had taken a famous artist, of all people, to finally get under the Sacklers’ skin said as much about what captures Americans’ attention as it does about corporate influence-peddling.”

The genius of Macy’s writing is that she makes readers care, on every page, as she bears witness. This is heartfelt, informed writing at its best, and always personal. With Dopesick and now Raising Lazarus, Macy is a social historian and change-maker at the top of her game.

Raising Lazarus, Beth Macy’s follow-up to Dopesick, will radically change your opinions on the opioid crisis.
NonfictionTechnologySocial Science

Survival of the Richest

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

There are any number of events that could trigger a global apocalypse: climate change, a virus, nuclear war, an asteroid, the rise of artificial intelligence. Would anyone be able to survive? A group of elitist technology billionaires have seriously pondered this very question, spending a great deal of time and money to plan how they alone might outlive this inevitable catastrophic event, leaving the rest of us in the dust.

In Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, professor of media theory and digital economics Douglas Rushkoff (Team Human) explains how this evacuation plan came to be and what it means for the future. When Rushkoff was invited to an exclusive desert resort for what he thought was a speech on the future of technology, he was shocked to find that his audience was just five super wealthy men “from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge fund world.” As it turned out, they had summoned him to pick his brain about how best to insulate themselves from “the very real and present danger” of a mass extinction, even asking him whether New Zealand or Alaska would be rendered less uninhabitable by the coming climate crisis.

Each chapter of Survival of the Richest focuses on a different aspect of how these tech billionaires have gotten to this place in our society and the origins of their entitled way of thinking. Rushkoff calls this Silicon Valley escapism “The Mindset,” a frame of mind that “encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.” He skillfully uses his extensive background in media theory to explain The Mindset in such clear terms, it’s scary. For example, he proposes that The Mindset allows for the easy externalization of harm to others: Its very structure requires an endgame, with a clear winner and loser, in which the winners are the ones who have found “a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.”

Of course the irony in all of this is that “these people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society,” Rushkoff writes. “Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.” Numbing and mind-blowing in equal measure, Survival of the Richest is a true story that seems straight out of a science fiction tale.

Numbing and mind-blowing in equal measure, Survival of the Richest reveals how tech billionaires are planning to survive a global apocalypse.
NonfictionSocial Science

Strangers to Ourselves

Review by Catherine Hollis

Rachel Aviv’s first book explores questions of self-knowledge and mental health, subjects she’s previously examined in her award-winning journalism for The New Yorker. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us is a stunning book, offering sensitive case histories of people whose experiences of mental illness exceed the limits of psychiatric terminology, diagnosis and treatment.

Aviv begins with her own experience as a 6-year-old who stopped eating or drinking, for reasons she can no longer remember. She was eventually diagnosed with anorexia, the youngest child in the U.S. to receive such a diagnosis, and hospitalized for “failure to eat.” At the hospital, she met anorexic girls twice her age and learned to mimic their strategies for losing weight. But which came first: the diagnosis or her symptoms? This misfit between psychiatric terminology and lived experience is the core issue driving Aviv’s subsequent chapters.

Western psychiatry has a long history of ignoring how issues of racial violence and systemic oppression drive mental illness. Aviv’s reporting on Naomi, a woman experiencing psychosis, grounds Naomi’s mental illness in the intergenerational trauma she has experienced as a Black woman, which has been largely ignored by the institutions that have offered her treatment. Western psychiatry, as developed within a white European framework, also fails to account for cultural difference, as in the case of Bapu, a devout Hindu. Bapu’s mystical visions of ecstatic union with Krishna could be reduced to symptoms of schizophrenia, but to categorize them as such would be to ignore how Bapu herself interprets these visions and how they are understood by other Hindu worshippers.

Other chapters show how painfully limited and limiting psychiatric language is when measured against a person’s own sense of themself, a pressing issue in the context of the overmedication of young people. When adolescents are prescribed multiple medications for anxiety and depression, they risk—as in Aviv’s final case history—limiting their self-definition to the diagnoses they have received.

Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate and necessary exploration of the complex relationship between how we understand ourselves and how psychiatric diagnoses define us.

Strangers to Ourselves is a stunning book about people whose experiences of mental illness exceed the limits of Western psychiatry.
NonfictionSocial ScienceEssays

Animal Joy

Review by Celia Mattison

Though Nuar Alsadir set out to write a book about laughter, Animal Joy is a far deeper study of how we express and understand our most powerful emotions, told through meticulous psychoanalytic research and Alsadir’s own experiences.

Animal Joy opens at a clown school where Alsadir enrolled to explore laughter. The only nonactor of the group, Alsadir sought to understand a specific laugh: the spontaneous outburst. “Spontaneous outbursts of laughter express meaning outside of reason and . . . unveil a whole dimension of being and bodily aliveness that short-circuits logic,” she writes. Alsadir explores a wide variety of social outbursts, including the laughter Christine Blasey Ford recalled hearing from Brett Kavanaugh when he allegedly sexually assaulted her, the tradition of professional mourners and the fake laughter purposefully generated in a laughter yoga class. This research provokes an intimate examination of impulsive and unconscious communication in all of its “savage complexity.”

As a poet and psychoanalyst—readers might recognize her as one of the counselors from the Showtime documentary series “Couples Therapy”—Alsadir is uniquely positioned as an excavator of human emotion and the things that evoke those emotions. She draws a constellation of interactions, with points made out of Anna Karenina’s doomed love affair, Blade Runner‘s obedient replicants and Dick Cavett’s 1985 interview with Eddie Murphy. These references are not tangential or tacked on but essential components of her thinking. “Other people’s speech, like it or not, lives inside us, buoys us, metastasizes,” she writes. “We are quantum entangled with our universe and everything in it.”

Rather than feeling dated or overly niche, these deeply specific references only heighten the intimacy Alsadir offers. There is plenty of serious academic analysis to admire in Animal Joy, with her detailed discussions of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes, but what is more spectacular is how she entangles theory with the tender anecdotes about her two daughters that ground the book. Though the terrain Alsadir covers is vast and often feels tenuously connected, the resonant beauty of her prose helps guide the reader through a deliberately cluttered and complicated narrative. 

Animal Joy is a challenging and deeply rewarding meditation on laughter and communication that will stand up to multiple readings; as Alsadir herself reminds us, “Understanding often occurs retroactively.”

Though Nuar Alsadir set out to write a book about laughter, Animal Joy is a far deeper study of how we express and understand our most powerful emotions.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionSocial ScienceScienceMemoirLiterary FictionFantasy

4 award-winning books to read with your book club

Feature by Julie Hale

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for fiction, Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book is a searing portrayal of the Black authorial experience. At the center of the novel is an unnamed Black author on his first book tour struggling to navigate the publishing industry and make sense of the modern world. His narrative is offset by chapters recounting the story of Soot, a young Black boy in the South. Poignant and often funny, Mott’s novel draws readers in as it scrutinizes race in American society and the power of storytelling.

Marlon James’ epic fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf is narrated by Tracker, a hunter with an acute sense of smell. Accompanied by a shape-shifter named Leopard and a band of misfit mercenaries, Tracker travels through a landscape inspired by African mythology and ancient history on a dangerous quest to find a lost boy. Hallucinatory and violent yet marvelously poetic, this first entry in James’ Dark Star trilogy won the 2019 L.A. Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. There are an abundance of potential topics for discussion, such as James’ folkloric inspirations and Tracker’s unreliable narration.

Following the death of her aunt from an uncommon ailment called Chagas, or the kissing bug disease, Daisy Hernández decided to research the illness. She shares her findings in The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease. Hernández talked to physicians and disease experts throughout the United States, and her interviews with patients reveal the human cost of the American healthcare system’s inadequacies. Hernández displays impressive storytelling skills in this masterfully researched volume, which won the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.

In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado’s powerful chronicle of a toxic love affair, won the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction. In the book, Machado reveals that she fell hard for a magnetic, emotionally unpredictable woman who became abusive. In structuring her memoir, she draws upon various narrative devices and traditions (coming-of-age, choose your own adventure and more), and the result is a multifaceted, daring and creative portrayal of a deeply dysfunctional relationship.

Pick a guaranteed winner for your reading group.
NonfictionSocial Science

Beth Macy shines a light on the helpers who are making a difference in the opioid crisis

Interview by Alice Cary

After the publication of her landmark 2018 book Dopesick, which featured six years of reporting about how the opioid crisis affected families in her adopted hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, Beth Macy vowed to herself, “I’m not writing about this again.” Her physician feared Macy might have PTSD after bearing witness to so many tragic deaths, including that of a 28-year-old mother named Tess Henry, whom Macy had grown close to while reporting Dopesick and whose body was found in a Las Vegas dumpster on Christmas Eve 2017. Macy’s husband suggested that she should write about happy things this time, like food and gardening, while her late mother, who had advancing dementia at the time, advised her about “eight times a day” to “write a love story instead.”

Not surprisingly, Macy didn’t listen. Yet today she is feeling happy and hopeful, chatting by phone about Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis from her mountain cabin an hour outside of Roanoke. Midway through our conversation, she becomes even more ebullient, shouting, “Oh my God. I’m looking at an eagle!”

Macy explains that writing Raising Lazarus was a very different experience from writing Dopesick, and in some ways, it was healing. “I’m not writing about just death,” she says of her most recent book. “I’m mostly writing about helpers, as Mr. Rogers called them. I’m writing about people who are actually making a difference. It feels really good to give them a platform, a voice.” 

Read our starred review of ‘Raising Lazarus’ by Beth Macy.

One of the book’s many fascinating heroes is the Reverend Michelle Mathis of Olive Branch Ministries in western North Carolina, who uses the biblical story of Lazarus to encourage people to extend help rather than judgment to those with substance use disorder (SUD). Mathis “tells the story to get well-meaning Christians to check their blind spots,” Macy says. “Jesus does the miracle, but the people who are following him have to go in there and get their hands dirty. They have to roll the stone and unbind Lazarus.”

Blind spots play an important role in examining issues related to SUD. The opioid crisis is everywhere, but in rural areas it’s often hidden in plain sight—”literally,” Macy says, “right under the bridges you drive across.” She and the helpers she profiles in Raising Lazarus encourage an alternate approach to the war-on-drugs, “just say no,” victim-blaming approach that so many of us grew up with. “The idea that drug users are worthy human beings—that they are, in fact, equals—is harm reduction in a nutshell,” she writes. They need access to things like clean needles, hepatitis tests and buprenorphine, or “bupe,” an FDA-approved medication to treat opioid use disorder.

People with SUD also need simple things, such as casseroles, instead of stigma and reproach. “It doesn’t always smell like flowers, and you might get a little something on you,” Rev. Mathis says in the book. “But the people who are willing to work at the face-to-face level get to see the miracle and look it in the eye.” Many such solutions, Macy points out, “are kind of low-tech and high-touch,” and the good news is that they’re working. “That’s the view that America needs to see,” she says, “not just the dark but the miracles.”

“That’s the view that America needs to see, not just the dark but the miracles.”

Raising Lazarus by Beth Macy

The first time Macy visited a needle exchange program in Roanoke, “I just kind of had to take a breath and turn around and get a hold of myself,” she says. She thought of Tess Henry, who had verbalized a need for urgent care for people with SUD before she died. “She didn’t know what that meant, because she had never seen it,” Macy says, “but she knew it needed to be as easy as the urgent care center that first prescribed opioids for her.” Tess, she believes, would have loved this needle exchange and its welcoming, comfortable vibe. It’s run by a “sweetheart of a guy,” Macy says, who brings his two little white dogs with him to work and provides things like deodorant, food, computers and help with housing and job applications to anyone who needs it, in addition to clean needles.

Macy admits that she has at times struggled to forgive those with SUD, especially in the case of her father, whose substance was alcohol. As a result of his addiction, she grew up in poverty; he even failed to attend her high school graduation. Every now and then, she thinks, “Wow, I really didn’t have the experience of having a father.” But she also knows that he had an illness. “So in some ways,” she says, “I’m trying to figure all that out for myself too.”

Macy knows that she could have become addicted, too, if things had played out a little differently in her life. “I was a wild thing,” she says, “but in my small town, it was just marijuana and beer. I’m sure if everybody was doing [opioids], I would’ve wanted to get in on it too.”

“I think when the full truth comes out, it’s going to be even more shocking than it is now.”

At that time, however, the Sackler family had yet to unleash the pain medication that would eventually cause the opioid epidemic: OxyContin. With fascinating detail, Raising Lazarus describes major players in the class-action lawsuit against this “cartel of the opioid crisis,” as Macy describes them. Paul Hanly, a high-profile litigator who led the legal fight against opioid makers and distributors, told Macy, “I’ve taken 500 depositions in my career, and I have never deposed a person whose ability to exhibit empathy is zero. . . . Compared to [Perdue Pharma chairman and president Richard Sackler], Donald Trump looks like Jesus Christ.”

Macy says she would love the chance to question the Sackler family herself, but only if they first took a truth serum. “They hid so much of it for so many years,” she says. “I think when the full truth comes out, it’s going to be even more shocking than it is now.”

Still, Macy wonders whether the Sacklers wish they could have done things differently—even though board member Kathy Sackler has already testified before Congress that they do not. “They started this thing that has hurt roughly a third of American families, and they’ve taken no responsibility for it,” she says. “I just want to hear them say they’re sorry.”

Author photo of Beth Macy by Josh Meltzer

The bestselling author of Dopesick reexamines opioid addiction, this time with a more hopeful view.
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistoryBlack History

Under the Skin

Review by Alden Mudge

Linda Villarosa grew up in a high-achieving Black family in a mostly white suburb of Denver. When she began writing about Black women’s health for Essence in the mid-1980s, her articles were all about self-help and self-improvement, based on the assumption that poverty and poor education were the reasons for detrimental health conditions among Black people.

But then she discovered that well-educated, upper-middle-class Black women were also having underweight babies and higher rates of maternal death than white women. She found herself wondering, “Why is the current Black-white disparity in both maternal and infant mortality widest at the upper levels of education? And what was it about our health-care system that exacerbated this problem?”

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation answers these questions and many more. In one of the most interesting chapters, Villarosa writes about “weathering,” a concept developed by Dr. Arline Geronimus, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Weathering is the idea that “high-effort coping from fighting against racism leads to chronic stress that can trigger premature aging and poor health outcomes.” It draws the throughline from systemic failure to a harmful bodily response.

Under the Skin audiobook image
Read our starred review of the audiobook for ‘Under the Skin.’

Villarosa, who now writes for The New York Times Magazine, explores many more aspects of American prejudice and health in this book. In a chapter recounting a visit to Appalachia to write about the addiction crisis among poor white people, she suggests that many of these people suffer from the debilitating effects of class discrimination, with similarly negative health repercussions. She examines myths about Black genetics—that Black people are less sensitive to pain than whites, for example—that persist within the medical community to the detriment of Black Americans. She looks at how racism in housing forces many Black families into environmentally hostile neighborhoods. And, based on her reporting, she offers several ideas for improving community health that she believes will change American health care for the better.

Under the Skin is wonderfully written. It’s not an inaccessible academic work or a polemic. Rather, its points are made amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences. The book also serves as a stake in the ground for Villarosa as she powerfully discloses what years of reporting have led her to understand: “The something that is making Black Americans sicker is not race per se, or the lack of money, education, information, and access to health services that can be tied to being Black in America. It is also not genes or something inherently wrong or inferior about the Black body. The something is racism.”

Linda Villarosa’s wonderfully written book makes stunning points about the health risks of racism amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Corrections in Ink

Review by Sarojini Seupersad

By most measures, Keri Blakinger lived a charmed life. As the daughter of a successful lawyer and a schoolteacher, her upper-middle-class suburban existence seemed, from the outside, perfect. Her childhood was filled with loving parental support, academic success and a fierce pursuit of competitive figure skating that took her all the way to nationals. But when that pursuit ended in disappointment, Blakinger’s life came undone.

In her exceptional debut, Corrections in Ink, investigative journalist Blakinger reflects on an important decade of her life that took her from figure skating to drug addiction, to selling drugs and sex, to an arrest on a drug charge while she was a college student at Cornell University. She got clean during the almost two years she was imprisoned, but afterward she still had to grapple with the inhumanity of being behind bars.

Blakinger details the cruelties, big and small, that she endured while she was incarcerated. She also acknowledges that, as a white woman, she was in a position of privilege and that Black and brown people are treated far worse, get tougher sentences and have worse outcomes than their white counterparts. It is a sad and powerless position for anyone to be in, as the prison system is designed to slowly strip away one’s humanity. To hold on to her humanity, Blakinger had to find joy in unexpected places.

Corrections in Ink is written with deep insight and urgency, and Blakinger’s gripping insider knowledge and experience is supported by research, strong analysis and a blistering indictment of the criminal justice system. It’s this rare combination of personal narrative and reporting that makes Corrections in Ink such a singular reading experience.

Blakinger’s raw and important memoir isn’t only a drug recovery and success story. It’s a searing condemnation of our cruel and unjust project of caging human beings, a firsthand account of what this entails and a challenge not to look away from America’s flawed and punitive carceral system.

Keri Blakinger’s combination of personal narrative and reporting makes her debut memoir about her life in prison an exceptional, singular read.
NonfictionAudioSocial Science

The Nineties

Review by G. Robert Frazier

The 1990s may be a decade often lamented for its generation of “slackers” and eternally epitomized in the TV series “Seinfeld” (frequently described as “a show about nothing”), but Chuck Klosterman has found a treasure trove of history, nostalgia and pop culture relics to explore in The Nineties (12.5 hours). Each chapter is devoted to a defining characteristic or experience of Generation X, from VHS tapes and Blockbuster video stores to the strange phenomenon dubbed “the Mandela Effect,” in which whole swaths of people remember things differently than the way they actually happened. Klosterman narrates the audiobook in an almost tongue-in-cheek fashion, with acclaimed voice actor Dion Graham reading the footnotes and quotations.

Klosterman discusses the ’90s with both the intimacy of someone who lived through the decade and the authority of the beloved pop culture commentator that he has established himself as through 12 previous books. The Nineties provides a fascinating, granular look at a defining period of history, and if you’re listening on your smartphone, you’ll connect even stronger with Klosterman’s examination of an era that marked the “end to an age where we controlled technology more than it controlled us.”

The Nineties provides a fascinating, granular look at a defining period of history, and author Chuck Klosterman narrates in an almost tongue-in-cheek fashion.
NonfictionAudioSocial Science

Atlas of the Heart

Review by Tami Orendain

Brené Brown invites listeners to get vulnerable in Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (8.5 hours). Drawing from her research and personal experiences, Brown offers a new framework for building healthy relationships by analyzing common emotions such as compassion, fear and anger.

Brown narrates this audiobook with gentleness and expertise, and when she speaks about serious topics, she is sincere without being somber. Because Atlas of the Heart is a highly visual book, she’s taken steps to ensure that the audiobook is just as engaging as the print edition, with extra examples and stories that are exclusive to the recorded version. This small touch is a microcosm of Brown’s earnest intentions as a writer and narrator.

Listening to Atlas of the Heart is like sitting down with a trusted mentor. With both humility and authority, Brown helps readers stay engaged and encouraged, even as her book dives into difficult, tender ideas. Tune in for a challenging and inspiring listen.

Because Atlas of the Heart is a highly visual book, Brené Brown assures listeners that she's taken steps to ensure that the audiobook is just as engaging, with additional stories exclusive to the recording.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoirMedicine

Health care with heart

Feature by Deborah Mason

As we age, most of us will experience a debilitating or life-threatening illness at some point. Two nonfiction books take an unflinching look at this reality while painting a compassionate picture of how we and our health care providers could approach illness and death with more empathy, honesty and courage.

Healing

Cover of Healing by Theresa Brown

Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient is Theresa Brown’s searingly honest and deeply personal account of her experiences as a breast cancer patient. Brown, a registered nurse with a Ph.D. in English literature, has written and lectured extensively about the American health care system. As a former oncology and hospice nurse, Brown knew that patients often got a raw deal, but only after her own diagnosis did she realize how needlessly cruel that deal could be.

Brown has profound gratitude for her family, friends and medical team, who all supported her as she recovered, but she is also angry. She faced a host of necessary evils during her treatment, including invasive diagnostic procedures, painful surgeries and debilitating side effects from chemotherapy. But in a series of devastating vignettes, Brown also details the many unnecessary evils she endured in a system that favors profit over the needs of the patient: Diagnoses were delayed, questions left unanswered, test results undelivered. She was even forced to negotiate byzantine regulations on her own because her health care providers were stretched too thin to ensure that these basic duties were fulfilled effectively or graciously. Even though Brown was a seasoned health professional with extensive knowledge and professional contacts, she had to fight to be treated humanely. One can only imagine the obstacles less experienced patients must face every day.

Healing is both a moving memoir and a clarion call to action. When health care becomes a profit-making industry, dominated by hedge funds and corporate interests, we all lose. Instead, Brown argues, we must return to a system where meeting the patient’s needs—physical, emotional and social—is the priority.

★ The Day I Die

Cover of The Day I Die by Anita Hannig

In The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America, anthropologist Anita Hannig takes a different but no less passionate approach to her examination of death and dying in America. After becoming interested in how Oregon’s assisted dying law worked, Hannig embedded herself in a volunteer group that helps terminally ill patients take advantage of the law. She soon realized that the law, with its many hoops and barriers, could be like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s girl with the curl on her forehead. When it works, the law is very good. Hannig’s case studies of patients who have enough luck and resources to meet the demands of the statute demonstrate that assisted death can be, paradoxically, life-affirming. Autonomy can be restored to patients who have long been at the mercy of their diseases, and knowing when one will die can be an opportunity for reconciliation, reunion and gratitude.

But when things go bad, the law can be horrid. It is reasonable to have strict conditions surrounding assisted dying to ensure that the decision to end one’s life is freely made. But those conditions can have devastating effects upon patients who desperately want to die but cannot meet the requirements. Patients with ALS, for example, might lose their ability to communicate their assent before the deadline. Advanced Alzheimer’s patients are categorically denied access to assisted dying because they have lost the ability to fully understand their decision. Hannig rigorously details these and other situations in which people’s physical or mental deterioration, lack of resources or sheer bad luck result in a painfully prolonged life and terrifying death.

In her introduction, Hannig acknowledges the anthropologist’s dilemma: The act of observation is an imperfect tool for research, since it can change both the observer and the observed. However, it can also change the reader, since it is impossible to read Hannig’s book without being moved. Regardless of your stance on assisted dying, The Day I Die will make you reconsider how dying could and should be.

The personal stories in these nonfiction books set a more humane benchmark for patients and providers.
NonfictionSocial ScienceFamily & Relationships

Essential Labor

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Consider all the universal mundanities of caregiving: the endless feedings, diaper changes, cleanups, sleepless nights and confining days, not to mention all the laundry. What if, with the help of journalist, activist and mother Angela Garbes, we could radically reconsider the incredible value of this work? In Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Garbes swoops from the universal to the personal to the downright intimate, offering an all-encompassing vision of a more socially and economically just way of caring for one another that, de facto, would improve our individual and collective lives.

The author of the hybrid memoir Like a Mother, a 2018 NPR best book of the year, Garbes serves up her own experiences as a first-generation Filipina, daughter, wife and mother in her second book. She calls Part I of Essential Labor “A Personal History of Mothering in America” and uses it to delineate her social relationship to motherhood, including her own family’s complicated origins in the U.S., beginning when her parents emigrated from the Philippines in 1970. Part II, “Exploring Mothering as Social Change,” expands into the kinds of activism that mothering can and should inspire to create a more equitable world.

Garbes wants so much more for her mixed-race children than the racialized, gendered immigrant experience that her parents endured—yet there is more to mothering than personal circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic, Garbes says, changed how we care for each other, revealing that “mothering is some of the only truly essential work humans do.” She also identifies child care as a political issue—a kind of infrastructure for families that needs bipartisan government support.

At the same time that workplaces gave way to home “offices” during the pandemic, nursing homes became off-limits, schools and child care centers closed, and families were left with the work of finding other ways of caring for young people, elderly people and themselves. The myth of a self-sustaining family was no longer viable, Garbes observes; mothering needed the support of communities and multiple generations. The work of mothering, taking care of ourselves and others, became more essential than ever.

There is a great deal to digest here, and Garbes’ analyses will certainly resonate with people whose caregiving responsibilities increased during the pandemic. Yet by identifying the inherent power of mothering as a force for change, Garbes makes her message relevant to a broader audience. Indeed, as Essential Labor makes clear, all our fates are intertwined.

Angela Garbes swoops from the universal to the intimate as she offers a vision of mothering that would improve our individual and collective lives.

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