Books of 2014 - May

Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis by Helen Bynum
Life Animated by Ron Suskind
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

It's a shorter list than April, so I will give you my thoughts on all 3 books after the jump.




Spitting was very informative. Before taking Microbiology and going into nursing school, my impressions of TB were mainly based on Satine, the female lead in Moulin Rouge whose main symptoms are coughing up blood and dramatically losing her voice and/or passing out. It was not until I read Spitting that I learned how TB can affect parts of the body outside the lungs, or that before antibiotics people were sometimes treated by having an affected lung surgically collapsed or removed. Towards the end, Bynum did touch on the serious issues of DR-TB (drug-resistant TB) and XDR-TB (extremely drug-resistant TB). She did not speculate about whether we will have to start using older, more "barbaric" treatments such as lung surgery if most TB cases end up being DR or XDR. One thing I know for sure is that we wouldn't look like Nicole Kidman and delicately cough into our handkerchiefs before going back onstage for an encore.

Animated is the the first book I decided to purchase right after seeing an author's TV interview. It is an intimate look into the emotional life of Suskind's son, Owen. Diagnosed with PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, which is now on the less severe end of Autism Spectrum Disorder), Owen watches Disney movies over and over, rewinding to specific scenes. His parents figure out that he is using the movies, first to learn to talk. Later, Ron and his wife use Owen's interest in all things Disney to help him learn to read (with the help of the movie credits). But what I found most remarkable was Owen's ability to use Disney movies as an emotional toolbox. Repeating certain lines, rewatching certain scenes, and drawing characters' faces helps him make sense of his world and express himself. Suskind had me at describing how his son learned to talk, but Owen's subsequent discoveries are impressive too.

I wanted to connect my relationship with Disney to Owen's, but I started going on about reconciling my feminism with Disney princesses, which needs its own post.

I started The Bell Jar for two reasons. The less significant one is that I was trying to find cheap Kindle books, and the edition I bought was $2.99. More significant is that the main thing I knew about Sylvia Plath was how she died. I figured that it would be good to learn about her life and writing, and since Jar is heavily based on her life, I was intrigued. I haven't finished it yet, but I have been very pleased with the quality of Plath's writing. She managed to create very intense, vivid emotional pictures without the melodrama or screamingly obvious metaphors in other books that portray serious illness (say, Jodi Picoult's books*).

It is also a valuable lens into how patients experienced mental health care in mid-20th century America. Her descriptions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) without anesthesia (!!) and insulin shock therapy are horrifying, but she also shows the more complicated issue of what it's like to be a patient in a psychiatric hospital on a day-to-day basis. How the staff serve food (real glasses versus paper cups), for example, and how many "privileges" one has (going off the unit, being restricted to the unit, where your room is in the hospital). While I found myself saying "thank God people now get anesthesia before ECT" and "well we don't use lobotomies willy-nilly anymore," much of what Plath touches upon - social pressures on women, stigma against mental illness, and disparities within the mental health care system, still remains.  

* I have read several of Picoult's books. They are very gripping, and very interesting. She is very good at presenting multiple voices in one text, and at portraying familial conflicts. But she can sometimes hit you over the head with symbolic language.