By Shana

If folks want to read topically, I can suggest six books about pandemics, all worthy of five stars. Some highlight how government response impacts pandemic results, others how human activity is impacting disease, and one is the story of smallpox vaccination and shows what a boon vaccination is in saving lives.

Author: Bessel A. van der Kolk
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Review By: Shana

​This book managed to be both scientifically grounded and rich in the personal and anecdotal. Simultaneously harrowing and hopeful. My own personal preferences and personality are grounded much more in the hard sciences than the soft, and that preference means I found the first 60% of the book much more engaging and convincing as the author spends that first part explaining the neurological, physical, and psychological mechanics of trauma and its lasting effects. This part of the book is clear and detailed, and van der Kolk’s crisp prose cannot help but to open one’s eyes to the reality of what trauma does to people. Even in this section he does not merely expound the nuts and bolts of how trauma works. Instead, he interweaves thumbnail sketches of patients he has encountered and though done in broad outlines, the stories can be horrendous.  

Author: Eric Manheimer 
Rating: 2.5 Stars
Review By: Shana

​I am very conflicted about this book. The author, a former medical director at Bellevue Hospital, uses twelve patients (himself included) as a touchstone to discuss his life, his career, and numerous social issues surrounding medical care. As such, each chapter is its own vignette, though themes and some of his colleagues and family make repeat appearances. 

​Overall this is a solid book, outlining the history of chronic illness in the United States, offering the reader both a medical perspective and a patient perspective. There is some excellent insight to glean and a lot to think about, especially as our longer lives mean more of us will deal with some form of chronic illness. Of course, such illnesses run the gamut. Some are miserable conditions that cause constant pain, extreme fatigue, or other ailments that severely limit many life activities. Others are milder conditions that either can be reliably controlled with medication and lifestyle changes (e.g., some forms of diabetes) or issues that can be tolerated as a “new normal” (e.g., some forms of allergies and asthma).  

​This excellent history is not for the squeamish. It is no overstatement to say that antiseptic methods utterly revolutionized the practice of medicine in general, and surgery in particular.  Fitzharris tells the story of the antiseptic watershed through a sweeping history of medicine and some very nice biographical work on key figures of the time and on Lister, who documented and championed the cause.  

Quammen is a science writer par excellence when covering pandemics and zoonosis. His Spillover remains a masterpiece, covering a wide range of diseases that jump from animals to humans, examining the paths they take, how the diseases evolve and how they impact humans and animals alike, and the scientists and medical professionals who study and combat such diseases. In Ebola (published 2014), Quammen has excerpted the portion of Spillover (originally published in 2012) dealing with Ebola, and updated it with information and events from the intervening years. 

Author: Jonathan Eig​ ​
Rating: 4​ Stars
Review By: Shana

​Eig does an admirable job blending medical, social, and political history in telling the story of how the birth control pill came about. The impact this medication had on culture is hard to overestimate, and its intertwining with sexual freedom, population control, women's liberation and equality, and the pharmaceutical industry is fascinating.  

Author: Susan Sheehan
Rating: 5 Stars
​Review By: Shana

This book is a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a credit to the author’s dedication to following an individual for decades.  It should be obvious to any reader why this won a Pulitzer.  Sheehan’s work acts as both biography of Sylvia Frumkin (a pseudonym for the later-identified Maxine Mason, a woman with schizophrenia) and an examination of mental illness in America.  Sheehan has taken her years of research and molded it into an engrossing read—poignant and sad and explicit and enlightening.

Author: Atul Gawande
Rating: 5 Stars
Review By: Shana

​Profound and profoundly important.  This is a book I think everyone should read. And then should read again as the people they care about age and start to have increasing needs.  Being Mortal is grounding and eye-opening and heart-breaking and breathtaking.