Review of Source by Janine Burke

This handsome-looking book, with the Ansel Adams photograph on the dustjacket, attracted me, although I paused at the ‘healing’ in the subtitle. It sounded a little flaky, and I didn’t acquaint nature with the healing of any of the artists and writers listed. Some of them did not seem to be very ‘healed’ by anything, such as Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. But I was prepared to be convinced that I was wrong.



I was already reasonably acquainted, as most readers would be, with some of these artists and writers, who have been researched and written about by many people before Burke. So I thought that this might be a synthesis of Burke’s own observations from her travels to the territory of each of these great creators, and in a way it is. The imprecise tone in the Introduction and the first chapter, with its decidely banal feel, took me aback, though. ‘Creativity is a place’? ‘The artistic process itself is a journey’? Was it really going to be flaky all the way through?

Review continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.

Review of The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

It was reported recently that Raj Patel had been declared a Messiah by a religious organisation. Apparently, this was misleading, as the group did not name him specifically. Patel's response was a good-humoured, slightly embarrassed, denial and a statement that we shouldn't be relying on Messiahs of any sort to tell us what to do anyway.



Patel is a writer, activist and academic who has both worked for the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, and protested against them, as described on his website. Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System was his first book, clear and convincing in its arguments as to why so many people are obese and so many are starving, and why we need to rethink food production. Patel continues to emphasise in The Value of Nothing the need for us to think beyond being mere consumers if we are to change the inequities in our system, to reinvigorate democracy everywhere and at every level, and to understand how power inequalities cause poverty and suffering throughout the world.


Review continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.

Review of Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Secret, a book by a former television producer called Rhonda Byrne, professes to contain all that you need to know to be healthy, wealthy and happy, distilled from the wisdom of many thinkers over the ages. The essence of this secret is that if you believe hard enough that money, health or love will come your way, it will. Send your wants out into the universe, and the universe will send you the goods back.

It’s this type of positive or magical thinking that Barbara Ehrenreich criticises in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. She generally argues her case convincingly, using a good balance of the personal and research material. Some of it is eye-opening, laughable, infuriating.

If you are familiar with the author’s work, you will know that she is a prolific writer about social, cultural and political issues, including women’s rights. Her previous books have included Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA and Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. And in an interesting contrast to this current title, she has also written about collective joy, what she feels we really should be aiming for in life, rather than the pale, manufactured imitation represented by positive thinking.

Ehrenreich’s book has eight chapters, beginning with her own experience of breast cancer and the ‘pink ribbon culture’ she encountered, through business and finance, employment, religion and ‘the science of happiness’. She uses humour judiciously, stepping into satire when required.

Continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.

'Walking in our shoes' - Asylum by Christopher Payne

If my heart could speak,
I’m sure it would say, I wish I were
someplace else today.
Among these books, a great amount of knowledge there must be,
but what good is knowledge where others carry the keys. (201)


These lines are from a poem written by an unnamed (probably unknown) patient on the wall of a basement in Augusta State Hospital in Maine. The first line in blue, the rest in red, the words are large and neat with idiosyncratically placed capitals. Christopher Payne has placed this photograph at the end of the main section of his images in Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, just before his own afterword. It’s like the final statement on the treatment of mental illness, a combination of acknowledgement that things have improved, but that much remains to be done. Payne’s enabled one of the former patients to have their say, albeit indirectly, after both he, his camera, and Oliver Sacks have spoken for them.



This is a truly beautiful and haunting book, Payne’s skill with the camera evident in nearly 200 pages of photographs of asylums, showing their massive exteriors and some more intimate interior spaces, along with the farms, dairies, gazebos and cemeteries of their surroundings. He shows the extent to which American society wished to provide ‘enlightened’ care for its mentally ill population. Nearly every state had at least one asylum, and by 1948, there were 539 000 patients in these institutions (13).

Continued at M/C Reviews.

Review of The Good Doctors by John Dittmer

In the light of current debates over health care, this book provides some sobering and relevant insight. Towards the end of his thorough and balanced history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), John Dittmer provides a chapter entitled ‘Health Care Is a Human Right’. It has an epigraph from Aristotle:

If we believe that men have any personal rights at all as human beings, they have an absolute moral right to such measure of good health as society, and society alone, is able to give them. (228)

This chapter details the setting up in 1967 of a community health center, called the Tufts-Delta Health Center, in Bolivar County, Mississippi. It offered free clinical health services to the mainly black community and eventually ‘prescriptions for food’ to treat the malnutrition that was shockingly widespread. The staff ‘attacked the root causes of poor health and deprivation’ (233), organizing sanitation and providing education, with the involvement of the residents a crucial component. It served as a model for the development of other health centers.

Dittmer then leads into a discussion of the efforts by many in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Senator Edward Kennedy and the MCHR, to put forward plans for a national health program, noting that the ‘United States was the only industrial country without a national health program covering all of its citizens’ (236). Those efforts were thwarted by the American Medical Association (AMA), and pharmaceutical and insurance corporations, who all condemned the non-profit approach to medicine, too much government intervention in health care, and the view that health care was a right not a privilege. As there was no consensus as to what sort of plan should be implemented, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s trip to China took attention away from the issue, and there was no consumer push for action, nothing was done. President Clinton tried it again in the 1990s, and was defeated. Now the administration of Barack Obama is feeling the same resistance.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Spinning

My partner and I went to the Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art on the weekend, for the second time. There will be at least two more visits, because it's so beautiful and thought-provoking and creative, and because we find it impossible to see everything in one visit. Our brains become full and our lower limbs become sore. We need to go away and think about what we've seen, talk about the images and ideas, read the catalogue, go back again.

Hiraki Sawa. O 2009. Spinning objects, physical and on films, placed carefully around a large space. Three huge screens, showing images of vastness and detail: the moon's surface, the Central Australian desert, the interior of an abandoned house. Birds fly slowly and serenely across the sky, and across the wallpaper. Books with French titles, a Hitchcockian stain on a ceiling: for some reason I found my eyes wandering back to the interior more frequently than staying outdoors. I wondered who had lived there, and whether they missed what they had left behind. Were those books never to be opened again?

Sawa: 'Coming full circle is movement without displacement. In that time, you simply are, and all change is in the looking'. (APT 6 Catalogue)

Complexities - A History of the 'Unfortunate Experiment' at National Women's Hospital by Linda Bryder

Reviewed by Sue Bond



In 1987 I spent a month in Auckland as a student at the North Shore hospital. A journalist friend drew my attention to an article in Metro magazine of earlier that year that had revealed a scandalous experiment at the National Women’s Hospital, concerning women with cervical cancer. So when I saw Linda Bryder’s A History of the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ at National Women’s Hospital, I was curious to remind myself of this scandal, and perhaps learn the whole story.




Two women, journalist and feminist activist Sandra Coney and sociologist Phillida Bunkle, wrote the 1987 article called ‘An Unfortunate Experiment at National Women’s’ that alleged Dr Herbert Green, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, had withheld conventional treatment from women with abnormal cells in their cervix (carcinoma in situ or cervical dysplasia) to study the course of the disease. A proportion of these women went on to develop cervical cancer, and some of those died. As a result of this article, the Labour Government of the time set up an Inquiry, lead by Judge Silvia Cartwright, which produced a report in July 1988 that concluded the medical profession had failed patients. Many recommendations of Cartwright were implemented, including national screening and patient advocacy.



Linda Bryder is a medical historian, and was researching the history of the National Women’s Hospital (NWH) when she realised that the cervical ‘experiment’ needed a book of its own. What she has produced is methodical, detailed, thoroughly researched and scholarly, if a little dry at times. It is probably more for academics and medical professionals than the general reader, though the lessons she draws from her research are important for society as a whole. As she states in her introductory chapter, the ‘examination of the Cartwright Inquiry provides a lens through which to explore the relationship between women’s bodies, technology and medicine in the late twentieth century’ (6). I think it also reveals the disjunct between the medical community and the public when it comes to understanding health and disease, and that the media often fails to be the bridge between the two.

Go to M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media to continue reading...