THE GREAT SHADOW: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, serious subject...serious treatment

THE GREAT SHADOW: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy
SUSAN WISE BAUER
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From alchemy to wellness culture, from antisemitism to disposable plastic, a gripping account of how getting sick has shaped humanity.

Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? The Great Shadow brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle—the experience of actually being ill. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions?

The Great Shadow uses extensive historical research and first-person accounts to tell a vivid story about sickness and our responses to it, from very ancient times until the last decade. In the process of writing, historian Susan Wise Bauer reveals just how many of our current fads and causes are rooted in the moment-by-moment experience of sickness—from the search for a balanced lifestyle to plug-in air fresheners and bare hardwood floors. We can’t simply shout facts at people who refuse vaccinations, believe that immigrants carry diseases, or insist that God will look out for them during a pandemic. We have to enter with imagination, historical perspective, and empathy into their world. The Great Shadow does just that with page-turning flair.

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My Review: It is unbelievably apt that this book was contracted for in 2019. I don't think I need to discuss what happened in 2020. What COVID did was to point up the absolutely amazing progress in medical treatment of disease that we've made...vaccines that have saved tens of millions of lives in the past six years developed in months not years...and how ingrained fallacies are in our species...the social distancing farrago is just miasma theory written in Times New Roman. COVID also caused the author to forego doing in-person research in favor of extensive online research. (If, like me, your eyebrows went up at the mere notion of suchlike in a serious work of nonfiction, cool your jets until you've looked through the over 400 notes and citations that make up a literal quarter of the text.)

As a narrative technique, reconstructions of past actions and attitudes work only as well as the author's ability to convey evidence from the records in appropriate prose. It's a technique I think adds some immediacy to history that otherwise is often dry and tedious. I'm happy to say Author Bauer convinced me to follow her as different events were interpreted as divine wrath, moral turpitude, and individual punishment when most twenty-first century people would see the disease process for the impersonal force it is.

It does lend itself, however, to a discontinuity of time. I followed Author Bauer's conceptual links between topics and strands of evidence without much conscious effort, often thinking "...but what about...?" mere words before she addressed the very question I was still formulating. Others might not find that to be their experience. I mention it as information only. You'll resonate with a less linear presentation in your own way. I can't offer a perfect five because even I was occasionally thrown off the scent of the idea being pursued.

I'm here to tell you I want you to read this book, no matter your beliefs about medicine or science. It is not chiding or minatory to people not in the tent with the believers on either side. It is tendentious; it is not disrespectful. Of course I can say that without hesitation because I agree with Author Bauer. I will offer my main evidence in favor of reading it by saying I was highly resistant to her take on social distancing being modern miasma theory until I read her points about the science for and against it. My mind, in the face of cogently presented and logically mustered evidence, changed.

An author who can get in under my well-entrenched, heavily undergirded arrogant illusion of knowledge deserves your treasure and your eyeblinks.

ABORTION STORIES: DEEP CARE: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open, & WE CHOOSE TO: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe

DEEP CARE: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open
ANGELA HUME
AK Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of the radical feminist networks who worked outside the law to defend abortion.

Starting in the 1970s, small groups of feminist activists met regularly to study anatomy, practice pelvic exams on each other, and learn how to safely perform a procedure known as menstrual extraction, which can empty the contents of the uterus in case of pregnancy using equipment that can be easily bought and assembled at home. This “self-help” movement grew into a robust national and international collaboration of activists and health workers determined to ensure access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, at all costs―to the point of learning how to do the necessary steps themselves.

Even after abortion was legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, activists continued meeting, studying, and teaching these skills, reshaping their strategies alongside decades of changing legal, medical, and cultural landscapes such as the legislative war against abortion rights, the AIDS epidemic, and the rise of anti-abortion domestic terrorism in the 1980s and 90s. The movement’s drive to keep abortion accessible led to the first clinic defense mobilizations against anti-abortion extremists trying to force providers to close their doors. From the self-help movement sprang a constellation of licensed feminist healthcare clinics, community programs to promote reproductive health, even the nation’s first known-donor sperm bank, all while fighting the oppression of racism, poverty, and gender violence.

Deep Care follows generations of activists and clinicians who orbited the Women's Choice clinic in Oakland from the early 1970s until 2010, as they worked underground and above ground, in small cells and broad coalitions and across political movements with grit, conviction, and allegiances of great trust to do what they believed needed to be done―despite the law, when required. Grounded in interviews of activists sharing details of their work for the first time, Angela Hume retells three decades of this critical, if under-recognized story of the radical edge of the abortion movement. These lessons are more pertinent than ever following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision and the devastation to abortion access nationwide.

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My Review: By limiting her scope to activists in the Bay Area of California, Author Hume enables herself to dive deeply into the whys, hows, and wherefores of the activists who believed then, and will inspire others now to believe, in the truest expression of "self-help." There is a huge weight of wrongheadedness and immorality bearing down on women's rights. There always has been, of course; patriarchy isn't a new idea, and making up a matriarchal past from evidence so fragmentary as to be useless for tendentious argument is not particularly helpful to resisting the current, powerful, well-funded assault.

Author Hume does not shy away from graphic evocation of the procedures she enumerates the activists providing. It's astonishing to me how very difficult pregnancy is...to start, to finish, to understand in its myriad complexities. It was not always pleasant to encounter this information.

The broader framework of resistance and activism on multiple social fronts in that fifty-years-gone time and place is not skimped. The long-gone groups, their interlocking aims, their interpenetration of membership, wildly proliferate and birth acronym after abbreviation thus are correspondingly difficult to keep track of. As is so often the case among resisters of any facet of the status quo, the vicious internecine fights are hard to read about. I have this wild, unruly desire to scream at the idiots fighting over nonsense to grow up and get a grip! Fight the right-wingers in charge, not each other! It's just handing the rotters victory in their efforts to control and exploit everone for fun and profit to fight among yourselves!

I took long breaks from this read to avoid having more strokes from fury at the dimwits who refuse to accept impure, compromise positions because they are RIGHT and that should be OBVIOUS so everyone should do as they say! Which is, oddly enough, exactly what the right-wingers say.

Funny, that.

The thrust of this book is, as I see it, what worked before can work again. Get your gloves out, the literal healthcare ones and the metaphorical battle ones. The world's going to go into reverse unless we all do a LOT OF RESISTING, at ballot boxes, at clinic-defense events, at community meetings.

It worked before, it can again, but not without personal, individual commitments to show up in the flesh. Slacktivism is helpful to direct the conversation but more is needed to oppose the wave of nightmare invasive evil laws.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


WE CHOOSE TO: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe
CURTIS BOYD & GLENNA HALVORSON-BOYD
Disruption Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Although the Dallas Fire Department had saved the clinic, we were shaken and heartsick that our son had just spent Christmas Day at a crime scene. I had performed my first abortion in the year Kyle was born, and though he had long supported our work, he now felt worried for us in ways he’d never expressed. As we stood near the ruins, breathing fresh air in gulps, he said, “Do you have to keep doing this work?”

We were both silent for long moments before I simply said, “No. We choose to.”

In this deeply personal account, Dr. Curtis Boyd and Dr. Glenna Halvorson-Boyd reflect on their lives in abortion care, from the childhood experiences that shaped their paths to the Supreme Court decision that forced the closure of their Dallas clinic. Their stories begin in the 1960s, as Curtis opens a clandestine abortion practice while breaking with the beliefs of his Baptist family and Glenna pursues psychology while coming to understand the world of restrictive gender roles. When the two of them meet shortly after abortion is legalized, they bond over a common commitment to women, forming a professional and personal partnership that will weather the coming decades. We Choose To is the story of that partnership, and the staff and patients that have shaped the history of modern abortion.

In these pages, Curtis and Glenna share their holistic, morally rooted approach to their work. Led by a desire to empower patients, they advance abortion and mental health care further than ever even as they find themselves at the center of a controversial new issue in American life. Sweeping, introspective, and deeply honest, We Choose To is a rare portrait of abortion providers and the world in which they work, where abortion is not a talking point in a culture war but a private, even spiritual, act.

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My Review: If you're wondering what kind of person is drawn to resist social injustice, read this joint memoir by two powerfully rooted in faith people. They set themselves out to provide care for women who were not being served in their time of need by any system allegedly meant to do so.

I'm strongly anti-religion because people like the authors are far too seldom to be found in the ranks of churchgoers. These people are exemplars of walking the walk while self-awarely not talking the most frquently heard talk from the faith they once shared.

I emerged from this read far more ready to smile about the world's future. These deeply admirable people have raised kids and lived lives of service and, by example, inspired others. What more can one ask?

Thank you both for sharing your motivations and reasons for being genuinely good.