Black Man in a White Coat

A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine

by Damon Tweedy (from Goodreads)

 

One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans

 

When Damon Tweedy begins medical school, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites."

 

Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.

The Peculiar Patriot

The Peculiar Patriot looks at the business of the criminal justice system (those who are profiting), examines the human impact, and shines a light on the racial disparities inherent within it.  It is a fitting companion to Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. 

The Peculiar Patriot is written and performed by Liza Jessie Peterson, an activist, actress, playwright, author, and poet. This critically acclaimed one-woman show premiered at the National Black Theater in Harlem and was nominated for a Drama Desk award.

It was released on 9/24/20 and is available at Audible.com free to members.  If you are not a member, Audible has free trials.

Theater of War

 

by Bryan Dorries

NY Times review by James Shapiro, April 2015

“The theater of ancient Greece was many things: a literary competition; a ­Dionysian religious rite; a place where citizens gathered to see plays that ­explored pressing social and political concerns; and through its portrayal of human suffering, a site of collective catharsis.

It is the last of these, especially the therapeutic potential of catharsis, that most interests Bryan Doerries. Trained as a classicist and theater director, and scarred by witnessing the suffering and death of his girlfriend and his father, ­ Doerries sought in these old plays methods of dealing with unhealed wounds. “The Theater of War” recounts these and other experiences that led him to found a company that shares its name with his book. A catalyst for Doerries was the struggles of veterans who had returned home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Also see: Theater of War Productions.

Caste

Caste: The Origins of our Discontents

By Isabel Wilkerson

 

New York Times Book Review, July 31, 2020  https://nyti.ms/2Xfu0wc

Dwight Garner’s BR begins with these paragraphs: A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives.
He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes
a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William
Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of
literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
Kennedy wasn’t far off.

I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our
Discontents.” Caste is an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American
classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It
made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.

Wilkerson is an amazing storyteller. This book is a virtuoso performance. It’s important for any
of us living in the United States, indeed any of us living in the year 2020.  These notes do not
supplant reading the book, but they may serve as a guide to some busy people.

 

DJE's GoogleDocs Notes.

Hamnet

 

HAMNET
A Novel of the Plague
By Maggie O’Farrell

“Hamnet” is an exploration of marriage and grief written into the silent opacities of a life that is at once extremely famous and profoundly obscure.

Countless scholars have combed through Elizabethan England’s parish and court records looking for traces of William Shakespeare. But what we know for sure, if set down unvarnished by learned and often fascinating speculation, would barely make a slender monograph. As William Styron once wrote, the historical novelist works best when fed on short rations. The rations at Maggie O’Farrell’s disposal are scant but tasty, just the kind of morsels to nourish an empathetic imagination.

This is a beautifully written story that deals with grief and channels what life might have been like in Elizabethan England.

I listened to it on Audible.com, and the reading is clear and compelling.

NY Times Book Review.