Let's Go on a Book Tour!

I noticed the other day that there are books *all over* our house. So I decided to go on a little "book tour" with my camera. These are the books Dear Husband and I are currently reading.

On the sideboard:

Shifting Boundaries of Public Health (2008) is a collection of essays edited by Susan Gross Solomon, Lion Murard & Patrick Zylberman. I am particularly interested in doyen of public health history Dorothy Porter's chapter on "The Social Contract of Health."

Susanne Michl's Im Dienste des Volkskörpers. Deutsche und französische Ärzte im Ersten Weltkrieg (2007) continues the discussion about individual versus collective identity and responsibility for health.



On the living room coffee table:

In Medizin und Krieg. Deutschland 1914-1924 (2014), Wolfgang Eckart compiles a career's worth of secondary literature on medicine before, during, and after World War I. I've stalled in the first chapter.

The other one is a PreTest question book in Pediatrics. I have not been "reading" it as much as I maybe should be.



On my bureau:

I've actually already read Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies (2005) and Clio in the Clinic: History in Medical Practice (2004), edited by Jacalyn Duffin; click to read my book review on this blog. On my to-read list is Duffin's Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints and Healing the Modern World (2008).

On my bedside table:

A friend loaned me Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (2012), Andrew Solomon's 700-page award-winning meditation on the joys but mostly the difficulties of raising children who are in some way different from their parents: gay, Deaf, multiply disabled.

For Christmas, my father found me a neat little book edited by Harold Elk Straubing, In Hospital and Camp: The Civil War through the Eyes of its Doctors and Nurses (1993), with letters from medical personnel on both sides of the conflict.

On Dear Husband's nightstand:

Also for Christmas, I gave DH a copy of William Goldman's "abridged" version of The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure (1973). We take turns reading it to each other before (sometimes while) falling asleep at night.

DH has also set himself the task of reading all 11 volumes of Will Durant and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization in 11 years. He's got 3 months to read the last 300 pages of Volume XI: The Age of Napoleon (1975).