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'I remember you once told me about mockingbirds and their special talents for mimicry. They steal the songs from others, you said. I want to ask you this: how were our own songs stolen from us, the notes dispersed, while our faces were turned away?' Berlin, 1936. Ernst Schäfer, a young, ambitious zoologist and keen hunter and collector, has come to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, who invites him to lead a group of SS scientists to the frozen mountains of Tibet. Their secret mission: to search for the origins of the Aryan race. Ernst has doubts initially, but soon seizes the opportunity to rise through the ranks of the Third Reich. While Ernst prepares for the trip, he marries Herta, his ...
“The Waiting Room is both haunted, and haunting.”—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March The Waiting Room unfolds over the course of a single, life-changing day, but the story it tells spans five decades, three continents, and one family’s compelling history of love, war, and survival As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Dina’s present has always been haunted by her parents’ pasts. She becomes a doctor, emigrates, and builds a family of her own, yet no matter how hard she tries to move on, their ghosts keep pulling her back. A dark, wry sense of humor helps Dina maintain her sanity amid the constant challenges of motherhood and medicine, but when a terror alert is issued in her adopted city, her coping skills are pushed to the limit. Interlacing the present and the past over a span of twenty-four hours, The Waiting Room is an intense exploration of what it means to endure a day-to-day existence defined by conflict and trauma, and a powerful reminder of just how fragile life can be. As the clock counts down to a shocking climax, Dina must confront her parents’ history and decide whether she will surrender to fear, or fight for love.
A fundraiser for our wildlife, from land, sea and sky. Proceeds go to the Australian Marine Conservation Society and Australian Wildlife Conservancy. A response to the devastating 2019-20 bushfires, Animals Make Us Human both celebrates Australia's unique wildlife and highlights its vulnerability. Through words and images, writers, photographers and researchers reflect on their connection with animals and nature. They share moments of wonder and revelation from encounters in the natural world- seeing a wild platypus at play, an echidna dawdling across a bush track, or the inexplicable leap of a thresher shark; watching bats take flight at dusk, or birds making a home in the backyard; or foll...
This is fluent, well crafted poetry but it is not always comfortable as Leah Kaminsky takes us on a journey with her father fleeing from Poland to escape the holocaust, then as a doctor struggling to keep her commitment to her patients, and finally to Haifa, raising children under constant danger from rockets and suicide bombers. It is deeply felt poetry, gaining its power from precision and understatement. It is poetry which recalls Carolyn Forche's compelling anthology 'Against Forgetting'. - Ron Pretty
‘This is a book for doctors and patients – that is, the lot of us – to relish.’ – Thomas Keneally It is through writing that many doctors have plumbed the depths and richness of their experiences and, in turn, used this to explore their patients’ inner lives. Differential Diagnosis is a unique collection of fiction and non-fiction by doctor–writers that gives us a fascinating look behind the doctor’s mask, and gets inside the minds of those who deal with enormous existential issues and traumatic situations on a daily basis. These stories canvass emotional experiences acutely felt by doctors: an awareness of our mortality, of how humanity interplays with medicine, of the weight of responsibility carried by the profession. They bring into sharp focus, in many cases, the point of view of the patient, illuminating the experience of grief, trauma, illness, and ageing that doctors witness through their work. Contributors: Ethan Canin, Nick Earls, Atul Gawande, Peter Goldsworthy, Jacinta Halloran, Sandeep Jauhar, Leah Kaminsky, Perri Klass, Robert Jay Lifton, John Murray, Danielle Ofri, Oliver Sacks, Abraham Verghese, Gabriel Weston, Irvin Yalom
Moving from wartime Europe to modern day Australia, The Deceptions is a powerful story of old transgressions, unexpected revelations and the legacy of lives built on lies and deceit. Prague, 1943. Taken from her home in Prague, Hana Lederova finds herself imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt, where she is forced to endure appalling deprivation and the imminent threat of transportation to the east. When she attracts the attention of the Czech gendarme who becomes her guard, Hana reluctantly accepts his advances, hoping for the protection she so desperately needs. Sydney, 2010. Manipulated into a liaison with her married boss, Tessa knows she needs to end it, but how? Tessa's gran...
The Pen and the Stethoscope is a unique collection of fiction and non-fiction by doctor–writers that gives us a fascinating look behind the doctor's mask and gets inside the minds of those who deal with enormous existential issues and traumatic situations on a daily basis. It is through writing that many doctors have plumbed the depths and richness of their experience. This book takes a critical look at doctors' close observations on their working life. With a foreword by Jerome Groopman, contributors include Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Irvin Yalom, Jacinta Halloran, Peter Goldsworthy, Ethan Canin, Robert Jay Lifton, Danielle Ofri, Perri Klass, Nick Earls, Ethan Canin, Sandeep Jauhar, and Leah Kaminsky.
From Chekhov to Maugham to William Carlos Williams, doctors have long given voice to their unique perspectives through literature. Writer, M.D. celebrates this rich tradition with a collection of fiction and nonfiction by today’s most beloved physician-writers, including, • Abraham Verghese, on the lost art of the physical exam • Pauline Chen, on the bond between a med student and her first cadaver • Atul Gawande, on the ethical dilemmas of a young surgical intern • Danielle Ofri, on the devastation of losing a patient • Ethan Canin, on love, poetry, and growing old These essays and stories illuminate the inner lives of men and women who deal with trauma, illness, mortality, and grief on a daily basis. Read together, they provide a candid, moving, one-of-a-kind glimpse behind the doctor’s mask.
* One of the Boston Globe's Best Books of 2020 * Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Li-Young Lee The More Extravagant Feast focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection—the acts of making and sustaining other bodies from one’s own, and one’s own from the larger world. Leah Naomi Green writes from attentiveness to the vast availability and capacity of the weedy, fecund earth and from her own human place within more-than-human life, death, and birth. Lyrically and spiritually rich, striving toward honesty and understanding, The More Extravagant Feast is an extraordinary book of awareness of our dependency on ecological systems—seen and unseen.
A family doctor shares a mother and father's determination to save their son. This story of a father's search to find a diagnosis, and ultimately a cure, for his son's mystery disease is an inspiration that has set the world of genetic medicine and research abuzz with the possibilities for the future. After Cracking the Code screened on "Australian Story," Stephen Damiani and his extraordinary ordinary family have been inundated with messages of support for Mission Massimo. Stephen has a background in construction economics and risk management. He teamed with geneticist Ryan Taft to map his family's genome in an attempt to discover the cause of his son's illness, and in the process developed...