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Originally Posted by issybird
I ended up going back to the memoir well after all, with God’s Hotel by Victoria Sweet, an account of her practice at the last almshouse in America, in the years of its transition from patient-oriented to corporate medicine and its removal from its historic building to a purpose-built (but much less patient-friendly, according to the author) facility. I read this on a recommendation, not thinking it was really my thing, and I ended up loving it - the author’s synthesis of people, place, and her own evolving ideas of medicine which in fact went back to the twelfth century marvelously realized the almshouse, even given her biases and touch of arrogance. A five-star read.
I’m now reading a publication from this year, The Betrayal of the Duchess by Maurice Samuels, about the machinations of the daughter-in-law of the last Bourbon king. The author’s brief is that this was occasioned the transition of France to the modern era, including the nascence of modern anti-Semitism. It’s moving quickly and is entertaining, for all its seriousness of purpose.
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I seem to keep returning to the memoir genre this Covid summer and I just finished another five-star memoir which was published last month,
Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford. It’s the harrowing account of her rape by two fellow students at St. Paul’s School when she was fifteen years old, and of the subsequent coverup and shaming of the author by the school power structure, which persisted for decades even when the state finally began to investigate the culture of abuse and assault at the school.
Highly recommended, but I think it would be impossible to read this without a sense of sheer outrage so while it’s compelling, it’s also difficult and upsetting.