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January Magazine has kind words for Jem Poster's Rifling Shadows, now on sale in bookstores everywhere: "It sounds like hyperbole but I don’t care: Jem Poster’s sophomore effort, Rifling Paradise (Overlook) is as near perfect a book as I have encountered in a very long time. It is a work of historical fiction and the history here -- Australia in the Victorian era -- is pitch perfect. Rifling Paradise looks like a book, but it is not: it’s really a time machine.The story finds minor English landowner, Charles Redbourne, heading to Australia to make an impression as a naturalist, at a time when that was a weirdly competitive field. If Rifling Paradise was just Redbourne’s story, it would be interesting enough: it would be a good book. But when Redbourne’s specimen collecting takes a terrifying turn, we find ourselves with a page turner on our hands.So what is Rifling Paradise? Is it historical fiction? Literary fiction? Is it a psychological thriller? Or the portrait of an age? Well, actually, it’s all of those things. And more. A wonderful book."

Jem Poster's new novel Rifling Paradise gets a positive nod in next week's Publishers Weekly: "Destitution and scandal drive 19th century British gentleman Charles Redbourne on a voyage to Australia in Poster’s atmospheric second novel. Charles hopes to collect specimens of rare wildlife, but his trip soon goes literally and figuratively offtrack. His stay with a family friend is unsettled by his host’s daughter, a volatile artist with a troubled past. Bullen, his expedition manager, clashes violently with their porter, Billy Preece, deriding the servant’s guidance, even though Billy’s Aboriginal heritage provides their only authentic connection to the untamed land they traverse. As the journey devolves toward danger and even death, Poster (Courting Shadows) evokes complex Victorian attitudes toward nature, culture, progress and science. Charles is a compelling portrait of a man moving uneasily among conflicting possibilities of his time."

From Booknotes, the newsletter of the fabulous Elliott Bay Book Co. in downtown Seattle: "The year is 1881: Young architect John Stannard is sent from London to a rural part of England to make repairs on the village church. Tearing down walls, burning the pews, and unearthing the dead, Stannard pays no heed to the voices of protest that surround him. While not at work he devotes himself to emotionally tormenting a beautiful young local girl by the name of Ann Rosewell. Jem Poster presents a scathing look at the battleground between the sacred and profane. Thought provoking, coolly elegant, and rich in detail, this novel is sure to be a success." -J. Ditzel

Courting Shadows in reviewed on Entertainment Weekly online: "John Stannard, the narrator of Jem Poster's debut novel, Courting Shadows, is an insufferable snob. Hired to oversee repairs on a medieval church in a remote British village in the 19th century, the class-conscious Stannard treats his unrefined workers with arrogance. He's insensitive to the church's cleric and cruel to a seductive lass with whom he shared a flash of uncharacteristic bliss. It's risky placing such an unsympathetic, humorless character front and center. Poster keeps us engaged with prose that captures suffocating Victorian restraint, and a finale that doesn’t let the disagreeable prig off the hook." B - By Tim Purtell

Robert L. Klitzman, MD, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, discusses a chapter in his book, When Doctors Become Patients, about how spiritual choices may affect a clinician’s relationship and or judgment with patients here. To read an excerpt from the book click here.

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It is not easy for anyone to become ill and be at the mercy of doctors, but what about doctors themselves? How do they react to being on the other side of stethoscope? In When Doctors Become Patients Robert Klitzman, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, looks at what the experience is like for doctors who become sick, and what it can teach us about our current health care system and more broadly, the experience of being ill. In the excerpt below Klitzman explores how doctors go about researching their own diseases and how this research seems more disheartening once they have become part of the statistics.

‘‘We know very little,’’ Roxanne, the gastroenterologist, said, referring to the medical literature on the causes of cancer. As suggested above, once ill, many of these physicians came to reassess the role of research in individual medical decisions, and became more critical in their evaluations of research as a whole. Roxanne, for example, became more sensitive to the elusiveness of ‘‘the truth,’’ no longer thinking there was just one answer. ‘‘People base things on the literature and on one paper that’s not been duplicated. I’m skeptical. There’s a lot of literature, but also fashions—things used in the past. Now we’re into other treatment approaches. We can’t cure anything.’’ Indeed, these ill physicians appeared previously to have paid little heed to the implications of this pattern. (more…)

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Robert Klitzman, author of the upcoming book When Doctors Become Patients is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University. He was recently interviewed about the personal injury lawyer out of Atlanta, Andrew Speaker, who traveled to Europe after being diagnosed with a drug resistant form of tuberculosis. Here the podcast here.

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