By: Maryann Yin,
on 11/25/2015
What sources of light do you recall from your favorite books? The team at solarcentre has created an infographic to showcase “Memorable Lights From Literature.”
The image features references to The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and The BFG by Roald Dahl. We’ve embedded the full piece below for you to explore further—what do you think?
By: Maryann Yin,
on 10/1/2015
By: Powell's Staff,
on 9/25/2015
It's one thing to read about censorship in a news article; it's another to become aware of the threat at a nearby library or school. For Banned Books Week this year, we reviewed hundreds of documented appeals to remove materials from a local public library, school library, or course curriculum. Below are 30 books that [...]
By: Maryann Yin,
on 4/14/2015
The American Library Association (ALA) has released its annual list of the most frequently challenged library books of the year. Sherman Alexie’s National Book Award-winning young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, claimed the top spot.
Throughout the year 2014, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received 311 reports of challenged books. Click here to check out an infographic that explores “Banned Books Through History.”
Here’s an excerpt from the ALA report: “The lack of diverse books for young readers continues to fuel concern…A current analysis of book challenges recorded by ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) from 2001 – 2013, shows that attempts to remove books by authors of color and books with themes about issues concerning communities of color are disproportionately challenged and banned. A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed because of its content or appropriateness.”
10 Most Frequently Challenged Library Books of 2014
1. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
2. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
3. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell with illustrations by Henry Cole
4. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
5. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
6. Saga written by Brian Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples
7. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
9. A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard
10. Drama by Raina Telgemeier
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By: Meredith Sneddon,
on 12/19/2014
Sir William Osler, the great physician and bibliophile, recommended that his students should have a non-medical bedside library that could be dipped in and out of profitably to create the well rounded physician. Some of the works mentioned by him, for example Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne is unlikely to be on most people’s reading lists today. There have been several recent initiatives in medical schools to encourage and promote the role of humanities in the education of tomorrow’s doctors. Literature and cinema has a role to play in making doctors more empathetic and understanding the human condition.
My idiosyncratic choice of books is as follows.
Firstly, I start with a work by the most respected physician of the twentieth century, Sir William Osler himself. The work I choose is Aeqanimitas, published in 1905 and is a collection of essays and addresses to medical students and nurses with essays ranging in title from “Doctor and Nurse,” “Teacher and Student,” “Nurse and Patient,” and “The Student Life”. They are as relevant today as the day they were penned with a prose style combining erudition and mastery of language rarely seen in practicing physicians. Osler was the subject of the great biography, written by the famous neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, who was to win a Pulitzer prize for his efforts. (I am not including this biography on my list, however.)
Anton Chekhov is included in my list for his short stories ( he was also a successful playwright). Chekhov was a qualified Russian doctor who practiced throughout his literary career, saying medicine was his lawful wife and literature his mistress. In addition to a cannon of short stories and plays, he was a great letter writer with the letters, written primarily while he traveled to the penal colony in Sakhalin. He was so moved by the inhumanity of the place, that these letters are considered to be some of his best. Chekhov succumbed to tuberculosis and died in 1904, aged only 44 years.
William Somerset Maugham, the great British storyteller was once described by a critic as a first rate writer of the second rank. Maugham suffered from club foot and was educated at the King’s School, Canterbury, and St. Thomas’s hospital, London where he qualified as a doctor. His first novel Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897 describes his student experience of midwifery work among the slums of Lambeth led him to give up medicine and earn a living writing. He became a prolific author of novels, short stories, and plays. His autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage describes his medical student years at St. Thomas’s Hospital. Many of his stories and novels were turned into successful films.
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Another medical student from the United Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital who never practiced as a doctor ( although he walked the wards of Guy’s Hospital and studied under the distinguished surgeon Astley Cooper), was John Keats, who lived a tragically short life, but became one of the greatest poets of the English language. His first poem “O Solitude,” published in The Examiner in 1816, laid the foundations of his legacy as a great British Romantic poet. Poems the first volume of Keats verse was not initially received with great enthusiasm, but today his legacy as a great poet is undisputed. Keats died, aged 25, of tuberculosis.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous North American nineteenth-century physician, poet and writer, and friend and biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, popularized the term “anaesthesia,” and invented the American stereoscope, or 3D picture viewer. Perhaps his best known work is The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table his 1858 work dealing with important philosophical issues about life.
In Britain over a century later, in 1971, the distinguished physician Richard Asher published a fine collection of essays, Richard Asher Talking Sense which showcase his brilliant wit, verbal agility and ability to debunk medical pomposity. His writings went on to influence a subsequent generation of medical writers.
In the United States, another great physician and essayist was Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon whose accessible 1994 work How We Die became one of the twentieth centuries great books on this important topic a discourse on man’s inevitably fate.
Two modern authors next. The popular American writer Michael Crichton was a physician and immunologist before becoming an immensely successful best-selling author of books like Five Patients, The Great Train Robbery, Congo, and Jurassic Park, which was of course turned into a very popular film by the American film director Stephen Spielberg.
Khaled Hosseini the Afghan-born American physician turned writer is a recent joiner of the club of physician-writers, having achieved great fame with his books The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.
I suppose we must finally include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the Scottish physician and author. His stories of the sleuth Sherlock Holmes have given generations pleasure and entertainment, borne of the sharp eye of the masterful physician in Conan Doyle.
Heading image: Books. Public Domain via Pixabay
The post 10 medically-trained authors whose books all doctors should read appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Maryann Yin,
on 6/3/2014
Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar this week. To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date. Books of Wonder will host a launch party for One Man Guy by Michael Barakiva. Join in on Tuesday, June 3rd from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. (New York, NY) continued...
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By: Savita Kalhan,
on 3/4/2014
It’s World Book Week this week, so I thought I would share some of my favourite reads over the last year in teen/YA and adult fiction. I hope you’ll share some of your favourites, books you would recommend, in the comments section. It’s always nice to find undiscovered treasures...
Here's my recent Teen/YA reads:
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell 
Wonder by R J Palacio
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers
The Uninvited by Liz Jensen
And one of my all time favourite books –
By: Dianna Dilworth,
on 11/7/2013
Amazon has revealed the bestselling books of 2012, a list led by Donna Tartt, Khaled Hosseini and David Finkel.
We’ve reprinted the top 10 books on the list below. Follow this link to see all 100. You can also check out the company’s top 100 lists for Literature & Fiction, Nonfiction, Digital Singles and Children’s Books for the year. Amazon also created a free Kindle eBook of the top books list if you’d like to read it on your device. continued…
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By: Dianna Dilworth,
on 11/4/2013
Goodreads has opened up the voting for its fifth annual Goodreads Choice Awards. The awards include twenty different categories from fiction and poetry to humor and fantasy. Authors Khaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Wally Lamb have been nominated for Fiction. Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling have both been nominated in the Mystery category.
Here is more about how the books are chosen from the Goodreads blog:
The Goodreads Choice Awards are the only major book awards decided by readers, and we find our nominees from books that our members read and love throughout the year. There’s no judging panel or industry experts. We analyzed statistics from the 250 million books added, rated, and reviewed on the site in 2013 to nominate 15 books in each category. Of course, with hundreds of thousands of books published in 2013, no nominee list could cover the amazing breadth of books reviewed on Goodreads so we also accept write-in votes during the Opening Round to ensure that you can vote for exactly the book you want.
Readers will be able to vote in three rounds of voting. The opening round lasts through November 9. The highest voted titles will make it to the Semifinals which last from November 11 – 16. Readers can vote on the final choices November 18 – 25.
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Boosted by enthusiastic reader recommendations and strong online sales, the popular teen novel Maggie Vaults Over the Moon continues to soar as a best-seller at Watermark Books & Cafe, the region’s No. 1 bookstore. Listed among works by world-class writers … Continue reading 
By: Jason Boog,
on 4/16/2013
The American Library Association (ALA) has released its annual list of the most frequently challenged library books of the year. We’ve linked to free samples of all the books on the list–follow the links below to read these controversial books yourself.
The list was part of the ALA’s 2013 State of America’s Libraries Report. During the past year, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received 464 reports of challenged books. Here’s more from the report:
In California, a school committee voted to remove the Stephen King novella “Different Seasons” from Rocklin High School library shelves. The lone dissenter on that committee was 17-year-old student Amanda Wong, who continued to fight the ban and spoke against the decision at a later school board meeting. After hearing Wong’s concerns that the removal “opens a door to censoring other materials,” the district superintendent overturned the committee’s decision and returned the book to the Rocklin High School library’s collection.
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