Why Doctors Should Read Fiction
Students in medical school and nursing traditionally study ethics through the use of case studies, short synopses of situations the students may face later in their careers. This article describes a recent paper from the journal Literature and Medicine that suggests replacing case studies with short stories that present ethical situations in more narrative depth.
Why Little Women Endures
A look at the recent book Meg, Jo, Both, Amy by Anne Boyd Rioux, which argues that Little Women, often called a book full of sweetness, is also an angry book “in a specifically feminist way”:
Alcott uses the structures that hem women in—marriage, home, religion—both to attract and repel her readers.
100 Best Thrillers of All Time
The title is self-evident. The list breaks its contents down into several categories: psychological thrillers, crime/mystery thrillers, sci fi/fantasy thrillers, horror thrillers, legal thrillers, domestic thrillers, medical thrillers, and the catch-all atypical thrillers.
Pat Barker Sees the Women of Troy
As women across the globe come forward with stories of harassment, abuse, and oppression, novelist Pat Barker is giving voice to fictional women in a classic piece of literature. In The Silence of Girls, out in September from Doubleday, she tells the story of The Iliad from a female perspective.
One of the transformative powers of fiction is that it can present a familiar story from a different, never before heard, perspective. Here’s how novelist Pat Barker lets one woman speak about that ultimate example of patriarchy, war.
The Lazy Trope of the Unethical Female Journalist
As Stephen Marche wrote in 2014 for Esquire, the reality of journalists is that they’re “one of the less glamorous species of humanity,” and the most reliable trait of the truly gifted ones is that they’re perpetually on the phone—which is presumably why the entertainment industry has long preferred an alternate depiction of journalists, particularly when it comes to women. On television and in film, the fictional lady reporter tends to look less like Haberman [of the Showtime documentary miniseries The Fourth Estate] and more like Camille Preaker, portrayed in the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects by Amy Adams.
Sophie Gilbert, staff writer for The Atlantic, points out that this portrayal of female journalists is devastating in light of the many women who have entered the profession. Furthermore, the picture of female journalists who will sleep with any source just to get a story makes any news story by a woman suspect in popular opinion, a particularly alarming occurrence in the current climate of “fake news.”
Gilbert urges readers to watch The Fourth Estate to see “visibly tired, multitasking women working relentlessly because they know the stories they’re reporting are stories that need telling.”
© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown
