Staff Picks

An inspirational and enjoyable read about two doctors whose whole lives have been committed to restoring sight to the blind as well as saving lives for hundreds of people living in remote places with extreme poverty.

 

Publisher Description:

From the co-author of "Three Cups of Tea" comes the inspiring story of two very different doctors—one from the United States, the other from Nepal—united in a common mission: to rid the world of preventable blindness. In this transporting book, David Oliver Relin shines a light on the work of Geoffrey Tabin and Sanduk Ruit, gifted ophthalmologists who have dedicated their lives to restoring sight to some of the world's most isolated, impoverished people through the Himalayan Cataract Project, an organization they founded in 1995. Tabin was the high-achieving bad boy of Harvard Medical School, an accomplished mountain climber and adrenaline junkie as brilliant as he was unconventional. Ruit grew up in a remote Nepalese village, where he became intimately acquainted with the human costs of inadequate access to health care. Together they found their life's calling: tending to the afflicted people of the Himalayas, a vast mountainous region with an alarmingly high incidence of cataract blindness.

 

Robert Kolker is one of the best non-fiction writers I've ever had the pleasure of reading. In "Hidden Valley Road," he follows the saga of a large, all-American family--a family with a terrible burden. Of the twelve children in the Galvin family, six of them suffer from schizophrenia. From the earliest signs in the eldest son in the 1960s and 1970s, through the rapid changes in mental health care in the 1980s, up to the family's current struggles and triumphs, Kolker delves deep into the intricacies and everyday lives of an extraordinary yet utterly ordinary American family.

This book is about the physical and psychiatric effects of trauma, and the various treatments available for treating them. The author clearly outlines how trauma impacts people physically, how it's embedded in the body, and how those impacts can play out. This book really opened my eyes to the variety of ways those who have endured natural disasters, child abuse, physical abuse, war-related trauma, trauma from car accidents, etc., have literally been changed, and it explains some behavioral outcomes that I wouldn't have recognized or understood otherwise. It explains clearly why traumatized people behave the way they do, gave me a different perspective on the science, history, and labels used in psychiatry, and gave me great empathy for the struggles of people who have been traumatized. The most important takeaway is that traumatized people can't "just snap out of it," and that the younger and more severe the trauma, the harder it is to treat and overcome. Importantly, though, new treatments are showing great promise. This is an important book and an interesting read. I highly recommend it to parents, teachers, and frontline service workers.