Doctor Elizabeth Ford is a psychiatrist who has worked on and overseen the prison hospital psychiatric wards at Bellevue Hospital in New York since 2000. In this memoir, Dr. Ford describes the conditions, staff and patients in these wards as well as her own personal journey in working with them. Much of what she describes is frustrating and tragic: the lack of space and consistent treatment for those in need, seeing the same prisoners cycle back into her wards over and over, stories of individual […]
The American Revolution Through Slaves’ Eyes
Laurie Halse Anderson’s award-winning YA novels set during the American Revolution are superb. Not only does she get her history correct — with fascinating detail about daily life for wealthy and working classes, Loyalists and Patriots, city life and army camp life — but she also provides narrators whose perspectives are unique and provocative. Isabel and Curzon are slaves. Each brings a different view of the revolution and what it means for them as slaves. The three novels take the reader from May of 1776, when […]
Powerful Novel of War and Hope
Half of a Yellow Sun is a story of independence, war, betrayal and loss both for a nation and for a particular group of people swept up in it all. Set in the 1960s, it examines life in Nigeria on the eve of war and then during the chaos and violence of the Biafran war. While providing concise historical background on Nigeria and Biafra, Adichie, through her characters, shows how class division, race, culture, and gender fed into and were in turn influenced by conflict. […]
Hard Topic Done Right
This YA novel has turned into a bestseller and has generated a lot of positive buzz. Angie Thomas, with her first novel, boldly takes on racism and police shootings through the eyes of 16-year-old Starr Carter. Starr is an engaging narrator who straddles two different worlds that will collide, forcing her to make hard choices about who she is and what she ought to be doing. We meet Starr on the night “it” happens. It’s spring break and Starr is at a house party in […]