Category Archives: What I’m Reading

What I’m Reading: The Birth House

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What I'm Reading

From Goodreads.com:
The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare, the first daughter to be born in five generations of the Rare family. As a child in an isolated village in Nova Scotia, she is drawn to Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a gift for healing and a kitchen filled with herbs and folk remedies. During the turbulent years of World War I, Dora becomes the midwife’s apprentice. Together, they help the women of Scots Bay through infertility, difficult labors, breech births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling sex lives.

When Gilbert Thomas, a brash medical doctor, comes to Scots Bay with promises of fast, painless childbirth, some of the women begin to question Miss Babineau’s methods – and after Miss Babineau’s death, Dora is left to carry on alone. In the face of fierce opposition, she must summon all of her strength to protect the birthing traditions and wisdom that have been passed down to her.

Filled with details that are as compelling as they are surprising-childbirth in the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion, the prescribing of vibratory treatments to cure hysteria and a mysterious elixir called Beaver Brew-The Birth House is an unforgettable tale of the struggles women have faced to maintain control over their own bodies and to keep the best parts of tradition alive in the world of modern medicine.

My review:
Today in Canada, or at least in BC, pregnant women have the option to choose a midwife or a doctor for their pre- and post-natal care. Both are covered through health care and both are fully capable of delivering a baby into the world in a safe and efficient manner. I picked up this book to read not only for the Canadian content, but to maybe understand midwives a little bit more.

Back in the early 1900’s, especially in the rural communities such as Scots Bay, NS, midwives like Dora Rare and Miss. B were the ones who “caught” babies. There was no official schooling, just methods passed down from teacher to student. I really like reading this book and it really opened up my thoughts to midwives. Miss B is a wise lady and is rightfully sceptical of Dr. Thomas. Canada was still a very young country at this time, especially in rural areas, and the change of time was slower. New methods of medicine, in the case of this story, childbirth, were not always welcomed with open arms. The doctor’s “Wham-bam” method of delivering babies leaves Dora and Miss B leery and afraid for the women of their community.

Like the Goodreads description states, there are several tidbits of information that spring true from the time period – The Halifax explosion, the hysteria treatments (which made me laugh a little bit), as well as the influenza outbreak in Boston.

I really enjoyed this book not only for the historical factor, but also for the medical factor. It shows not only how much medicine has changed over the years, but also the roots of some of the herbal medicine you see today. Many of the herbal remedies that were mentioned in The Birth House I’ve heard of today. Dora’s story is also compelling – her journey through midwifing, love, and loss drew me in.

Overall, I give The Birth House 4 stars out of 5.

Reading the book didn’t make me want to ditch my doctor and switch to a midwife for my next pregnancy, because I don’t think doctors today are as radical as they were back then, but like I said, it opened my eyes. Midwives are just as capable of delivering babies as doctors, and tend to show more compassionate care than some doctors (Not that doctors don’t show compassion, because many do).

What are your thoughts on Midwives vs. Doctors? If you’ve had a baby – What made you decide which one to “use?” If you haven’t – which route do you think you’ll go with? Why?

What I’m Reading: Unbearable Lightness

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Synopsis from Goodreads.com:
“I didn’t decide to become anorexic. It snuck up on me disguised as a healthy diet, a professional attitude. Being as thin as possible was a way to make the job of being an actress easier . . .”

Portia de Rossi weighed only 82 pounds when she collapsed on the set of the Hollywood film in which she was playing her first leading role. This should have been the culmination of all her years of hard work—first as a child model in Australia, then as a cast member of one of the hottest shows on American television. On the outside she was thin and blond, glamorous and successful. On the inside, she was literally dying.

In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. She recounts the elaborate rituals around eating that came to dominate hours of every day, from keeping her daily calorie intake below 300 to eating precisely measured amounts of food out of specific bowls and only with certain utensils. When this wasn’t enough, she resorted to purging and compulsive physical exercise, driving her body and spirit to the breaking point.

Even as she rose to fame as a cast member of the hit television shows Ally McBeal and Arrested Development, Portia alternately starved herself and binged, all the while terrified that the truth of her sexuality would be exposed in the tabloids. She reveals the heartache and fear that accompany a life lived in the closet, a sense of isolation that was only magnified by her unrelenting desire to be ever thinner. With the storytelling skills of a great novelist and the eye for detail of a poet, Portia makes transparent as never before the behaviors and emotions of someone living with an eating disorder.

From her lowest point, Portia began the painful climb back to a life of health and honesty, falling in love with and eventually marrying Ellen DeGeneres, and emerging as an outspoken and articulate advocate for gay rights and women’s health issues.

In this remarkable and beautifully written work, Portia shines a bright light on a dark subject. A crucial book for all those who might sometimes feel at war with themselves or their bodies, Unbearable Lightness is a story that inspires hope and nourishes the spirit.

My review:
I had a general idea of how “deep” into your psyche eating disorders could get before I started reading de Rossi’s memoir. I knew that it was more than just not eating, more than bingeing and purging, but reading this book really opens your eyes to the though pattern and rationality that lurks behind anorexia and bulimia.

To say it simply, this book is scary. To think that a person can go as far as considering the amount of calories lip balm may contain is a whole new level of eat disorders, and it just goes to show how far one person can be willing to go to reach some vision of what an “acceptable” weight for models and actors. Sure, they may look and act glamourous and beautiful, but there is nothing beautiful about counting calories to such an extreme that you’re unable to live a normal live. The normalcy of it all is what’s also quite shocking – Not eating for days on end was normal for de Rossi.

In regards to the actual book itself, I could not put it down. I knew who de Rossi was before she married Ellen Degeneres, although I didn’t watch Ally McBeal (my mom did) or Arrested Development. I knew she had an eating disorder and overcome it, I just didn’t know how she developed it and how she overcome it. I found myself reading page after page so intrigued by her story and just wondering how much further she would take things, and when she finally decided that she was not thin and beautiful but sick and knocking on death’s door.

I think everyone should read this book, whether you have known someone with a disorder, have tried dieting, or just want more insight of how brutal this disorder can be. I finished the book with a lot of disbelief, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I give Unbearable Lightness 5 stars out of 5.

What I’m Reading: Inside

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Synopsis from Goodreads.com:
When Grace, an exceedingly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man who has just failed to hang himself, her instinct to help kicks in immediately. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments. 

And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. 

With razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to—and responsible for—those dearest to us.

My review:
I wasn’t completely sure what to expect out of this book, considering it wasn’t the usual happy & fluffy genre of chick-lit I usually steer towards, but I decided to go for it anyway. While I didn’t LOVE love the book, I did enjoy it.

Each character has their own storyline, all while being intertwined at the same time. I think I enjoyed following Grace’s story the most, mostly because of the relationship she develops with the man she found while out skiing. If there were a main character of the book, I suppose it would be Grace as she has the most interaction with all of the other characters.

**SPOILER ALERT!**

The book drew me in by pulling on my psychological heart strings; every page turn made me want to figure out each character a little more, and this leads to the reason why I didn’t enjoy Inside as much as I had hoped I would, because I really wanted to know MORE. I found that there were a lot of loose ends in the character’s stories – Why Grace closed her practice (To give a better life for her daughter? Because it was pulled by the board after Annie’s incident?), why Annie chose to run away, why Mitch and Grace split up to begin with … I suppose this is a reflection of the underlying theme of the book. A need to know more about a person’s life is something that therapists and psychologists are always battling with, so it makes sense why the author chose to write this way.

Overall, I’d give Inside 3.5 stars out of 5. I really wanted more out of the characters, but the style of the book wasn’t allowing that.