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Book Reviews 271 Sue Brannan Walker and Rosaly Demaios Roffman, eds., Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing. Mobile, Ala.: Negative CapabiUty Press, 1992. 647 pp. Clothbound, $24.95; paperback, $13.95. This is a large, moving, and useful book, a compendium of almost three hundred poems, stories, essays, and personal statements on the themes of suffering, heaUng, and medicine. About three-quarters of the items are poems, and although there is a good deal of variety among the contributions, the overall flavor of the anthology is distinctly autobiographical and therapeutic. The collection's view of medicine is broad, and its politics are populist—or perhaps universalist is more accurate. The primary editor, Sue Walker, says in her introduction that she conceived the book as part of her own search for healing after the death of her parents. Walker, who is a professor of English, poet, editor, and publisher, asked her contributors to consider the relation of words to heaUng. The result is a wealth of material that will deepen any reader's appreciation for the many human forms of suffering and heaUng. Who are the authors? The book's biographical section reports that a large majority of the 228 contributors are writers, editors, or Uterary academics. Many, Uke its two editors, fit two or more of these categories; about one in ten is a scientist or a medical person; and more than half are women. Some contributors are well known. Many readers of this book will recognize names such as John Updike, Karl Shapiro, Marge Piercy, William Stafford, Carl Djerassi, Mary OUver, Dannie Abse, Diane Wakoski, Gerald Weissmann, Jack Coulehan, and Bernie Siegel. Most contributors, however, will probably not be famiUar to many readers in the medical humanities. Although Walker does not say exactly how she solicited works for her anthology, the fact that only thirty-eight of her contributors are included in a list of copyright acknowledgments suggests that most of these works were either composed for the occasion or were thought to be too personal (or not Uterary enough) to have been published elsewhere. In spite of this, the literary and medical sophistication of these works overall is quite high. The editors have included some fragments and some personal statements that are not literary in the usual sense, whose power comes directly from the experience to which they testify. In one fragment, the culinary writer M. F. K. Fisher speaks briefly of the heaUng potential of satisfied hunger, whether for food or love. In a short personal narrative, a young woman recaUs a childhood incident of sexual abuse by her father with her mother's consent, and describes the process of her recent heaUng—aE in less than a page. In spite of its simpUcity, the latter piece 272 BOOK REVIEWS seems to me a valuable part of this collection, guided as it is by the belief that the experiences of suffering and healing are universal and that their true telling has both an educational and cathartic validity that does not require sophisticated treatment to be interesting. The readings are divided into eight clusters by theme. The collection begins at full speed with a short but harrowing section on abuse. This is followed by two longer sections, titled "Death and Dying" and "Illness," which contain the collection's works that most clearly occupy the territory usually thought of as medical. "Relationships," "Memory," and "Rituals and Remedies" broaden the focus considerably. The long section "White Flags from Silent Camps" offers a particularly wide variety of works, including some short essays. This section's enigmatic title comes from a poem about translation in which translated words are imagined as antagonists under fire, emerging slowly, their defenses gone, surrendering their meaning. Some of this section's fifty-three works, particularly the poetic ones, are only loosely related to medicine, but the cluster is unified by its consistent interest in words, speaking, and writing. The book's final section, titled "With Hope for Life," is the most tightly focused. Inspired by the horrors of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, seven poems by a writer who lived near the Chernobyl plant and a thoughtful essay by a Soviet scientist compose...

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