Michele HarperRecensioni

Not exactly the kind of book I was looking for, but inspiring in its own way. It had a spiritual and philosophical component too that I wasn't expecting, but I liked it. It makes me want to practice more yoga and meditation.

I love medical memoirs. I gravitate toward them by default, so when this one showed up on my radar, it was a no-brainer. Harper's story is poignant and at times heartbreaking: exactly what you'd expect from a memoir written by an ER doctor who spends part of her career working for a VA hospital in Philadelphia.

There's also a deeply spiritual bent in Harper's storytelling that I didn't expect but fully appreciated. Her spirituality is non-traditional (she mentions the goddess a handful of times), but that's exactly that made it so appealing. I hadn't realized how much it would touch my soul to see my own spiritual beliefs reflected back at me in a mainstream book by a highly-respected doctor.

Although the dialogue was at times stilted and Harper's turns of phrase occasionally awkward and convoluted, there's also so much beauty in this book. In the writing, in the storytelling, and in the deeply human stories of love and loss.

I really wanted to like this but it felt very disjointed, self-congratulatory, and overall not a very cohesive series of stories. It kind of just felt like reading patient files with a hint of "btw I was abused and I'm smart" and I think it would have been more interesting to read just as case studies kind of separated from Michele herself. I wanted there to be more about how her childhood actually shaped her. I did appreciate the parts about her being a Black woman in medicine.

An intimate look at emergency medicine in modern urban America as well as the survival strategy of one accomplished black female doctor working within the constraints of that system. We should all be so lucky to be treated by a medical professional with Dr Harper's professional skills, empathy, energy, and communication abilities. I hope she is still publishing and practicing 25 years from now.½

The experience of reading this book felt disjointed to me. I could not understand why the author only put in her childhood experience of a father physically abusive to her mother and brother, said she would write nothing about her experiences as an undergraduate at Harvard, talked about her divorce and breaking up with her boyfriend, wrote about her spiritual quest, and then made most of the chapters vignettes about patient experiences she had as an emergency room doctor. It was not until I read the epilogue that I realized the book was about being broken and then resolving that situation. I should have taken the clues from the book title, but I didn’t.

I was annoyed that in the writing they were so many terms that I did not know, even as a retired health professional. I was also annoyed that the author wrote about what she “was not going to write about” despite the reason.

The chapters themselves were good with the author presenting herself as a well qualified and caring emergency room physician. The individual patient stories presented situations of real social concerns. I consider this book good, but not one of the more memorable doctor’s memoirs.

I did not finish this book, although it was very good, but I can't figure out how to take it off my currently reading list without marking it read. Marking it not-reading doesn't do it!

Some pretty powerful & timely stuff here, thoroughly enjoyed it.

Revealing Perspective on Life

The writer quickly engaged attention by presenting gripping experiences from the perspective of a "caregiver" who looks at the individual need and not only the medical need. Ms. Harper weaves her personal story with those of her patients demonstrating that regardless of how our lives appear publicly, there is often a struggle that goes unseen, one we camouflage but can never break away from. I enjoyed her honesty, frank writing and transparency regarding her own personal struggles.

This was a really beautiful collection of essays by a Black doctor in the United States, talking about her life as a doctor and her struggles with racism and sexism, relationships and their meaning, and the American medical system. I really enjoyed reading this book.

nonfiction memoir - Black ER doctor in Philadelphia (inner city ER and Veterans hospital ER; relationships, absent/abusive father, personal recovery and helping others, touching on race issues with potential triggers - patient histories include sexual assault, drug addiction, mental illness

Really good, providing an unfortunately typical example of how Black mothers and babies face an unnecessarily higher risk of dying during childbirth in hospital care - highly recommended.

In this poignant memoir, Michele Harper writes about the abusive household in which she was raised as part of a wealthy African-American family. Her upbringing led her to want to help other people heal. She goes to Harvard for undergraduate work and then attends the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. She marries and divorces before she finishes her final residency and then dedicates her time to being a healer and the most ethical emergency room doctor possible. She spends considerable time self-healing and finding balance in her own life, from the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi to yoga and the use of incense. She is always seeking to love herself and be at peace with her own body and spirit as she attends to others.

After the initial narrative about her journey to the world of medicine, each subsequent chapter focuses on a particular patient who made an impression on her. In many cases, she learned lessons from the patient she decided to spotlight. Still, the incidents often reaffirmed what she already knew and provided entertaining and thought-provoking information for the reader. I gained many insights into the world of medicine. I confirmed my beliefs about the sometimes indecipherable differences between physical and mental health that provide continual challenges for the medical profession and society.

I loved Michele Harper’s writing. She communicated passion for her profession and compassion for her patients. She also tackled serious issues such as institutional racism and classism with anecdotes that enhanced my awareness. Michele Harper also qualifies other nuances of inequities inherent in the United States culture. Her beautiful prose gives real-life examples of the microaggressions and blatant racism that people of color face in America’s institutions. I was particularly struck by Lauren, a clueless resident doctor reporting to Dr. Harper, who phoned the hospital’s ethics department because she didn’t believe a Black patient who was under arrest by the police should be allowed to opt out of his treatment.

https://quipsandquotes.net/?p=623

Michele Harper is an emergency room doctor, and in this memoir she talks about her own life (including her abusive childhood and the problems of sexism and racism that she has faced), about treating her patients, about her views on medicine and spirituality, and about all the ways she's seen the US medical system and other institutions fail people, especially people of color.

I'm finding this a hard one to review, because, man, I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. Or, really, to like it at all. Dr. Harper is someone who's endured a lot, who's accomplished a lot, and who is clearly a very caring and committed doctor, and one who isn't afraid to admit to her mistakes, all of which I respect. (Although, I have to say, I find it rather dismaying that she comes down as an advocate for the pseudoscience of "complementary medicine," which she thoroughly conflates with uncontroversial healthy lifestyle choices.) And I do applaud her for the way she so forthrightly says some things that I think very much need to be said and listened to when it comes to the ways in which the institutions that are supposed to help keep us all healthy, safe, and supported fail to do so in depressing and discriminatory ways.

Actually, the chapters where she explicitly does that calling-out of biased and inadequate systems are the best in the book, and I did find them worth reading. But for so much of the rest of it, I found her writing hard to get along with, as it's often stilted and sometimes vaguely purple, and features a lot of her giving compassionate but terribly didactic-for-the-reader lectures to patients. I'm sure a lot of my issues with it have to do with the fact that books that deliberately set out to be inspirational often backfire badly for me, and ones that go on about emotional and/or physical healing as a spiritual process tend to lose me very quickly. But I could tell that this book was just not really going to be for me early on when, in the course of talking about an incredibly sad incident in which Harper and her colleagues tried everything they could to resuscitate a tiny baby who was already beyond saving and then had to inform the family of what happened, she started going on about the spirits of sweet departed cherubs whispering their last words into their parents' ears and giving them butterfly kisses, and... I'm sorry. I can't. I just can't. I know Dr. Harper's heart is absolutely in the right place, and I can't even imagine what it's like to have experiences like that as part of your normal work day, but I read lines like that and I can't help seeing it as human tragedy turned into a sappy Hallmark card, and my brain just kind of shuts down.½

Dr. Michele Harper writes this memoir as a Philadelphia ER physician. The book is structured around eleven or so stories of different patients that she treated at various points in her career. Along the way, Dr. Harper discusses her own path into and in medicine. Having completed her residency in New York and having worked at a few different hospitals in Philly (the last hospital mentioned in the memoir, where [I think] a majority of the mentioned cases took place, being the Philadelphia VA), Dr. Harper discusses her experiences in medicine as a woman of color in the field of medicine.

I really enjoy memoirs, and I often find medical memoirs really interesting. Though I appreciated Dr. Harper's perspective, this memoir unfortunately wasn't my favorite. I'm hesitant to say that a memoir ought to have a "message" or similar, but I don't think I'm totally clear on what the main takeaway of this book was. The book was partially a recount of a number of patient stories, a description of Harper's own childhood trauma and career trajectory, and a (slightly preachy) reflection on the benefits of yoga and meditation. I didn't feel that some of these threads were as fully developed as they might have been (I especially think that the book could have benefited from discussing more of her adolescence/young adulthood), and the bridging between them was a little confusing sometimes. The audiobook narrator, from my perspective, also went a little over-the-top with some of the voice acting with some of the patients, which didn't help my listening experience.

At the same time, I do think that the book does have things going for it. One aspect that I found really interesting were Dr. Harper's comments on the hospital system; it was really interesting to read about the more professional/systemic aspects of practicing medicine, since that is something that I've read less about. I also found her comments on how her work at the hospital interacted with larger societal systems really noteworthy--two particular points that stood out to me were the case the patients Dominic (with discussions of when patients can be examined against their will) and Paul (again with discussions related to the legal system, here particularly with psychiatry and the prison system).

The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir, Michele Harper, author; Nicole Lewis, narrator
In spite of efforts to thwart her desire to heal, to rise up the ranks in the medical profession because she was highly qualified, well trained and filled with the compassion to do a better job than many already in the field, she soldiered on and on, always grasping hope from the mouth of despair. Turned down for a job no one else applied for, a job for which she was perfect, she did not quit, she simply moved on to a place she hoped to fare better. She brought her healing hopes to the VA Hospital. She works to aid those less advantaged, people of color, women and men who are underrepresented, prisoners who are not afforded basic civil rights, women who are abused and ignored, women who were refused the same rights that men were happily afforded in some instances, even when roadblocks were placed before her. Michele Harper is the Emergency Room doctor we all hope to find if we are in a traumatic situation that brings us there.
Michele Harper has written a compelling book, in beautiful prose, with clarity and compassion. It is through her eyes that we glimpse the world of those in pain, those who need help in the direst of situations, if not in all eyes, then at least in their own, that is certain. She guides those she can, to better health, calms those who need support, and comforts those who have lost all hope. From the words on the pages of this book, one can only admire this woman who seems largely selfless and without animus toward anyone. Her desire is to heal.
There are moments highlighted, when one learns that she understands, as a woman of color, the plight of those less fortunate, less advantaged, and there are moments when she promotes the ideas of male toxicity and systemic racism with which some readers may not agree, but she uses examples of such injustice to fortify her reasons for these beliefs. They are anecdotal, and they are colored by the opinions of someone who has experienced a large dose of some of the abusive behavior she describes. The readers can draw their own conclusions regarding her philosophy, but they can not dispute the humanity of this woman or her efforts to heal and save all those who come before her with a grace and kindness, a sincere interest and effort to better the world through the influence of love. Her confidence and courage is inspiring. Her efforts area heroic.

Interesting story about the double challenge of being a both a doctor and a woman. I just cringed at the times patients called her "ma'am. My only problem was it seemed a little didactic, which detracted a bit from her brave story.½

While The Beauty In Breaking is a memoir that incorporates Harper’s medical career as an ER doctor, what she really highlights is the power of growth and healing. She narrates her internal journey as a black woman in a profession that even in 2020 has pervasive racism and gender inequality.

She shares about how paths through broken systems – whether it is complex family dynamics or systemic racism – can ultimately lead us forward. In personal stories and narrative, she shares that there is truly is beauty in the breaking points of life.

“Brokenness can be a remarkable gift. If we allow it, it can expand our space to transform.”

There have been many medical memoirs published over the last few years, such as [b:When Breath Becomes Air|25899336|When Breath Becomes Air|Paul Kalanithi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492677644l/25899336._SX50_.jpg|45424659] and [b:Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End|20696006|Being Mortal Medicine and What Matters in the End|Atul Gawande|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408324949l/20696006._SY75_.jpg|40015533]. This memoir is unique with a useful premise: Dr. Michelle Harper, a Black woman, uses each chapter to introduce us to an emergency room case, and the subsequent life lesson she gleaned from treating that patient. Nicole Lewis does a fabulous job narrating the audiobook.

She's a beautiful writer who combines spirituality and medicine in a wonderful way. Upfront and honest; sometimes harsh but but always insightful. Enjoyable and poetic. Worth a reread someday.

I simply couldn't put this memoir down. It's a debut unlike any other; If you think this a medical career memoir you'd be wrong and pleasantly surprised. Michele brings to light what is often forgotten in the medical shows: First you become a doctor and then you discover how to become a healer.

I simply couldn't put this memoir down. It's a debut unlike any other; If you think this a medical career memoir you'd be wrong and pleasantly surprised. Michele brings to light what is often forgotten in the medical shows: First you become a doctor and then you discover how to become a healer.

While this book was a fast read and had good points and lessons learned, I was disappointed as i expected more. I cant articulate what was missing for me.
However it did very realistically recount life in the ER departments of busy municipal hospitals. Being a nurse for 40 some years, I can attest to that.½

Precious, overblown writing prevented my getting very far in this book.

Harper claims that our culture today, still, reveals a "landscape that requires all women to pound tenaciously against the proverbial glass ceiling, which we've...discovered is made of palladium." This is the story of a person who grew up in a home of abuse, both verbal and physical. A child whose family lived beyond their means (as the saying goes), whose children were educated in private school, who herself over-achieved, and who is currently stuck in a field that doesn't even have a glass ceiling. But she continues to care, to try to help. In the end, Harper discovers the definition of "forgiveness" is freedom. I shall try to remember this, too.

3 1/2