The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine
By Anne Harrington
Norton, 354 pp., illustrated, $25.95
In this brilliant study, Anne Harrington, professor of the history of science at Harvard, concludes that "mind-body medicine is a deeply storied world" where at different historical moments, different narrative templates have claimed scientific authority and have functioned as carriers of moral, religious, and existential levels of meaning. She carefully details the major narratives of the last century, which she titles "The Power of Suggestion," "The Body That Speaks," "The Power of Positive Thinking," "Broken by Modern Life," "Healing Ties," and "Eastward Journeys."
As these familiar themes suggest, Harrington does not depend on academic jargon, but combines her serious scholarship with the language of the modern media. Beginning with the passivity of those healed in response to the suggestions of authority figures, she moves to the courage of those who face their traumas and confess their sins, then to the good fortune of those who can heal themselves through positive thinking, then to the complexities faced by those who must regulate their energies and minimize stress. For some, love is the best drug; for others the ancient wisdom of the East offers a cure. With generosity and without judgment, Harrington presents these stories, which endeavor to tie together different realms of experience - the medical and the moral, the biological and the biographical, the natural and the cultural.
The Gateway: Stories
By T. M. McNally
Southern Methodist University, 211 pp., $22.50
These stories by T. M. McNally are tough and tender at once. A variety of characters, often narrating their own tales, observe and report with clarity and without sentimentality. Yet sentiment is at the heart of their memories.
In "Bastogne" a man visits the Belgian battlefield where his father lost his leg during World War II. The son conjures his father's spirit and carries on a conversation that brings him close to the man he never understood. The father of the beautiful and beloved Annabella in "Given" watches helplessly as his daughter marries the wrong man. Exercising considerable restraint, he waits for her to recognize her mistake, then moves in to rescue his treasure. He knows the worth of his prize, although she doesn't. In the title story, a man, in Paris with his wife and daughter, imagines fierce love and lust in himself and his wife in the past, experiences them in the present, and feels them expand into the mysteries of the universe.
Many of the stories feel hard in the middle but grow surprisingly soft by the end. The men are especially heartbreaking in their shameless need for love and their remorseless grip on hope.
Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food
By John Haney
Random House, 285 pp., $26
Seeing the title of this memoir and the author's present job (copy chief at Gourmet magazine), I expected elaborate descriptions of delicious meals. But having come of age in London's East End, John Haney is nostalgic not for haute cuisine but for bangers, fish sticks, bacon sandwiches, and Marmite. And food is, in fact, not really at the center of this memoir of growing up poor in class-bound England after the war.
Haney's father, who was raised in an orphanage, has little ambition, while his mother, brought up in only somewhat more favored circumstances, is determined to see her son better himself. And he does, winning scholarships and attending good schools, where he feels an outsider, "the bumpkin in the ballroom." His posh education leads him to schoolboy soldiering, then to drumming in a rock band, and finally to working at tony magazines in New York City. Like many of those who go up the next rung of the ladder, Haney never feels secure. He is not at home in America or in the England of the present. Only the illusion of England sustains him. A meal of cold ham, a "hatbox of a pork pie (with a hardboiled egg imprisoned at its core)," and cold new potatoes is what, in the end, feels like home.
While the food is decidedly plain, the writing is, at times, unnecessarily fancy. Haney, it seems, is no longer at ease with his native cockney jargon or comfortable with the language of his classical education.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.
