Reading on a Wednesday
Jul. 13th, 2022 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allekhaRead: I put The Facemaker on hold at the library after reading an interview with the author. I got it yesterday and finished it today, which tells you how engaging I found it.
It's a biography of the plastic surgeon Harold Gillies and his work during WWI, during which he performed facial reconstructions for injured soldiers and in the process, invented and advanced plastic surgery techniques. (After the war, he did both cosmetic and reconstructive work, and he also performed the first phalloplasty for a trans man.) There is also a hefty dose of context on other plastic surgeons working on facial reconstruction at the time, those making facial masks for injured soldiers, relevant advances in medicine such as blood transfusion and anesthesia, the general horror of the advances in warfare and how they lead to so many facial injuries, and what happened with some of the soldiers he treated. I thought it was just the right amount of context to fill out the book without distracting from the main story.
The author did a very good job with the storytelling - I was almost driven to tears at one point in the prologue. It was also compassionate towards the patients and addressed how some aspects of their treatment may have reinforced the idea that facial disfigurement == horrific and unseeable (such as how there were no mirrors in the wards, a measure meant to keep them from being dispirited about their appearance while still going through many surgeries). She talks about how the men were often treated when they went out in public and how losing a limb was something that could be celebrated as a sign of bravery, but coming home missing your jaw was too horrific to be talked about. While there are a few photos of the reconstructive process, she only included those of soldiers who were able to finish their surgeries, and since they're presented in sequence and sequestered at the back of the book, it didn't feel like gawking.
The only thing I didn't enjoy about the book was that a few of the surgical techniques, like the whole thing about pedicles that gets discussed quite a lot, were a bit confusing, even after hitting up Google. I would have appreciated clear diagrams demonstrating how they worked.
Reading: Still working on スケートボイズ, though I'm trying to catch back up on Japanese after the move so I haven't touched it this week.
Reading next: I see the author also has a book on Lister! I'll be checking it out. But first, I will once again be grabbing Jonathon Stroud's new book off of Kobo Japan because for some reason it's 2022 and we're still releasing books months and months apart in different countries.
It's a biography of the plastic surgeon Harold Gillies and his work during WWI, during which he performed facial reconstructions for injured soldiers and in the process, invented and advanced plastic surgery techniques. (After the war, he did both cosmetic and reconstructive work, and he also performed the first phalloplasty for a trans man.) There is also a hefty dose of context on other plastic surgeons working on facial reconstruction at the time, those making facial masks for injured soldiers, relevant advances in medicine such as blood transfusion and anesthesia, the general horror of the advances in warfare and how they lead to so many facial injuries, and what happened with some of the soldiers he treated. I thought it was just the right amount of context to fill out the book without distracting from the main story.
The author did a very good job with the storytelling - I was almost driven to tears at one point in the prologue. It was also compassionate towards the patients and addressed how some aspects of their treatment may have reinforced the idea that facial disfigurement == horrific and unseeable (such as how there were no mirrors in the wards, a measure meant to keep them from being dispirited about their appearance while still going through many surgeries). She talks about how the men were often treated when they went out in public and how losing a limb was something that could be celebrated as a sign of bravery, but coming home missing your jaw was too horrific to be talked about. While there are a few photos of the reconstructive process, she only included those of soldiers who were able to finish their surgeries, and since they're presented in sequence and sequestered at the back of the book, it didn't feel like gawking.
The only thing I didn't enjoy about the book was that a few of the surgical techniques, like the whole thing about pedicles that gets discussed quite a lot, were a bit confusing, even after hitting up Google. I would have appreciated clear diagrams demonstrating how they worked.
Reading: Still working on スケートボイズ, though I'm trying to catch back up on Japanese after the move so I haven't touched it this week.
Reading next: I see the author also has a book on Lister! I'll be checking it out. But first, I will once again be grabbing Jonathon Stroud's new book off of Kobo Japan because for some reason it's 2022 and we're still releasing books months and months apart in different countries.
