Welcome back to my recommendations of the month! This is the best of what I’ve read* and watched in the last few weeks. Do you have any suggestions for next month? Leave them in the comments, and I’ll gladly take a look!
Article: Hannah Barnes, ‘The trauma ward’ (New Statesman, 10th April 2024)
Disclaimer: if you’re currently pregnant or just gave birth, I would caution you against reading this article right now. It’s quite distressing stuff - maybe wait until later.
Hannah Barnes’s article about traumatic births on NHS maternal wards is as necessary as it is painful to read. I’ve not been particularly open about this online as I’m still trying to, as they say, *process* what happened, but I had a pretty horrific postpartum after my daughter was born. I think I read Barnes’ article a little too soon for my own sake (hence the disclaimer, in case other women are in a similar situation), but if you can stomach it, I would urge you to read it. Some trauma is perhaps unavoidable when going through an experience as life-changing as labour and delivery, but there are many ways in which that experience can be improved - or worsened - by decisions made by hospital staff. Where I live, all my mum friends were left traumatised (one of them described it as ‘hell’), and the reason is always one of a few: their pain was not taken seriously; they were not offered interventions when they felt they were needed; they were not allowed to have their husbands with them postpartum (or any visitors who could help with the baby); they were left alone by nurses who were stretched thin and received no help even if they had suffered severe birth injuries. This is avoidable. We need to do something about it.
Non-fiction book: Josef Pieper, Problems of Modern Faith (1974)
I’ve only read a couple of the essays in this collection by German philosopher Josef Pieper, but so far I’m impressed. ‘The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power’ is an astonishing discussion of what happens when we use language to manipulate rather than to seek the truth. I will leave you this particular quotation, which I think by itself makes a case for why you should read the essay:
the profanation of the dignity of man by other men which is manifested in such an alarming form in the acts of physical violence exercised by a totalitarian regime, actually begins - unfortunately in a form we find much less alarming - in that almost undetectable moment when the word loses its dignity.
(the whole essay appears to be available through Internet Archive here)
Bonus non-fiction book: Tom Holland, Dominion (2019)
I’m only four chapters into Tom Holland’s mammoth of a book, Dominion, and, like the 18th-century enthusiast that I am, I’ already looking forward to reach. I picked it up after I finally started listening to Holland’s podcast with Dominic Sandbrook, The Rest is History (which absolutely everyone I know seems to also listen to!) and was hooked. In Dominion, Holland traces the history of Christendom chronologically. Not for nothing is the book’s subtitle ‘The Making of the Western Mind’: Holland is arguing, full force, that even in our post-Christian society, our worldview is profoundly shaped by the very faith which we have abandoned. Holland contrasts the ‘complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value’ in classical antiquity, with our contemporary assumptions about the value of individual conscience and the moral imperative that we help the vulnerable. As Holland puts it, ‘So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view’.
Film: Sense and Sensibility (directed by Ang Lee, screenplay by Emma Thomson, 1995)
One of my top 3 best Jane Austen adaptations. I hadn’t watched it in years, and it was even better than I remembered. Amazing soundtrack, great acting, great directing, and an almost flawless script from Emma Thomson, who also plays Elinor Dashwood. The one comment I have, is that the script cuts out the scene towards the end of the book between Elinor and Mr. Willoughby, in which she reproaches him for having betrayed and hurt Marianne so deeply. It’s a moving, yet restrained scene in the book, and I would have loved to see it included. Not my favourite Austen novel, but an excellent, excellent adaptation of it!
*Unfortunately, no poetry or novels this month. My husband and I are still making our way through Robert Hugh Benson’s The Lord of the World, and I have found it impossible to get started on any other fiction books in the last few weeks (the toddler and the baby are being well, a toddler and a baby!).