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Medical Mentions Book Review VII

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Medical Mentions is a group of graphic works. The graphic works reviewed here are books whose primary topics are not medical, and yet they cover a medical topic with some depth at some point in the work. The rest of the work might be fictional or nonfictional, while the medical portion is often technical and five pages or more. The reviewer will usually neither recommend nor discourage reading the work, except when the rest of the work is deemed outstanding or terrible, respectively. Typically, six graphic works will be part of the review with one paragraph for each. Prior Medical Mentions… Read More

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness

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By Karol Kovalovich Weaver  Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness analyzes the isolation and the loneliness that people in the United States experience. Using personal narrative, academic studies, and the history of technology, author and illustrator Kristen Radtke describes the emotional and physical longing for connection with others. Using thoughtful imagery, Radtke directs the viewer to look at lonely people and guides the reader into lonesome homes. Radtke’s book and its message urging people to connect with one another are timely as the United States emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and the isolation that accompanied it and as the… Read More

No Ordinary Flu

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by Janet Chan No Ordinary Flu doubles as both a story of pandemics and public health guidance from the public health Center of Seattle and King County, Washington. Artists David Lasky and Lin Lucas use a limited color palette which succeeds in conveying both the sadness in the situations and the hope for the future. This short 12-page publication introduces a family on the brink of the 2020 Covid pandemic recounting their ancestors’ experiences during the 1918 flu pandemic. Through the story we see the events of the 1918 pandemic unfurl. The flu virus’ identification on the east coast and… Read More

Living & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle 2020-2022

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by Stephen Dudas In his foreword to Steve Brodner’s Living & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle 2020-2022, Edward Sorrel draws the apt comparison between Brodner’s graphic diary of the COVID-19 pandemic and the diaries of Samuel Pepys. Just as Pepys “fastidiously kept a record of the effects that the bubonic plague had on London” in the 17th century, Brodner records a nuanced experience of the first two years of the pandemic in our own time. Deeply reflective and carefully analytical of the intersectional dimensions of illness in a politically and socially tumultuous era, the artifact Brodner creates (and is… Read More