5 HOT BOOKS: The Erosion of Medical Consent, the Problem with Fad Psychology, and More

1. Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent by Harriet A. Washington (Columbia Global Reports)

“First, do no harm.” The oath attributed to Hippocrates may seem to be a low bar, but readers of Washington’s prize-winning 2006 book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, will be even more shocked and appalled by her new book examining the meaning of “informed consent” in the COVID-19 era, which harks back to the eugenic past. Washington grounds her tightly argued and compelling book in contemporary stories of how patient consent has been sabotaged. Deftly weaving human dramas and science, Washington shows an instinct for nuance as she focuses especially on medical experimentation. “The U.S. history of medicine has been curated to obscure the nature of questionable or exploitative treatment of its marginalized populations,” she writes. For example: “Four-fifths of corporate clinical trials are now conducted in the developing world where high-quality studies can be completed much more quickly and cheaply than in the United States.” Is this just careless profiteering? Washington convincingly argues that “consent has been whittled away not by successful ethical argument or by persuasion, but because the U.S. medical research system maintains subjects in a voiceless and uninformed state.”

2. The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills by Jesse Singal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Singal’s passionate, compelling critique of half-baked, overhypeded pop psychology is more than a lament or jeremiad against the flawed research holding that one’s complicated problems can be worked out with quick fixes of “cute, cost-effective interventions by psychologists.” Singal thoughtfully exposes problematic research claims and why the brain latches onto simple “monocausal accounts” and ideas like “grit” or “superpredators” that are promoted in venues like TED Talks. More than a skeptical interpreter of trends in popular behavioral science, Singal forcefully reveals their dark sides, arguing that there is “strong reason to believe that they fail because they neglect to attend to deeper, more structural factors that are not easily remedied via psychological interventions.”

3. Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour by Rickie Lee Jones (Grove)

The “Duchess of Coolsville,” as Time magazine dubbed singer-songwriter Jones, takes the title of her memoir from a song rich with the metaphor of a lonely gas station at town’s edge, because after spending most of her life in transit, riding in “back seats, shotgun, and driving myself,” she found a vantage point to watch “life approach and recede.” Jones evokes her rocky years gently and her success with wry observation, all with a ferocious passion and iconoclastic sensibility that elevate this two-time Grammy winner’s accounts to a bravura performance. “This troubadour life is only for the fiercest hearts,” Jones writes, “only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song.”

4. Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason by Gina Frangello (Counterpoint)

“A is for Adulteress.” Accused. Author. Asshole. Age. Analysis. Adultery. . . So begins the dictionary-style staccato opening chapter, titled “The Story of A,” of Frangello’s compelling memoir, leading to “A is for Anton (Chekhov),” author of “The Lady with the Dog,” his short story involving adultery. In her sexually detailed, extra-intimate and revelatory account, Frangello spares herself a shiny veneer as she moves through the traumas of her life – cancer, death of a dear friend, scars of childhood – but also the joy of a new love and her children, and recognition that she had once been a woman who had shredded her journal, in the dark of night, in a public trash can. Eventually, Frangello writes at the end of her deeply affecting memoir, “we all have to start screaming well before we hit the ground, so the women below us will understand when to scatter, when to take cover, when it is safe to come back outside and try again to change the world.”

5. A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

Cultural critic, poet, memoirist, and music critic, Abdurraqib does all that work and defies categorization, and is proving to be a voice to be sought and savored. Essays, prose poems, and brief fragments in this powerful and distinctively exuberant collection are broken not into chapters but rather what he terms five “movements,” with the theme “On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance” repeating in a rhythm, until the surprising last movement. His orchestral account goes from dance marathons to Beyonce at the Super Bowl to Josephine Baker to background singer Merry Clayton to the deaths of his mother and Aretha Franklin. Just as Abdurraqib exits the stage, he writes: “I am sorry this one is not about movement, or history, or dance. But instead about stillness.” He leaves readers to marvel over a brilliant mind at work.