If you like your summer reading to reaffirm the work you do building healthy communities, we’re here to help. Here’s your professional development reading assignment that’s actually fun. Some are learner favorites from our courses and others just deserve attention. Read on for picks for the summer reading season, which we hope will inspire you to keep learning even when you’re on the beach.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
by Anne Fadiman, Paperback, 368 pages
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down could be a textbook case study for culturally competent care—it’s certainly a rich example and one we use in our health literacy course—but it’s also the compelling tale of what happens when well-intentioned health care workers fail at cross-cultural communication. Author Anne Fadiman tells with masterful literary journalism the story of Lia Lee, a Hmong child from a refugee family from Laos living in California. Lee, diagnosed with severe epilepsy, suffers while her loving parents and providers miscommunicate while she goes from emergency room visits to intensive care unit (ICU) admissions to legal courts and finally to irreversible neurologic damage.
Read an Excerpt
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Chapter 1) Birth
If Lia Lee had been born in the highlands of northwest Laos, where her parents and twelve of her brothers and sisters were born, her mother would have squatted on the floor of the house… READ THE FULL EXCERPT
The Arrival
by Shaun Tan, Hardcover, 128 pages
The Arrival is a stunning, compelling piece of art with a powerful story about what it’s like to leave your home for a new country. Shaun Tan’s graphic novel–which doesn’t use a single word (aside from the title)–is a lesson in empathy and communication. The migrant story trails a man who leaves his wife and child in a faraway city to find opportunity elsewhere. Everything is fantastical and foreign: strange animals, unintelligible languages, and incomprehensible customs. Along the way, he’s helped by strangers, who each have their own complex histories. Its gorgeous pages let you experience what it’s like to be helpless in a strange place, and also provide a valuable example of how you can communicate when words fail.
One Step Behind
by Henning Mankell, Paperback, 440 pages
One Step Behind is truly beach reading material, but it shows that illness can befall anyone, even Inspector Kurt Wallander. Henning Mankell’s popular Swedish crime series is just as gruesome and horrific as his other novels (spoiler alert!), but this time Wallander is solving crimes while dealing with a new diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. He shows that diabetes self-care is extremely challenging when you have a busy day job. This book didn’t make the cut of our Diabetes and Prediabetes course, but it still provides an interesting perspective on juggling health care needs with work.
Tip for TV-watchers: this book was also made into an hour-long series starring Kenneth Branagh.
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Instant Influence: How to Get Anyone to Do Anything—Fast
by Michael Pantalon, Hardcover, 256 pages
Students of Motivational Interviewing know that this communication framework is invaluable for inspiring people to stop smoking, eat less salt, exercise more, and generally make positive behavior changes. Instant Influence: How to Get Anyone to Do Anything—Fast by Dr. Michael Pantalon is an excellent introduction to how motivational interviewing can have a positive effect on just about anyone, including your patients, clients and community members. The author draws on his 20-year career in addiction research and clinical practice to realize that:
- Motivating someone to enter treatment can be done with effective strategies. (Interventions rarely work)
- We have treatments that work, but we’re not using them. (Most rehabs don’t use scientifically supported treatments)
- You need help to get good help. (AA is not treatment, a recovery coach will help you get treatment)
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