Mailbox Monday -- August 2nd

The reason why I love Mondays -- Mailbox Monday hosted this month by Chick Loves Lit. Below are the following advance review copies that I received this week:

1) The Kitchen Shrink by Dora Calot Wong, M.D. Amazon Product Description. he personal story of how a psychiatrist confronts the profound changes sweeping the medical establishment as they reshape her life and career.

In the past two decades, a seismic shift has occurred within the walls of our nation's hospitals and doctor's offices. The medical profession- once considered a sacred, cherished vocation-has devolved into a business motivated by a desire for profits. Even psychiatry, once the mainstay of the human interaction between doctor and patient, has fallen victim to rising costs and dictates by insurance sources.

How has medicine strayed so far from its roots? In The Kitchen Shrink, psychiatrist and lecturer Dora Calott Wang delves into what happened.

Through the prism of her own story, Wang elucidates key events in her professional life-the declining state of hospitals and clinics, the advent of managed care, and the rise of profits at the ex­pense of patient care-that highlight the medical profession's decline. Along the way we meet some of her patients, whose plights reflect the profession's growing indifference to the human lives at risk. There's Selena, whose grief over her mother's death and lack of family support make it difficult for her to take the medicine that keeps her body from rejecting her new liver, and Leonard, a schizophrenic with no health insurance who develops peritonitis and falls into a coma for three months. Each new story brings additional compromises as the medical landscape shifts under Wang's feet. She struggles with depression and exhaustion, witnesses the loss of top doctors who leave in frustration, and attempts to find a balance between work and home as it becomes ever clearer that she cannot untangle the uncertain future of her patients from her own.

Part personal story and part rallying cry, The Kitchen Shrink is an unflinchingly honest, passionate, and humane inside look at the unsettling realities of free-market medicine in today's America.

2) Shoulder Bags and Shootings by Dorothy Howell. Publisher's Summary. Haley Randolph just spent two weeks in Europe with her boyfriend Ty Cameron, owner of Holt's Department Store. Life would be perfect if she could just get her hands on the new Sinful handbag--and if she could discover how her nemesis Tiffany Markham ended up dead in her trunk.

Thanks to FSB Associates!

3) Blue Nude by Elizabeth Rosner. Publisher's Summary. Once a prominent painter, Danzig now shares his wisdom and technique with students at San Francisco's Art Institute—yet his own canvases remain empty. When he meets Israeli-born Merav, the beautiful new model for his class, he senses she may reignite his artistic passion. Merav moved to California to escape the danger and violence of the Middle East, yet she cannot outrun her fears about the past. As the characters challenge one another, Rosner lyrically uncovers their disparate upbringings, their creative awakenings, and their similarly painful, often catastrophic, love lives to propel them toward reconciliation, redemption, and ultimately revival.

4) Diamond Ruby by Joseph Wallace. Publisher's Summary. Seventeen-year-old Ruby Thomas, newly responsible for her two young nieces after a devastating tragedy, is determined to keep her family safe in the vast, swirling world of 1920s New York City. She's got street smarts, boundless determination, and one unusual skill: the ability to throw a ball as hard as the greatest pitchers in a baseball-mad city.

From Coney Island sideshows to the brand-new Yankee Stadium, Diamond Ruby chronicles the extraordinary life and times of a girl who rises from utter poverty to the kind of renown only the Roaring Twenties can bestow. But her fame comes with a price, and Ruby must escape a deadly web of conspiracy and threats from Prohibition rumrunners, the Ku Klux Klan, and the gangster underworld.

Thanks to Simon and Schuster!

5) What She Kept by Linda Bradshaw. Amazon Product Description. Deanne Cross endured a hard childhood in an unhappy Appalachian home, but she doesn't want anyone to feel sorry for her. As her life unfolds from rural Alabama to working class Chicago, she is determined to create a different kind of life for herself, her family, her husband, and her children. Through early loss to middle-aged stability, she refuses to acknowledge the price of self-will. Deanne is a woman displaced, flawed and difficult, deeply connected to her past even as she tries to ignore it.

Thanks to the author!

6) Double Trouble by Jim Lacey. Author's Summary. The disappearance of a controversial history professor at Wyndham State College from his sailboat on the Connecticut shore initiates a web of intrigue that brings an attractive cast of characters to New York City and Washington, D.C. They include savvy and hapless academics, a popular administrator who is not what he claims to be, a sharp and attractive UConn law student, a middle school teacher with a shadowy past, a super mom, and two precocious kids. What begins as an investigation of a local mystery by would-be sleuths leads to the discovery of the Knights of Malta’s involvement in terrorism and the shenanigans of the state department in Latin America during the Reagan administration. The book is cheerful, romantic at times, and full of surprises. Readers who like upbeat conclusions will not be disappointed.


Thanks to the author!