Michele Harper, an emergency room doctor and the author of The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir, devotes case-study-like chapters to patients whose stories spur her to draw connections between her work and the larger world. In "Jeremiah: Cradle and All," as an example, Harper treats a 13-year-old with a head trauma--the upshot of a classmate's bullying. After the boy confesses that he owns a gun and intends to use it on his assailant, Harper is required to contact social services. As she awaits the social worker, she wonders "why, in all my growing-up years, no physician had ever spoken to me alone, to ask if I was safe."
It's a reference to her fraught childhood. Harper grew up middle-class in Washington, D.C., with a physician father who beat up her mother. The celebratory mood of her graduation from an emergency medicine residency was dulled by the coinciding collapse of her marriage. By the end of the memoir, Harper has found a restless peace working at a Philadelphia VA hospital, where the beguiled reader hopes that she will continue to gather insights and commit them to the page. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer