To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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JONATHAN TAYLOR is moved by the plea to replace mechanistic medicine with a ‘narrative’ approach based on imagination and humanity
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: Cardiologist Juan Manuel Romero at a hospital in Ciudad Obregon in Sonora, Mexico, takes part in pre-op consultation with a patient and her doctor 400 miles away in La Paz, Baja California. Telemedicine does help deliver care to patients in rural and remote locations across Mexico.
[Intel Free Press/CC]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Oliver Sacks, Letters,
ed. Kate Edgar, Picador, £30
THROUGHOUT his life, the great neurologist Oliver Sacks emphasised the human aspect of medical practice.
Often faced with the most debilitating and apparently dehumanising conditions, Sacks demanded that doctors stopped seeing their patients as “bodies” and instead met them as “human beings”: “We must come down from our position as ‘objective observers’,” he wrote in his famous work Awakenings (1973), “and meet our patients face-to-face; we must meet them in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter.”
This ideal of medical practice runs as a kind of refrain, or perhaps on-going quest, throughout Sacks’s fascinating Selected Letters, brilliantly edited and contextualised by Kate Edgar. Over and over, he rails against the dominant mechanical models of diagnosis, seeking to replace them with something more human.
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KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
HENRY BELL welcomes a fine demonstration of the need to love the words themselves in the communication of political messages
CARL DEATH introduces a new book which explores how African science fiction is addressing climate change
The creative imagination is a weapon against barbarism, writes KENNY COYLE, who is a keynote speaker at the Manifesto Press conference, Art in the Age of Degenerative Capitalism, tomorrow at the Marx Memorial Library & Workers School in London