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Carol Levine (ed.), Living in the Land of Limbo: Fiction and Poetry About Family Caregiving , Vanderbilt University Press , Nashville, Tennessee , 2014, 296 pp., pbk US $24.95, ISBN 13: 978 08265 1970 2 .
Reviews
This book is part of a wider project that extends our understanding of the contested nature of care in the social and health sciences through recourse to existing creative literature (novels, short stories, poetry) from the Humanities. 'Medical Humanities' insists that our understanding of social phenomena is enhanced by the more nuanced wisdom available in narrative, and especially in those evocative narrative forms available in literature that fictionalise experience and 'speak' in ways that are freed from the disciplinary conventions of knowledge produced in the social and health sciences. Certainly, any intervention that extends or deepens our understanding of caring in societies in which populations are ageing, and in which caregiving to those who are frail or vulnerable is contested and subjected to the harsh economic realities of providing expensive care, is to be welcomed. It is particularly welcome in those many societies where, at the macro level, care is often treated as an expensive commodity when it is delivered by health and social care professionals and, therefore, must be supplemented by informal and unpaid caregiving by those surrounding care recipients.
This collection pulls together a range of contemporary stories and poems and is organised in five parts, each of which is concerned with a particular constellation of caregiving relationships. The first section deals with creative fictions about children of ageing parents and highlights the complex and contradictory dynamics of caring for someone who was once...