Synopses & Reviews
An impassioned and gifted neonatal physician, Dr. Maggie Claymore fights for the lives of her newborn patients with a fierceness that has gained her the devotion of worried parents and sometimes the ire of her colleagues. Maggie is just shy of forty, and her career is on the rise: she is on the verge of receiving a coveted promotion at a prestigious Boston research hospital. That is, until an anonymous hate campaign calls her credentials and her ethics into question, threatening to destroy her professional reputation. Suspicion and doubt begin to shade all of her relationships, from her professional connections to her own blissful marriage. Worst of all, the rumors surrounding her begin to shake her deepest sense of who she is.
Psychologically riveting, The Mystery of Breathing explores modern personal and ethical dilemmas in a story of one woman's struggle to mainatain her identity.
About the Author
PERRI KLASS is a practicing pediatrician, an acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction, and a prizewinning journalist. She has won five O. Henry Awards for her short stories, including three of the stories in Love and Modern Medicine. Her fiction includes two novels, Recombinations and Other Women"s Children, and a collection of short stories, I Am Having an Adventure. She has also written two collections of essays about medicine, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student and Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician"s Training. Her columns and articles have appeared the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Discover, and Parenting. She recently won a James Beard Foundation Award for an article in Gourmet, "The Lunch Box as Battlefield."Both Klass"s fiction and her journalism have dealt with issues of medicine and society. In her medical career she practices pediatrics at Dorchester House, a neighborhood health center in Boston, and is medical director of the national literacy program Reach Out and Read, dedicated to making books and literacy promotion part of pediatric primary care. Klass lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Larry Wolff, a professor of history at Boston College, and their children.