Reviews for Why Christians burn out

The average rating for Why Christians burn out based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-03-01 00:00:00 Les Gelber Few books can make you feel happier to be alive than to gaze upon this loving collection of nineteenth century deformities and monstrosities. First off, you're far removed from their direct experience (thereby erasing guilt). Secondly, you're much more normal and self-possessed than these freakazoids, especially as they're getting shamed by the lengthy shutter speeds of male-gazing doctor-photographers. I'm half-kidding about that last bit, of course: this is all very sad, sublime, strange, no matter how many Jim Foetus or AxCx promotional materials have co-opted it. You'll never forget the before-and-after images of that 200-pound ovarian tumor, for example. Or the various teratoforms which obviously look like demons (cf. the sirenomelus and the cyclocephalus). Or the gruesome Civil War injuries which remind us that plastic surgery began as a noble effort to, y'know, put people's faces back upon their skulls. Those of us who are cynical about the psychological sciences will be amused by the five (5) pages devoted to "psychological disorder": a single photo of Charles Guiteau's brain, and three pics of two vaguely alarmed-looking women. (Remember: psychology began with that ridiculous "hysteria" business.) Last, but not least, behold the "precocious sexual development in a four-year-old boy" (wherein a doctor holds the squirming boy on his lap in order to display them remarkable genitals) and "congenital hypertrophy of the clitoris" (my earliest memory of this alluring photo consists of lolling about on the apartment floor, flipping through one of my mom's nursing textbooks... at age four). A wonderful collection. My only suggestion is that perhaps some of the all-too brief captions could have been expanded by modern medical insights, however daffy they might be.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-11-27 00:00:00 Klaas Butter A lovely photo book from one of my favorite museums. This book concentrates on the photographs which could be considered groundbreaking, rather than purely a physical record. The only thing I found lacking was an explanation of the medical conditions displayed. As this book is for a general audience rather than medical professionals, I would have preferred a few sentences of explanatory text about the condition shown rather than just, say, "severe congenital equinus deformity".