Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Coles, Robert - Iain Bamforth (review date 7-13 July 1989)

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Iain Bamforth (review date 7-13 July 1989)

SOURCE: "Clinical Humanitities," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4501, July 7-13, 1989, p. 752.

[In the following review, Bamforth comments on Coles' combined concerns for medicine and literature.]

Times of Surrender is a collection of reviews, addresses and reminiscences from the past twenty years which attests to Robert Coles's conviction that appreciation of literature is a useful adjunct to the study of medicine. Coles is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard; literary texts have thus been his chosen means of guiding a generation of over-achieving medical students towards the ethical dilemmas awaiting them in their professional lives. Of the forty-odd essays in this collection, a large number are devoted to writers and thinkers, among them John Kennedy Toole, Georges Bernanos, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Merton, Robert Jay Lifton and B. F. Skinner. Coles's stance is...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Melvin J. Friedman (review date Fall 1982)
   2. Neil Postman (review date 19 January 1986)
   3. Katherine Paterson (review date 2 February 1986)
   4. Jonathan Kellerman (review date 9 February 1986)
   5. New Yorker (review date 10 February 1986)
   6. John Leo (review date 17 March 1986)
   7. Kenneth L. Woodward (review date 6 September 1987)
   8. Jeff Dietrich (review date 13 September 1987)
   9. Fitzhugh Mullan (review date 8 May 1988)
   10. Helen Bevington (review date 26 February 1989)
   11. Francis X. Rocca (review date March 1989)
   12. Iain Bamforth (review date 7-13 July 1989)
   13. Sanford Pinsker (essay date Summer 1989)
   14. Herbert Mitgang (review date 21 November 1990)
   15. Laura Sessions Stepp (review date 23 December 1990)
   16. The New Yorker (review date 7 January 1991)
   17. Virginia C. Hoch (review date 26 August-2 September 1992)
   18. A. J. S. (review date 1993)
   19. Michelle Huneven (essay date 3 October 1993)
   20. Robert A. Sirico (review date 15 November 1993)
   21. Gail Russell Chaddock (review date 9 December 1993)
   22. Ed Walraven (essay date 1994)
   23. Paulina F. Kernberg (review date October 1994)
   24. Richard Bernstein (review date 27 January 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright