MARIA DUARTE, LEO BOIX and ANGUS REID review Brides, Dead of Winter, A Night Like This, and The Librarians
How black nurses beat TB
MARJORIE MAYO recommends a remarkable book that restores another of history’s racially biased omissions
COMPASSION: Nurses at Oak Ridge Hospital in the 1940s
[doe-oakridge/CC] ![REBELS: Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar in Nadia Fall’s powerful debut feature Brides [Pic: IMDb]](https://msd11.gn.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/desktop/public/2025-09/round%20up%20web_0.jpg.webp?itok=41xI6jhN)
MARY CONWAY recommends an early Shakespearean tragedy that feels so contemporary that it mirrors our daily news
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends a dazzling production of Bernstein’s opera set in a world where chaos and violence are greeted by equanimity
MARY CONWAY is frustrated by a new play that loses its drama amid the moral dilemma of re-settling children in the aftermath of WWII
Acclaimed as a masterpiece when it premiered, this study of story-telling in an Irish pub more than lives up to expectations, says MARY CONWAY
SYLVIA HIKINS relishes a comedy that dives deep into Liverpool’s divided loyalties
The Black Angels: The untold story of the nurses who helped cure tuberculosis
Maria Smilios, Virago, £12.99
THE BLACK ANGELS provides “an invaluable restoration of another of history’s racially biased omissions”, as the book’s front cover explains.
Black nurses faced the challenges of working with tuberculosis (TB) patients before there were effective cures, challenges that were compounded by their experiences of racial discrimination in the community as well as in the workplace. This is the remarkable story of their courage and determination, in the face of these challenges.
Caring for TB patients was highly dangerous at the time that the book opens, in 1929, when TB was a highly infectious and effectively incurable disease. As a result, white nurses were leaving Sea View, the Staten Island hospital (off New York City) where so many TB patients were being treated. So, black nurses from the Southern states of the US were being recruited in their place.
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PAUL BUHLE agrees that a grassroots movements for change in needed in the US, independent of electoral politics
STEVEN ANDREW recommends an informed and personable work that contains as many ommisions as it does analyses
ANDY HEDGECOCK recommends a deceptively short novella that is mysteriously bigger on the inside
