MUSTREADS
Out now in paperback
LEAP IN by Alexandra Heminsley (Windmill Books £8.99) ALEXANDRA Heminsley’s first book, Running Like A Girl, was a funny, candid account of how she took up marathon running.
Having moved to Brighton, she spent five years without dipping into the sea, finally taking the plunge on her wedding morning.
Her relationship with swimming had a problematic start: when she and her new husband took a dip, his wedding ring fell into the waves, lost for ever.
Alexandra signed up for a course in open-water swimming — ‘It was the sea versus me’ — got stuck halfway into her wetsuit and found herself sobbing on her first training swim.
Alongside this she records another, sadder, narrative: her failure to conceive by IVF. Part memoir, part motivational manual, this offers encouragement to anyone inspired to follow her into the water.
THE MESMERIST
by Wendy Moore (W&N £8.99) DR JOHN Elliotson was an innovative and humane physician who rose from modest beginnings — his father ran a chemist in south London — to become Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the newly established London University.
Elliotson challenged the 19th- century medical establishment with its unsanitary, and often injurious practices, pioneering the use of the stethoscope and championing remedies such as iodine and quinine.
By his mid-40s he was a celebrated society doctor when he encountered the phenomenon of mesmerism — the practice of putting patients into a trance. Elliotson embraced the practice with an enthusiasm that quickly turned to showmanship, giving popular demonstrations with two young female patients that verged on the sadistic.
Moore’s readable book charts the rise and tragic fall of a brilliant doctor with a fatal flaw. I MUST BELONG SOMEWHERE by Jonathan Dean (W&N £8.99) JOURNALIST Jonathan Dean is the grandson and greatgrandson of refugees.
His great-grandfather, David, fled from Russia to Germany, where he was blinded while fighting in World War I. He trained as a lawyer, and was held in the Theresienstadt concentration camp by the Nazis.
He sent his sons, Heinz and Rudi, to England to escape the same fate, and on his release resumed his legal practice in Vienna.
Heinz, Jonathan’s grandfather, married an Englishwoman and became, his second wife remarked, so English that at his funeral, his neighbours were astonished to learn that he had spent the first 16 years of his life in Austria.