The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper

I picked this out because it was on the New York Times Notable Books list for 2020 and because I cannot yet go into a library to peruse books, so I am living solely at the hands of my hold lists. This has been going on for a year--and rightly so--but it has changed what I read. This is a memoir by a black emergency medicine physician. One of the challenges about a story that is told in a language you can best understand is that sometimes it is down right irritating, and that is occasionally true with this book. I am a mental health care professional, which lends a point of view that is not always generous. I am very sympathetic to the author's struggles as a woman, and as a person of color I can only imagine that makes the situation more prejudicial. The fact that someone said out right to her that as a woman she cannot be put in charge of a program in the hospital she is in. I have experienced more veiled sexism, but regularly over a thirty year career that just wears on you after a while. I myself finally decided to end my career as a member of the troops rather than one leading them, and it has been an unexpected joy to not have to fight those battles any more. She has some points of view that I struggled with, and I wish it had been either a book about her personal life or her professional life rather than both, but in the end I was happy that I had read it, but will likely skip her next book.