The Mystery of Breathing

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005 - Fiction - 344 pages
An impassioned and gifted neonatal physician, Dr. Maggie Claymore fights for the lives of her newborn patients with a fierceness that has gained her the devotion of worried parents and sometimes the ire of her colleagues. Maggie is just shy of forty, and her career is on the rise: she is on the verge of receiving a coveted promotion at a prestigious Boston research hospital. That is, until an anonymous hate campaign calls her credentials and her ethics into question, threatening to destroy her professional reputation. Suspicion and doubt begin to shade all of her relationships, from her professional connections to her own blissful marriage. Worst of all, the rumors surrounding her begin to shake her deepest sense of who she is.
Psychologically riveting, The Mystery of Breathing explores modern personal and ethical dilemmas in a story of one woman's struggle to mainatain her identity.
 

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Contents

Who Do You Think You Are?
3
In a Cavern In a Canyon
24
The Luxury of Marriage
33
Beach
47
The Tremor of Inaction
56
Makeovers
73
Damage Control
83
Godchild
97
Data
197
Bethlehem Pines
217
Sharing
224
Faking It
243
Maggie in the Caribbean
255
Search Needs
258
Poison Center
277
Custody
289

Warning to All Parents
103
Wto Youre Investigating Is Me
125
Babysitting
142
Pumping
148
Their Sex Life Maggie and Dan
169
Ambulance Dreams
173
The Infertility Problem
192
Maggies Notebook
304
Donna Solves It
307
Maggies Notebook
315
Losing
318
Behind Glass
333
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

DR. PERRI KLASS is the award-winning author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, including Love and Modern Medicine and Other Women's Children. She is a pediatrician and teaches journalism and pediatrics at New York University. Klass is also the medical director of the national literacy program Reach Out and Read, dedicated to promoting literacy as part of pediatric primary care. She lives in New York.

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