“In the Land of Invisible Women” (Sourcebooks Inc. 464 pages, $24.95) by Qanta A. Ahmed: Most job contracts don’t include mentions of the death penalty, but when Dr. Qanta A. Ahmed agreed to a new job in a Saudi Arabian hospital she became subject to the laws of that country which, as she writes in her memoir, can include decapitation.

After being denied a visa to stay in the United States, Ahmed, decides at “the spur of the moment” to accept a job practicing intensive care medicine at the King Fahad National Guard Hospital in Riyadh, the capitol of Saudi Arabia.

During her two-year stint, in which she works with an assortment of Saudi men and women as well as nurses and doctors from around the world, she encounters almost daily situations for which no American medical school could have prepared her: a female patient who is comatose but whose face still needs to be properly veiled; female medical personnel trying to listen attentively to a patient’s heartbeat through the rustling fabric of an abbayah, the long black head covering worn by women in Saudi Arabia. … continue reading this entry.