Field Guide to Falling Ill – Essays. Questo articolo non è disponibile.Field Guide to Falling Ill – Essays

From the inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, a riveting exploration of illness and medicine that imagines a more humane form of care
 
“What was wrong with them? That’s what we wanted to know.” So begins Jonathan Gleason’s prizewinning collection of essays on the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape disease. Drawing on his experiences as a medical interpreter and patient, and on a decade of historical research, he illuminates a stunning range of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, the troubled relationship between state violence and mental illness, and the trial of a doctor accused of murdering his patients. Gleason shows how medicine is influenced, compromised, and enlivened by the cultural narratives, historical contexts, and complicated people who practice it.

In her foreword, Meghan O’Rourke, judge of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, writes that “illness is often framed as a crisis to endure or overcome on the way back to a restored ‘intact’ self. But as Gleason’s work reminds us, illness is also a way of knowing. His essays speak to the precarious beauty of that knowing, and to the ways it connects us—to history, to culture, to one another.”

Jonathan Gleason is an award-winning writer and a lecturer at the University of Chicago, where he teaches creative writing. Meghan O’Rourke is the judge for the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize and the editor of the Yale Review. Her books include the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.