Now with a new Afterword from the author
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy.
Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, Anne Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism at its finest.
When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely independent people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication.
Table of Contents:
Preface
-- 1. Birth --2. Fish Soup -- 3. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down -- 4. Do Doctors Eat Brains? -- 5. Take as Directed -- 6. High-Velocity Transcortical head Therapy -- 7. Government Property -- 8. Foua and Nao Kao -- 9. A Little Medicine and a Little Neeb -- 10. War -- 11. The Big One -- 12. Flight -- 13. Code X -- 14. The Melting Pot -- 15. Gold and Dross -- 16. Why Did They Pick Merced? -- 17. The Eight Questions -- 18. The Life or the Soul -- 19. The Sacrifice
-- Afterword to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition -- Note on Hmong Orthography, Pronunciation, and Quotations -- Notes on Sources -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index.
Review Quotes:
"Superb, informal cultural anthropology--eye-opening, readable, utterly engaging." --Carole Horn, The Washington Post Book World
"This is a book that should be deeply disturbing to anyone who has given so much as a moment's thought to the state of American medicine. But it is much more . . . People are presented as [Fadiman] saw them, in their humility and their frailty--and their nobility." -- Sherwin B. Nuland, The New Republic
" The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down changed how doctors see themselves and how they see their patients. Anne Fadiman celebrates the complexity and the individuality of the human interactions that make up the practice of medicine while simultaneously pointing out directions for change and breaking readers' hearts with the tragedies of cultural displacement, medical limitations, and futile good intentions." -- Perri Klass, M.D., author of A Not Entirely Benign Procedure
Anne Fadiman is the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (FSG, 1997), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. She is also the author of two essay collections, At Large and At Small and Ex Libris, and the memoir The Wine Lover's Daughter, and she is the editor of Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (all published by FSG). Her essays and articles have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among other publications. She is the Francis Writer in Residence at Yale.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Pub Date: April 24, 2012
1.0" H x 8.1" L x 5.4" W
368 Pages
Paperback