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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
2016 & 2014 & 2015 The New York Times Best Seller
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.
Book Details
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publish Date: Apr 24th, 2012
- Pages: 368
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.10in - 5.40in - 1.00in - 0.70lb
- EAN: 9780374533403
- Categories: • Ethics• Disease & Health Issues• Minority Studies
About the Author
Fadiman, Anne: - 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.
Praise for this book
"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