Field Guide to Falling Ill: Essays [Hardcover]

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? Thats what we wanted to know. So begins Jonathan Gleasons 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, Gleason illuminates a stunning range of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, and the troubled relationship between state violence and mental illness. With sharp analysis and boundless empathy, Gleason shows how medicine is shaped by cultural narratives, historical contexts, and the complicated people who practice it.

In her foreword, Meghan ORourke, judge of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, writes that illness is often framed as a crisis to endure or overcome. But as Gleasons 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 usto history, to culture, to one another.

Enlightening and beautifully written. . . . Sparkles with clarity and precision, rendering complicated concepts accessible and stimulating. . . . A triumph.Publishers Weekly(starred review)

Dynamic. . . . Arresting prose meets emotional and clinical intelligence in this lucid collection.Kirkus Reviews(starred review)

An absolutely necessary read.Michael Welch,Chicago Review of Books

This book is thoroughly enjoyable, not in the sense of it being a light read, but in the sense that its alive. Gleasons essays have momentum. They move. They surprise. . . . Gleason explores how sickness lives inside systems, inside public life, inside language itself, and it shows us how people keep trying to be understood anyway.Ava Emery,Michigan Daill“!