Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
|
 |
What Her Body Thought |
List Price: $24.00
Your Price: |
 |
|
|
|
| Product Info |
Reviews |
Description:
Illness is often a transformative experience. In What Her Body Thought, Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Susan Griffin describes the years of suffering and frustration that marked her battle against an autoimmune fatigue disorder. Her experience comes to resonate in her own mind with the fate of the famous 19th-century courtesan Marie Duplessis, the inspiration for both Dumas's La Dame Aux Camelias and Verdi's La Traviata (and, by extension, the 1937 Garbo classic Camille). Griffin is not the first writer, of course, to tackle the notion of disease as social epiphany--among the most notable are Norman Cousins (Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient) and Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor). But Griffin is a particularly fearless teacher; she writes passionately about the culture of blame that attaches words like psychosomatic to etiologies it does not fully understand. And as her disease drains personal and financial resources, she discovers how terrifyingly easy it is to become someone whom society overlooks. We have made progress since the 19th century in our understanding of health and medicine, Griffin concludes, but we have failed miserably in our social obligation to extend those benefits to all who suffer and to teach compassion to those who don't. --Patrizia DiLucchio
|
|
|
|
