The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
by Anne Fadiman
About this book
Lia Lee was born in 1982 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, over-medication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance." The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, "There are no villains in Fadiman's tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty—and their nobility.
Where to buy
No purchase options available at this time.
More by Anne Fadiman
A Life in Medicine: A Literary Anthology
Abraham Verghese, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anton Chekhov, Walt Whitman, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Terry Tempest Williams, William Carlos Williams, Audre Lorde, James Wright, Rafael Campo, Jean-Dominique Bauby, Anne Fadiman, John Stone, Theodore Deppe, Jack Coulehan, Shūsaku Endō, Sheryl Feldman, Penny Armstrong, Hart Crane, Albert Schweitzer, Rachel Naomi Remen, Robert Jay Lifton, Lewis Thomas, Bernard Pomerance, Alice Ilgenfritz Jones, Cortney Davis, Jerome Lowenstein, David Hilfiker, Jeffrey R. Botkin, Judy Schaefer, Veneta Masson, Randy-Michael Testa, Susan Onthank Mates, Jeanne Bryner, Michael Weingarten, Lucia Cordell Getsi, Rosalind Warren, Lawrence Grouse, Kirsten Emmott, Alyson Porter, Constance Meyd, Timothy J. Fisher, Sarah Lentz, Eric J. Cassel, Matt Dugan, Lori Alviso Alvord, David B. Nash
At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
Anne Fadiman
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Anne Fadiman
The Best American Essays 2003
Anne Fadiman