The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Farrar Straus & Giroux · Print & ebook · April 24, 2012
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.
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- Who it’s for
- A compassionate work of literary journalism about medicine, family, and the costs of misunderstanding.
- Themes
- Cross-cultural misunderstanding, Medical care and epilepsy, Family caregiving
- Genres
- Doctor-Patient Relations, Lives in Medicine, How Cultures Work
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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.
Continue reading
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. ______ Lia Lee 1982-2012 Lia Lee died on August 31, 2012. She was thirty years old and had been in a vegetative state since the age of four. Until the day of her death, her family cared for her lovingly at home.
Care Across Cultures
A compassionate work of literary journalism about medicine, family, and the costs of misunderstanding.
Come here for
- A nuanced look at conflicting understandings of care
- A sustained account grounded in one family’s experience
Expect
- Literary journalism with compassion and moral complexity
- A difficult story of a child’s care and its aftermath
Where it sits
| Doctor-Patient Relations | 68% |
|---|---|
| How Cultures Work | 40% |
| Lives in Medicine | 38% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- How Cultures Work
- Disease & Public Health
- Refugees
- Authors
- Anne Fadiman
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- April 24, 2012
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Cross-cultural misunderstanding · Medical care and epilepsy · Family caregiving
- Reading lane
- How Cultures Work