Anne Fadiman

In these eighteen essays, Anne Fadiman "recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language."--Jacket. Ex Libris recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's twenty-two-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who considered herself truly married only when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of flyleaf inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proofreading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading aloud.

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 nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness and healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while the medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness qaug dab peg - the spirit catches you and you fall down - and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down moves from hospital corridors to healing ceremonies, and from the hill country of Laos to the living rooms of Merced, uncovering in its path the complex sources and implications of two dramatically clashing worldviews.

In At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman returns to one of her favorite genres, the familiar essay—a beloved and hallowed literary tradition recognized for both its intellectual breadth and its miniaturist focus on everyday experiences. With the combination of humor and erudition that has distinguished her as one of our finest essayists, Fadiman draws us into twelve of her personal obsessions: from her slightly sinister childhood enthusiasm for catching butterflies to her monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from her wistfulness for the days of letter-writing to the challenges and rewards of moving from the city to the country. Many of these essays were composed "under the influence" of the subject at hand. Fadiman ingests a shocking amount of ice cream and divulges her passion for Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip and her brother's homemade Liquid Nitrogen Kahlúa Coffee (recipe included); she sustains a terrific caffeine buzz while recounting Balzac's coffee addiction; and she stays up till dawn to write about being a night owl, examining the rhythms of our circadian clocks and sharing such insomnia cures as her father's nocturnal word games and Lewis Carroll's mathematical puzzles. At Large and At Small is a brilliant and delightful collection of essays that harkens a revival of a long-cherished genre. from rear cover

"A memoir exploring the author's father's love of wine" --

"Explorations of a Mind-Traveling Sociologist is a book of thematically interconnected ethnographic essays by the internationally esteemed sociologist Renee C. Fox, who employs a participant observer outlook to provide unique insight on such enduring - and pressing - issues as the lived experiences of physicians and patients. This includes patients who are physically challenged, elderly, mortally ill or beyond the reach of medical care; the origins and consequences of epidemic outbreaks of old and new plague-like infectious diseases that occur and recur, despite the impressive advances of medicine; the concomitants and challenges of aging; the wellsprings, dynamics and significance of medical humanitarian action; engagement with a 'beyond borders' world view; the occurrence of national and international events of major moral as well as political and legal import and repercussions; and the meaning and meaningfulness of teaching, exploring, questing and writing. Latently associated with these themes are the author's social values and social conscience. Composing these essays from a participant observer outlook heightens and enriches the author's observations over the course of her daily life, enabling her to engage in 'mind travel' to places and people she has intimately known in the past and to places she has yearningly hoped to visit but never has"--Back cover.