Field Guide to Falling Ill

From the inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Award, a captivating exploration of illness and medicine that imagines a more humane form of care. "What were these people suffering from? That's what we wanted to know." Thus begins Jonathan Gleeson's award-winning collection of essays on the human life underlying the institutional, legal, and cultural practices that shape illness. Drawing on his experiences as a medical translator and patient, Gleason highlights a dizzying array of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, and the uneasy relationship between state violence and mental illness. With careful analysis and boundless empathy, Gleason shows how medicine is shaped by cultural narratives, historical contexts, and the complex people who practice it. In her introduction, Yale Nonfiction Prize jury member Megan O'Rourke writes, "Illness is often portrayed as a crisis to be endured or overcome. But as Gleeson's work reminds us, illness is also a way of knowing. His essays speak to the fragile beauty of that knowledge, and to the ways it connects us—to history, to culture, and to each other."