FROM THE NY TIMES: Read this review of the new book, "The Empathy Exams"
(The March 30 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/books/the-empathy-exams-essays-by-leslie-jamison.html?_r=0
Leslie Jamison has a balky heart. The medical name for her condition is SVT, or supraventricular tachycardia. “There was an extra electrical node,” her doctor explains, “sending out extra signals — beat, beat, beat — when it wasn’t supposed to.” She calls this her “tiny rogue beat box.”
In “The Empathy Exams,” her extraordinary new book of essays, she calls to mind writers as disparate as Joan Didion and John Jeremiah Sullivan as she interrogates the palpitations of not just her own trippy heart but of all of ours.
Her book isn’t, except in passing, a medical memoir. “The Empathy Exams” bounces among topics. There are essays on travel in dangerous territories, on men in prison, on extreme endurance races, on saccharine, on murder trials, on unusual diseases, on women and pain. Ms. Jamison’s mind plays across topics as disparate as the HBO series “Girls” and the morphology of folk tales.
But her cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say that we feel someone else’s pain.
(The March 30 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/books/the-empathy-exams-essays-by-leslie-jamison.html?_r=0
Leslie Jamison has a balky heart. The medical name for her condition is SVT, or supraventricular tachycardia. “There was an extra electrical node,” her doctor explains, “sending out extra signals — beat, beat, beat — when it wasn’t supposed to.” She calls this her “tiny rogue beat box.”
In “The Empathy Exams,” her extraordinary new book of essays, she calls to mind writers as disparate as Joan Didion and John Jeremiah Sullivan as she interrogates the palpitations of not just her own trippy heart but of all of ours.
Her book isn’t, except in passing, a medical memoir. “The Empathy Exams” bounces among topics. There are essays on travel in dangerous territories, on men in prison, on extreme endurance races, on saccharine, on murder trials, on unusual diseases, on women and pain. Ms. Jamison’s mind plays across topics as disparate as the HBO series “Girls” and the morphology of folk tales.
But her cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say that we feel someone else’s pain.
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