American Breakdown
About This Book
Jennifer Lunden's story begins when she was 21 and had just moved from Canada to Maine. Within a short time she became chronically ill, so weakened that she could not hold a book or stand long enough to shower. She lost her job and spent her days in bed. When she asked a doctor for help, she was told she was simply depressed. Five years into this unexplained illness, she found an unexpected source of hope in a biography of Alice James, a witty, often bedridden diarist and the sister of novelist Henry James and psychologist William James. Alice lived with neurasthenia, a devastating condition that is now often waved away as a trendy complaint. Lunden braids her own struggle together with Alice's, tracing how medicine has understood invisible illness and how the industrial revolution and late capitalism have shaped the health of ordinary people. Presented as a Silent Spring for the human body, the book mixes memoir, investigation and history. Following the threads of both lives, Lunden uncovers the many concealed dangers of everyday life in America and portrays a nation that is struggling, and failing, to stay healthy. Lunden acknowledges that science, and the politics behind how it is funded, has repeatedly let her and millions of others down. Yet the research ultimately leads to a discovery that changes how readers think about the ecosystems within their bodies, their communities, their country and the planet.
ISBN: 9780062941374
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