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wombatjenni 's review for:
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
by Susannah Cahalan
Again the dilemma of reviewing an autobiographical book about something that had a devastating effect for the author: give it 5 stars for the amazing good the information is doing to others experiencing the same, or rate it based on the things I usually enjoy about nonfiction writing. So I compromised with 3 stars.
The book is about the craziness and dangers of misdiagnoses. It's about having your body turn against you, keeping you an unrexognizable captive to others who are bound to think you've just gone insane. Cahalan's experience is the most extreme case of an autoimmune disease I have heard of, yet facets of her symptoms and reactions are familiar to those of us dealing with more garden-variety types of autoimmune issues.
On the other hand, I found myself leafing through some pages because Cahalan's tone could change from highly personal and invested to thesaurus-assisted descriptions of scenes to super dry runs of factoids that seemed to be lifted straight out of Wikipedia. Or maybe we can go meta and say that the book is simply a metaphor for how the illness made her inconsistent in the ways she expressed herself...? If the topic itself had not been so interesting, I would have left this book unfinished due to what to me seemed like a very disjointed narration.
The book is about the craziness and dangers of misdiagnoses. It's about having your body turn against you, keeping you an unrexognizable captive to others who are bound to think you've just gone insane. Cahalan's experience is the most extreme case of an autoimmune disease I have heard of, yet facets of her symptoms and reactions are familiar to those of us dealing with more garden-variety types of autoimmune issues.
On the other hand, I found myself leafing through some pages because Cahalan's tone could change from highly personal and invested to thesaurus-assisted descriptions of scenes to super dry runs of factoids that seemed to be lifted straight out of Wikipedia. Or maybe we can go meta and say that the book is simply a metaphor for how the illness made her inconsistent in the ways she expressed herself...? If the topic itself had not been so interesting, I would have left this book unfinished due to what to me seemed like a very disjointed narration.