Volume 55, Number 16 · October 23, 2008
The Patient Talks Back
By Diane Johnson, John F. Murray
The Two Kinds of Decay
by Sarah Manguso
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 184 pp., $22.00
My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey
by Jill Bolte Taylor
Viking, 183 pp., $24.95
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead
by David Shields
Knopf, 225 pp., $23.95
Sarah Manguso, a poet, and the author of The Two Kinds of Decay, says that her memoir 'is a usual book about illness. Someone gets sick, someone gets well.' People feel a need to talk or write about their illnesses, and most of us read these accounts with close attention. They are written to inform and encourage others, to bear witness to our common fate, and to give advice about how to avert it; and the more inspiring, cautionary, and tutelary the book, the more eagerly we pick it up—among these under review, Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight has been on recent best-seller lists.
Review, 3760 words
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