Skip to main content
Free carbon-neutral shipping over $35  ·  Every purchase supports independent authors

The Empathy Exams: Essays

by Leslie Jamison

Graywolf Press

Paperback 256 pages English April 01, 2014

(No reviews yet) Write a Review
Millions of titlesEvery book you're looking for
Carbon-neutral shippingFree on orders over $35
Fast shipping worldwideDelivered to your door
From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014 Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain--real and imagined, her own and others'--Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory--from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration--in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.
Author:
Leslie Jamison
Publisher:
Graywolf Press
Publication Date:
April 01, 2014
Number of pages:
256 pages
Language:
English
Binding:
Paperback
ISBN-10:
1555976719
ISBN-13:
9781555976712