Anne Fadiman is the author of two essay collections, At Large and At Small and Ex Libris, and the editor of
Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down received a National
Book Critics Circle Award, an L.A. Times Book Prize, and a Salon Book Award. Her essays and articles have appeared
in Harper�s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among other publications. She is the Francis Writer-in-Residence
at Yale.
Summary
Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is the Winner of the National Book Critics Award for Nonfiction. A chain of events are set in motion when three month old Lia Lee arrives at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California that she, her parents nor her doctors would ever recover from.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface ix
1: Birth 3
2: Fish Soup 12
3: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down 20
4: Do Doctors Eat Brains? 32
5: Take as Directed 38
6: High-Velocity Transcortical Lead Therapy 60
7: Government Property 78
8: Foua and Nao Kao 93
9: A Little Medicine and a Little Neeb 106
10: War 119
11: The Big One 140
12: Flight 154
13: Code X 171
14: The Melting Pot 181
15: Gold and Dross 210
16: Why Did They Pick Merced? 225
17: The Eight Questions 250
18: The Life or the Soul 262
19: The Sacrifice 278
Note on HmongOrthography, Pronunciation, and Quotations 289
Notes on Sources 291
Bibliography 311
Acknowledgments 325
Index 329
